“A reward for good citizenship”: National Unemployment Benefits and the Genuine Search for Work

Abstract

During debate on the National Insurance Bill in the House of Commons on May 4, 1911, Colonel Claude Lowther commended the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George for introducing “a Bill which is clever, human, sound, and statesmanlike.” A Conservative and staunch opponent of socialism, Lowther envisioned unemployment insurance as “free[ing] the individual from the trammels and meshes of poverty. It would inspire him with hope rather than fill him with despair, and help him instead of being a useless of member of society to become a wealth producer.”¹ National insurance would be in the interests of national efficiency, whereas the Poor Law was “chaotic” and served to “breed pauperism.”² The Poor Law stripped honest men of their self-respect, but unemployment insurance would help the poor regain their manhood:

No man in this country is allowed to starve. The State acknowledges itself morally bound to give not only food but lodging and shelter to those who cannot find them for themselves…. But instead of attempting to rehabilitate the individual, instead of helping him to re-find his lost manhood and lost dignity, the State brands him with a stigma of disgrace which often causes the honest working man, out of work through no fault of his own, to sink deeper and deeper into the morass of pauperism and despair.