The Welfare State PDF
Preview The Welfare State
THE NATION TODAY The Welfare State The Nation Today NEWS & VIEWS GOVERNMENT & POLITICS BRITAIN IN THE WORLD THE WORLD OF MONEY THE WELFARE STATE Suitable for the upper forms in Secondary schools and further education establishments this series is designed to make students think about the issues which affect us today, and the people and machinery which make and carry out decisions. The author has accomplished a rare feat in combining an abundance of facts with a highly readable style. But this is not all, for he goes on to make the reader think about the social and world problems connected with the subject under discussion. The books are therefore both well-informed and stimulating. The gathering and dissemination of news, govern ment and politics, and Britain's place in the world are the subjects covered in the first three volumes. The fourth book deals with financial affairs as they affect the man in the street, and describes the part that money plays in the life of the country and the world. The fifth discusses the advantages and dis advantages of having a welfare state. THE NATION TODAY The Welfare State P. J. SIDEY PALGRAVE MACMILLAN © P. J. Sidey 1967 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1967 MACMILLAN & CO LTD Little Essex Street London WC2 and also at Bombay Calcutta and Madras Macmillan South Africa (Publishers) Pty Ltd Johannesburg The Macmillan Company of Australia Pty Ltd Melbourne The Macmillan Company of Canada Ltd Toronto StMartin's Press Inc New York ISBN 978-0-333-03400-2 ISBN 978-1-349-00235-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-00235-1 Contents Introduction 1 1 From cradle to grave 3 2 The health of the nation 7 3 Money in need 18 4 When we grow old 24 5 Schooling for life? 31 6 Somewhere to live 42 7 Out of work 50 8 The trade unions 55 9 The volunteers 63 10 With charity for all 67 11 Compulsory social conscience 72 12 Nation of softies? 79 13 The pursuit of happiness 83 Index 88 Acknowledgments 90 Introduction There is nothing God-given about the Welfare State. No automatic state aid helped countless Indians faced with famine in 1966; there are no schools for half the children on earth; not sufficient food in two-thirds of the homes round the globe; no adequate hospitals for most of the world; no decent roof over the heads of the majority of human families; no security of employment for most of the world's workers, and no money in old age for those who manage to survive that long. Some countries have accepted the idea that the State should provide these basic things, or guarantee their provision. They are all fairly rich countries. It is easier to find the wealth to help the sick, the old and the needy when your output per head is our £600 a year or that of any of the ten still richer countries, rather than, say, the £17 per head of Ethiopia or Laos. The whole basis of the Welfare State depends on the country staying rich. If we fall behind in the general race to prosperity, then all our welfare benefits fall too. In Britain, over the years, we have agreed that certain basic 'welfare services' -education, medical treatment, financial support in sickness or unemployment or old age - should be offered freely by the State. And by 'the State' we mean simply by the rest of the population, through paying taxes to provide the money for these services. In a sense there is no limit to the amount we could pay for welfare ser vices and no limit to the amount we ought to pay. Those of us who are healthy cannot, surely, turn some desperately sick person away from hospital because 'it costs too much' to treat him? But, in a way, we do so every day. We decide (through Parliament) how much we can afford to spend on new hospitals, how much we can afford on research into the cure of diseases, how much we can afford on keeping alive old people who can no longer work for their living, how much we can afford on educating a boy who may (or may not) turn out to be a brilliant benefactor of mankind. Many old people, for instance, find life hard on their basic £4 lOs retire ment pension and could well do with an extra £1, or £2, or £10. When do you stop? Who decides what is a reasonable figure? Your idea of 'reason able' might be very different from that of the chap next door; and certainly very different from that of an average Indonesian today, or even an average Briton of fifty years ago. Someone has to decide because there has to be a limit. 1 If, in a collective burst of generosity, we decided to treble every retire ment pension, where would the money come from? From the rest of us, paying more taxes. Perhaps we would willingly pay the extra, but what of the claims of the sick? New hospitals are needed, more doctors should be trained, bigger grants should be made for research into illness ... and then there is education demanding our attention with new schools wanted, new universities to be built .... How much taxation could we stand before we decided that working for a living was just not worth it? The fact that there has to be a limit to spending on welfare means that there is a constant struggle for priority between rival deserving causes. If there is a limit in total spending, then, put brutally, more money for curing cancer means less for improving maternity services, more for old age pensioners means less for handicapped children, more to rebuild primary schools means less for higher technological studies. It is generally accepted in Britain, that, in spite of our enormous £6000 million annual bill on welfare, we must spend still more to bring the services up to acceptable standards. Taxes must go up higher, but before launching into another round of' more of the same' many people are looking afresh at the Welfare State to try to see if the underlying fabric is sound. In a similar fashion to the small girl who pointed to a particularly pom pous man and said: 'Mummy, what is that manfor?' we should not sla vishly praise, nor narrow-mindedly condemn, the huge structure we call the Welfare State without first asking ourselves: What is itfor? 2 1 From cradle to grave Some kings of England could not read or write; some died of illness which would keep us in bed only for a week or two; some had palaces so cold the wine froze on the banqueting table; some lost wives and heirs in needless deaths at childbirth; and some fled regularly as plague swept London. Quite ordinary men, women and children nowadays live much healthier, longer, more luxurious lives than the great men they read about in history books. Yet never before have we been so agitated about the poor, the sick, the unfortunate and the ill-educated among us. We are all fussed over by the State from birth to burial. Helping those in need was simpler in days gone by. The Church and the charitable could aid the poor or the sick and the simple village life showed clearly who was hard-up and who could look after himself; the humble but bright boy could be found a place in grammar school and the other village boys never imagined that life held anything for them but work on the land. But, with the industrial revolution, the huge increase in the population and the sprawl of new towns, the simple ways broke down. In their place came 3 appalling squalor, inadequate water and drainage, bad working condi tions, poor food, crime, drunkenness. ... Or, perhaps, things were always bad and the towns merely showed them up more. Many charities were started by people whose consciences were outraged by this poverty and misery within the richest country in the world but - as through history - there was still a generally held view that it was not a duty to help the unfortunate. Anyone was at liberty to make charitable gestures or found charitable institutions with their own private fortunes if they chose, but the community at large had no obligation to help those people who could not make a way for themselves in life. The State would only intervene when widespread overwhelming misery came about. The vote Those who wielded political power were not themselves poor. Wheri the privilege of voting came to all the country, more was done to feed, to educate and to care for the sick among the mass of the people in 100 years than had been done in 1000 before. But nowadays there are some people who think the whole thing has gone too far; that life is too easy for the idler, the shirker, the sponger; that he who does not work should - if not starve - at least be short of food; that we should spend less on people who are well able to struggle by on their own and more on those in desperately real need. There are some people who think the State should back out of all welfare, now that so much of the country is well-off, and leave the 'hard' cases to charities to handle; but, on the whole, most people fall into one of two broad camps - the 'insurance policy' or the 'ambulance'. The first group wants us to go on much as we are at present when every one pays into what is in effect an insurance fund and everyone who finds himself in certain circumstances -ill-health, unemployment, poverty, old age - can draw out fixed amounts. If the millionaire is thrown out of work, or reaches sixty-five years of age, he is entitled to his few pounds a week just as much as the labourer. If the managing director of a firm falls sick he gets his doctor's attention free, in the same way as the man who looks after a lathe on the factory floor. It is not charity, it is a right; it is not money from some benefactor that pays for these services, it is contri butions in one form or another from the whole population, to be paid out to those who qualify. 4
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