Welfare State In Britain Research Articles

Feminism, reproductive labour and the gendered welfare state in Britain’s National Insurance Act of 1911

Abstract In 1911, numerous women’s organizations, of varying political interests, mounted a campaign against the National Insurance Bill. Such opposition emerged despite feminist support for increased welfare provision in general and especially for the maternity benefit that the Bill proposed to introduce. Feminists criticized National Insurance for discriminating against women, especially its failure to recognize the economic contribution of women’s unwaged reproductive labour. They lobbied and campaigned for a series of amendments, some of which were successful. Feminist opposition to National Insurance sheds new light on an ongoing historiographical debate over the degree to which women were able to influence early welfare states prior to enfranchisement. Their activities cannot be easily contained within a framework of ‘maternalist feminism’, and call into question distinctions between ‘maternalist’/‘social’ feminism and ‘equality’ feminism, and middle-class and working-class women’s agendas. Instead, feminist campaigns around National Insurance reveal an early analysis of ‘social reproduction’ (the origins of which are usually traced back only to ‘second wave’ feminism) whereby British feminists participated in international conversations contesting the gendered definitions of work that went on to inform insurance-based welfare states across Europe.

Poverty and the Rise and Fall of the Welfare State in Britain, 1900 to the Present

Poverty in the UK has recently risen to levels and created conditions not seen since c.1900. Then, the poverty revealed in major surveys by Booth and Rowntree created shock and proposals for change leading to the first measures of what became the Welfare State. Then, as now, a major cause of poverty was inadequate pay for precarious work, though another significant cause now is the decline of the Welfare State. State welfare expanded gradually from 1906 to 1945, then much faster, along with full employment and labour market regulation, especially under Labour governments until the late 1970s. Poverty declined but never disappeared. Under Thatcher’s Conservative government, 1979–1990, state welfare was severely cut and poverty shot up. After some respite under New Labour, 1997–2010, a period of successive Conservative governments since 2010 has witnessed significant cuts to social welfare and an increase in poverty causing serious deprivation comparable with the early 1900s. But there are fewer proposals for reform now than then, though they are urgently needed.

The Rise of the Parish Welfare State in England, c .1600–1800*

Abstract: The world’s first nationwide, publicly funded welfare system emerged and solidified in England over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its influence on society and economy during this period was profound, but this article is the first attempt to determine the scale of its impact by examining the amount of money annually spent on relief across the whole period. Drawing on data from 184 widely dispersed parishes over more than two centuries and a new estimate for spending in c.1600, it shows that poor relief experienced alternating phases of rapid expansion, relative stability and occasionally outright retrenchment. Levels of redistribution were pushed higher by both ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ factors. Specifically, trends in relief spending are compared to other indices such as population, economic expansion, central government revenues, labourers’ wages and inflation to show how the growth of poor relief related to wider demographic and economic changes. Such comparisons make it possible to think more clearly about causation: how much of the growth in spending can be attributed to such developments? While law, demography, inflation and other well-attested factors certainly contributed to the rise of this early modern welfare system, the poor themselves may well have played an important role.

Pilgrim's Progress: The Landscape of the NHS Hospital, 1948-70.

This article argues the politics of land-use was fundamental to the challenges of realizing Britain's welfare state. It makes this case through a focus on efforts to plan and design new hospitals in the National Health Service (NHS) between 1948 and 1970. It pays particular attention to the Pilgrim Hospital in Boston, Lincolnshire which serves as an exemplar of a sort of politics that has been largely overlooked due to an overemphasis on central government. At the Pilgrim, a private landowner claimed inadequate consultation had produced a hospital proposal that was counter to local opinion, resulting in their farmstead being preserved within the grounds of a modern tower-on-podium facility. Working back from this aesthetic compromise, the significance of the landscaped hospital is introduced and situated within patterns of NHS land transactions and conflicts over site acquisition. This analysis re-orientates historical research to better reflect the decentralized nature of post-war planning in Britain. It does so by demonstrating how the welfare state internalized the criticisms of wider publics and powerful existing cultural and economic frameworks. These necessary processes formed the real groundwork for state modernization.

‘[Her] hostess … is anxious to have her back when she is cured’: The impact of the evacuation of children on wartime local services, England, 1939–1945

World War II had a profound, but uneven, impact on the delivery of services designed to support the bodies and minds of English children. This article, which is based on...

Review of Disability and the Welfare State in Britain by Jameel Hampton

No abstract available.

Review of Jameel Hampton (2016), "Disability and the Welfare State in Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy 1948-79"

Jameel Hampton (2016). 
 Disability and the welfare state in Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy 1948-79.

Americanising Brexit Britain's Welfare State?

AbstractWill the British welfare state revert to an Americanisation trajectory or retain features of the European model after April 2019? After a period of historically prolonged austerity and substantial working age welfare reform, with the UK facing yet another renegotiation of the social contract in a post‐Brexit world, the question of whether there remains space for an alternative to the ‘American’ model is of crucial importance. We argue that there has been a blurring of differences across the American and European welfare states in terms of working age benefits, as most countries have adopted aspects of work‐based conditionality reforms, which attach the receipt of benefits to the active pursuit of work and, to varying extents, the underlying politics of US welfare reform, where there are large coalitions supportive of more punitive policies towards low‐income adults and minorities. These trends are taking place against the backdrop of a second major shift: increasing restrictions on benefits for immigrants. This double narrowing of the welfare state, making benefits conditional for citizens and excluding those who are not citizens, seemingly sets the agenda for a more restrictive post‐Brexit welfare state. The experience of the last two decades suggests, however, that the adoption of the American model has not been wholesale; steering a middle path between punitive conditional American benefits and more traditionally generous universal benefits is on the agenda across advanced welfare states.

イギリスにおける福祉国家の変容 : 「サッチャリズム」から「第三の道」へ

イギリスにおける福祉国家の変容 : 「サッチャリズム」から「第三の道」へ

One British Thing: A Bottle of Welfare Orange Juice, c. 1961–1971

AbstractThis essay inaugurates a new series in the Journal of British Studies titled “One British Thing.” This short essay uses a bottle of welfare orange juice distributed sometime between 1961 and 1971 to tell a larger story about the relationship between Britain's Welfare State and the colonization and decolonization of the British West Indies. The history of the Welfare State has largely been told as a metropolitan story severed from a wider global history of empire. The empty bottle of concentrated orange juice, however, tells a different story. It exposes Britain's own dependency on its colonial subjects to provide the means of furnishing welfare benefits to its metropolitan citizens. The history of welfare orange juice thus opens up a richer understanding of the politics and economics of the Welfare State and its relationship to colonial development projects on the one hand and the slow processes of decolonization on the other.

Social Policy by Other Means? Mutual Aid and the Origins of the Modern Welfare State in Britain During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract:During the last twenty years, several writers have drawn attention to the role played by friendly societies and other mutual-aid organizations in the development of Britain’s welfare state. Proponents of mutual aid have argued that these organizations were part of the rich associational culture of working-class life; that they represented a viable alternative to state welfare; and that they were eventually undermined by it. However, this article highlights the challenges that these organizations were already facing toward the end of the nineteenth century as a result of changes in working-class culture and the rise of more commercial insurance agencies. It suggests that the rise of state welfare was not so much a cause of these difficulties as a response to them. It also examines the role that friendly societies played in the expansion of welfare services after 1914 and their attitude to calls for further expansion before 1945.

Jameel Hampton (2016), Disability and the Welfare State in Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy 1948–79, Bristol: Policy Press, £70.00, pp. 288, hbk.

Jameel Hampton (2016), Disability and the Welfare State in Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy 1948–79, Bristol: Policy Press, £70.00, pp. 288, hbk.

Jameel Hampton, Disability and the Welfare State in Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy 1948–79

Jameel Hampton, Disability and the Welfare State in Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy 1948–79

Disability and the Welfare State in Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy. By Jameel Hampton

Disability and the Welfare State in Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy. By Jameel Hampton

Review of 'Disability and the Welfare State in Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy 1948-1979'

Review of 'Disability and the Welfare State in Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy 1948-1979'

In the wake of austerity: social impact bonds and the financialisation of the welfare state in Britain

ABSTRACTThis paper provides an analysis of the financialisation of the British welfare state. In a continuation of neo-liberal privatisation and labour market activation, the financialised welfare state pursues a policy of welfare retrenchment, while engaging in forms of social engineering aimed at producing self-responsibilised individuals and communities who are financially literate, ‘investment-ready’ and economically productive. New financial instruments such as social impact bonds are deployed to these ends, both to ‘solve social problems’ and enable cost saving. Through the use of such financial instruments, the implementation of regulatory infrastructures and tax incentives, the financialised welfare state becomes a vehicle for the transfer of wealth from the public to private investors, while subjecting the domain of social policy to the vicissitudes of global financial markets. This paper offers a critique of these developments, situating the case of Britain within the broader global context and with regard to the implications for understanding the current political economy of the welfare state.

Population, Politics, and Unemployment Policy in the Great Depression

Working out large-scale processes through close attention to local-level analysis remained central to Louise Tilly's approach to social history. An ongoing commitment to agency and strategy undergirded her vision for a global history that made connections between large-scale processes across space, between human agency and structure, and between the past and present. Her vision remains an important influence in my coauthored comparative history of the welfare state in England, France, and the United States. This is illustrated by a discussion of unemployment policies in the three countries at one particular moment of crisis, the Great Depression, concentrating on the United States, where the Depression hit first and hit the hardest. Important differences in demography, the mobilization of ordinary citizens, the responsiveness of state structures to democratic pressure, and public attitudes about the legitimate role of government all affected the history of unemployment policy in each country.

Concede and Move On? One Nation Labour and the Welfare State

The idea that Labour has already lost the argument on welfare with the Conservatives, and with it the general election, is probably overplayed. If truth be told, Labour's construction and subsequent defence of the welfare state has always been something of a double‐edged sword for the Party, earning it brickbats as well as support, and sometimes as stranding it in the past, committing it to promises that were undeliverable and ultimately self‐defeating. The political response by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls to the welfare trap set for them by David Cameron and George Osborne owes as much to New Labour as it does to ‘One Nation Labour’. That said, the latter does seem to be informing the Party's policy response, in particular its emphasis on restoring the contributory principle. Whether, however, this is practical politics given the inherently hybrid nature of Britain's welfare state and its heavy skew toward help for the elderly is a moot point. And whether ‘One Nation’ actually helps or hinders the Party in its quest for workable policies and a winning electoral formula is similarly debateable. Certainly, however much it is tempted to do so, Labour shouldn't waste too much valuable time trying to counter widespread myths about welfare. Nor should it overreact and obsess about the issue—or, indeed, pour out detailed policy too soon, if at all. Obviously, Labour needs to provide a direction of travel. However, that should focus not so much on welfare itself but on what the Party is proposing on the economy, on housing and on wages.

Reconceptualising the Welfare State: The Rise of a Selective Welfare State' in the United Kingdom?

This paper seeks to explore the emergence of a ‘selective welfare state’ in the United Kingdom under the prefecture of the current coalition government. It will be argued, that in light of fiscal austerity, the state has been compelled to reconceptualise its traditional role from a ‘full provision welfare providing body’ to a ‘selective welfare providing entity’. Examples of deviation include the Troubled Families Agenda, under the notions of ‘citizens’ empowerment’ and ‘reducing dependencies on the state’. These reforms run parallel to the thicket of mandatory governmental restructuring, evidenced through the Triennial Review and the Red Tape Challenge at the national level. It will be demonstrated that such selective welfare revolution exacerbates an acrimonious struggle between state powers and individual rights, where in turn, the citizens question the legitimacy of the selective welfare concept. Apart from using judicial review, we also seem to be witnessing the rise of non-governmental organisations as the new avenues of social consciousness, used to translate their individual interests into collective and public issues, whose relationship to rights is most precarious, with collective voices through electoral representation as a final forum. Voters decimated the ruling power of the coalition government in the United Kingdom’s local government election in May 2013, a testimony that they do not acquiesce to the selective welfare state agenda. The state is still in search of a plethora of sustainable governance, with the General Election 2015 as a final platform to determine the destiny of the selective welfare state in Britain.

Diversity as victim to ‘realistic liberalism’: analysis of an elite discourse of immigration, ethnicity and society

Analysis of contemporary political discourse reveals that the topics of ‘immigration’ and ‘asylum’, historically the preserve of extreme right-wing politics, have increasingly entered more centrist conservative discourse. Meanwhile, it is also argued that elite political discourse on ethnic affairs cuts across traditional political divides. Thus, contemporary left-wing discourses also require scrutiny. The current article examines one example of elite discourse from liberal media commentary, which addresses ideological concerns regarding diversity, immigration and the welfare state in Britain. Adopting a discursive analytic approach, three predominant discursive themes are identified in the text, which we term: ‘Unnatural Sharing’, ‘Diversity as Ethnic Difference’ and ‘Immigrant-Minorities Alchemy’. Through careful examination of these themes, we show how, via their engagement, the text subtly yet persuasively builds a version of ‘reality’ inimical to progressive ideals.