Winston Churchill versus the Webbs: The Origins of British Unemployment Insurance

Abstract

AMONG the several legislative experiments that constitute the social reform program of Herbert Asquith's prewar Liberal administration, the measure most wildly empirical, most fraught with economic and political danger, was compulsory insurance against unemployment, which appeared as Part II of the National Insurance Act of I9II. Never before had a nation required its citizens to insure against the vagaries of the labor market. Even the Germans, whose influence on British social welfare experiments was critical, had been unwilling to attempt unemployment insurance.' Although many publications dealing with the general topic of compulsory unemployment insurance in Great Britain have appeared, the political and ideological origins of the measure have been only slightly explored. Because the mass unemployment of the I920's and I930's destroyed the program for a time as a plan of insurance, modern histories have neglected the prewar problems that unemployment insurance had been designed to solve and have underestimated the very real legislative craftsmanship and political daring involved in framing the measure.2 The intent of this study is to show that the attack on unemployment marked a significant departure in Liberal welfare planning, the beginning of what may be termed the pioneering phase of social reform. The early