The Welfare State: from Beveridge to Borrie

Abstract

The (partial) implementation of William Beveridge’s wartime report on Social Insurance and Allied Services was for long seen as one of the main pillars upon which the postwar order in Britain had been built. Almost as frequently, this postwar regime has been described as social democratic, in intention and consequence, if not always in name Fifty years on, the confidence that surrounded both the formation of the postwar welfare state and the more general political ambitions of social democrats has largely evaporated. Since the mid-1970s, and more particularly since the arrival of Mrs Thatcher’s first administration in 1979, opinion has seemingly moved decisively against the welfare state or at least against that form of it which social democrats had traditionally recommended. In this chapter, I consider whether the social democratic political agenda is truly exhausted or whether, under the radically changed social and economic circumstances of the 1990s, it is still possible to generate a social policy programme consonant with the ambitions of social democrats. I do so in the context of a detailed assessment of the main principles underlying the Borrie Commissions’s Report on Social Justice.¹