British Social Policy and the Second World War

Writing just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Joseph Schumpeter remarked that English socialism, in contrast to European socialism, was at bottom an ethical creed. For socialist intellectuals, the Fabians for instance, there was no difference between slums and the House of Lords. Both were bad things and ought to be eliminated. I do not suggest that by the time Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy was published in 1942 this was by any means a new idea. The briefest survey of the speeches or writings of George Lansbury or James Keir Hardie, not to mention those of the Webbs and Bernard Shaw, would show the same attitude. They dwelt less in terms of the people's need than of the people's rights. By and large, they talked not of what could be done, but of what should be done. Accordingly, they sneered at the social legislation of the New Liberalism as a plaster bandage which did nothing to heal the working man's wounds, but made them hurt less. They saw clearly that national insurance and old age pensions were prompted less by recognition of the moral imperative behind the public welfare than by fear on the part of the nation's rulers of a politically aroused working class which might effect a parliamentary revolution through the agency of the Labour party, or, indeed, after the war, a violent revolutionThe only criticism that need be made of Schumpeter's analysis of the extent of the permeation of English socialism is that he did not see by the end of the 1930s how far it had gone. My own research suggests that by the time of the outbreak of the second World War, socialism — or social justice in the sense that the physical and economic welfare of the ordinary citizen was the unquestioned responsibility of the state — had become the creed of the ordinary English citizen. He took for granted that it was society's business to support him when unemployed and that in old age the state should provide him with a pension. Sidney Webb's national minimum had become part of the ethical furniture of the mind of the working man.