Welfare Legislation and the Unions during and after the First World War

Abstract

In an important article (The Historical Journal, XXIII (1980), 857-74), Dr Whiteside has transformed from relative obscurity to considerable significance the administration of unemployment insurance during the First World War. It is to be hoped that there will now be some revision of conventional accounts of welfare legislation in which the fudged compromises of inter-war social policy have for too long been contrasted unfavourably with the imaginative boldness of the pre-war Liberal reforms. Dr Whiteside has well demonstrated trade union opposition to wartime plans to extend unemployment insurance and has thus exposed the political weakness of pre-war bureaucratic rationalism (the old Board of Trade spirit in which 'you govern labour for the good of labour, on behalf of labour, but keep labour at a distance').' By inference, a more sympathetic light is cast on the 'stoical realism' of inter-war administrators who recognized the pluralistic bounds of policy-making (the acknowledgement, for example, by one ministry of labour official that 'an antagonistic attitude on the part of the public may often turn the right thing to do into the wrong thing to do') .2 A reappraisal of the practical achievements of inter-war civil servants, within the political constraints of the time, is long overdue. However, the article raises consciously and unconsciously several major contradictions, the resolution of which will not be facilitated by its necessarily selective handling of the evidence. One such contradiction, as the article notes, was the total reversal of trade union attitudes towards state welfare between the wars. Others involve the policies of government departments which would appear to have been equally volatile. Insurance by industry, Dr Whiteside notes, was 'virtually outlawed' by the Treasury in I99I-20 (p. 872) and yet two years later it was to be a major economy measure recommended by the Geddes Committee on National Expenditure, championed vigorously by the diehard Conservative governments of Bonar Law and Baldwin. Similarly, the ministry of labour was apparently sympathetic to the Treasury restrictions on industrial independence (p. 869) whilst simultaneously it was promoting a policy of 'home rule for industry'. In I9 I7-I8, for example, it sought actively to assist trade union organization by drafting the Trade Union Amalgamation and the Trade Boards (Amendment) Acts and its attempts to erect Whitley Councils throughout industry have been noted for their 'driving conviction rather than a bureaucratic sense of duty'.' To the extent that these contradictions