The changing British welfare state
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The spotlight may fall on 1979 as a turning point in social policy but it is notably only the half-way point in the post-war welfare state. This chapter puts the past 30 years of policy change into a longer historical context and broadens the focus to consider a wide range of policy and social policy, and governmental and political change. These wider and longer-term views allow us to concentrate more on programmes of taxes and benefits in later parts of the book. Looking back, how has social policy changed and developed in Britain and how do such changes fit into the policy history before and after 1979? The first 25 years of post-war policy The post-war welfare state was forged under the wartime coalition government and the 1945 Labour government. Inspired by a ‘never again’ attitude to the prewar economic crash, and the experience of solidarity and planned economy during the Second World War along with a good dose of socialist idealism, a raft of social policy legislation effectively created the post-war welfare state between 1944 and 1948. This vision of a more egalitarian Britain, dubbed by some commentators as being one of a ‘New Jerusalem’ (Addison, 1975; Barnett, 1995), was based on a welfare state and full employment. The 1944 Education Act enacted free secondary education up to the age of 15 as a right for all, removing the elementary ‘all age’ schools and fees from state secondary schools (Timmins, 2001). Nye Bevan's 1946 National Health Service Act introduced the National Health Service (NHS) based on universal healthcare free at the point of use, ending limited and uneven access to healthcare from a combination of fees and means tests. Bevan's legacy on housing was short-lived. His universal vision of council housing estates being communities of all classes and occupations was based on a high standard of housing and proved impossible to sustain due to cost and material and skills shortages. The severe housing shortage began to be solved by lower-quality mass building and this programme was basically adopted by the Tories in 1951. Private sector house building and private renting were restricted and highly regulated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".