(1) Janet and
William Beveridge, Antipodes Notebook (London, 1949).
(22)
William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services (Londres: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1924), 2.
Even then, however, the successful passage of a new system of family allowances in 1948 relied principally on
William Beveridge's skillful public relations efforts, the fact that he tied it to an overhaul of systems of relief that everyone acknowledged as necessary, and persistent resistance from trade unions to increased wages, which they feared would make British goods uncompetitive.
The architect of the post-Word War II 'welfare state,' the model that most clearly comes to mind when describing its 'golden age,' is the English statesman Sir
William Beveridge. In 1942, he proposed a program for post-war income security that included comprehensive social insurance and national assistance programs.
When Sir
William Beveridge's report on the future of the social services was published in 1942, people queued up outside the Stationery Office to buy copies, and more that 600,000 were quickly sold.
British planners, led by
William Beveridge, helped lay the intellectual framework for the massive expansion of the British welfare state that followed the Labor Party's triumph in the 1945 elections.
His words for some of his other colleagues, such as Harold Laski and
William Beveridge, on the other hand, are contemptuous, and it is somewhat surprising to see them surface in print.
He jumbles Sir
William Beveridge's social security proposals of 1942 with those for employment in Beveridge's later Full Employment in a Free Society (1944), which Woods never mentions.
It's 70 years since
William Beveridge's simple, beautiful principle was put into practice and more than 45million babies have been welcomed into the world by our National Health Service.
William Beveridge pictured (centre) on October 15, 1944, two days before he became MP for Berwick at a by-election.