The welfare state: Images and realities

The welfare state has evolved as a particular manifestation of Western democratic societies. The Communists disdain it, perhaps because Stalin regarded equality as a bourgeois prejudice. The earliest use of the term in Britain was apparently by William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, in Citizen and churchman (1941). He developed the notion of a welfare state in place of the conception of the ‘power state’. This notion, he argued, held only if the state fulfilled its moral and spiritual functions in promoting human welfare. The concept, if not the phrase itself, is to be found in the wartime debate which led, on the international plane, to the Allied programme agreed upon between Mr Churchill and Mr Roosevelt off Newfoundland in August 1941 and in the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear. On the national plane in Britain, the phrase came to mean the minimum programme of social reform and reconstruction agreed upon between the three political parties in the wartime Coalition government. The need for radical changes in British society had been recognised earlier by conservative opinion and was reflected in much of the new social legislation for education, medical care and social security developed in the later years of the Second World War and after the Labour government assumed power in 1945. But the phrase ‘welfare state’ did not become part of the everyday language of social policy until after it had appeared on the American political stage. It was used in 1949 by former President Hoover, who described it as “a disguise for the totalitarian state” and it figured prominently in the congressional campaign of 1950. The British then took it over and it formed one of the major issues around which the general election of 1951 was fought. This election saw the Conservative Party return to office for the longest period in the 20th century to date [1951-64]. The term has apparently come to mean all sorts of things. Some have seen the development of the welfare state in historical perspective as part of a broad, ascending road of social betterment for the working classes, beginning in the 19th century and achieving its goal in our time.

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