Those of us who are old enough to remember relatives who fought in one or even both world wars know how, in their reminiscences, you’d often get the sense that, yes: war could be terrible. But I recall a clear sense, from my grandparents among others, that wartime was also exciting, vital, even at times fun — all lit up by blazing moral clarity.
By the same token, we sometimes fail to appreciate just how radically those two wars transformed the country, socially and politically, especially in the massive expansion of state capacity required to wage total war. When you put these observations together, a third comes into view: that Britain’s welfare state, the so-called “postwar settlement”, is nothing of the sort. It was, rather, created to sustain those aspects of wartime social organisation that Britons liked and wanted to keep, just without the fighting.
Our so-called “postwar settlement”, then, is in fact a continuation of the wartime one. And as evidenced by news this week of a Labour rebellion against Keir Starmer’s efforts to rein in welfare spending, after 80 years Britain is still (administratively speaking, if in no other sense) on that war footing. Except that this settlement is now running perhaps decisively out of two vital resources: funds and solidarity. As the two wars recede from living memory, I predict its long afterglow will too — whether or not Starmer’s rebel MPs prevail.
Possibly the only person alive in Britain today who remembers the country before large-scale administrative bureaucracy is Ethel Caterham, who at 115 is Britain’s oldest living citizen and this year, became the world’s oldest living person. Born in 1909, she can maybe just about recall the polity described by historian A.J.P. Taylor, whereby until August 1914 “a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman”.
It was the scale, coordination, and population-wide mobilisation required for total war that laid the foundations for Britain’s modern administrative state — along with its abiding connotations of solidarity and moral mission. It wasn’t just the millions called up to serve. It was also, as British writer Mary Ward approvingly documented in 1916, every last corner of the country reconfigured for the war effort: workshops turned over to munitions manufacturing, jobs opened to women, villages turned over to barracks, volunteers planting and harvesting, and all administered by a suddenly radically-expanded state. As Taylor put it later, during the two world wars the state “established a hold over its citizens which though relaxed in peace time, was never to be removed”.
The result was welfare bureaucracy that blended moral and administrative objectives, all based on the unwritten premise of a common wartime goal. This blend was in evidence from the outbreak of the First World War, in the “separation allowance” paid to the wives of soldiers. This was a measure that both paved the way for later welfare expansion and opened new opportunities for state surveillance of recipients. Standards of sexual conduct were imposed as a condition of payment, for example, and payments could be withdrawn for (among other things) drunkenness or gross neglect of children.
Thus was born the uneasy mix of bureaucracy, moral tutelage, and state munificence that has been Britain’s institutional modus operandi ever since: one that, as Taylor also notes, only grew more expansive and morally self-assured when the Second World War broke out in 1939. The Beveridge Report, that first proposed making permanent this state administration of national wellbeing, was written in 1942, while the Second World War was still ongoing: for Beveridge recognised the situation as a “revolutionary moment” whose lessons and effects should be seized and built upon. “Now,” as he put it, “when the war is abolishing landmarks of every kind, is the opportunity for using experience in a clear field.”
Once peace was declared, postwar Labour government declared war on Beveridge’s five Great Evils instead — Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. This meant turning Britain’s newfound, large-scale administrative capacity and shared moral purpose to new collective ends, via social housing, state education, a welfare safety net, nationalised healthcare, and plentiful good jobs. The resulting administrative infrastructure employed many of the bureaucratic innovations first established as war measures, only now in pursuit not of wartime victory but peacetime national flourishing.
Much of Britain’s postwar politics has concerned how this project can best be advanced — and, importantly, how to pay for it. For the retooling of Britain’s wartime administration as a vector for transformation in peacetime also meant continuing the approach to public spending that had characterised Britain at war. That is: we sold stuff to fund it. The wartime fire-sales began in 1940, with the Ships for Bases deal that traded 50 obsolete American warships for 99-year leases on territory in Newfoundland and the Caribbean that would be used as US military bases. This programme of selling off the empire by degrees would continue, for example in US pressure on Churchill to abandon the “imperial preference” trade tariff system, as a condition of US loans desperately needed to avert military defeat.
This great sell-off continued in the war’s aftermath, as a means of funding Beveridge’s vision. As historian James Barr notes, again under pressure from the US, while seeking the $3.5 billion reconstruction loan that Attlee’s government needed to realise its welfare programme, the British government began by degrees to cede control of Mandatory Palestine. Still there never seemed to be enough money; more auctions followed. When oil and gas was discovered in the North Sea, Thatcher used it to fund her programme of de-industrialisation, leaving whole towns and cities dependent on welfare, all funded by the oil bonanza. By contrast, the Norwegian government used the proceeds to create a national sovereign wealth fund, to safeguard that wealth for future generations.
More recent governments have scraped about ever more desperately for assets that can be liquidated to keep things going. Public utilities, railways, flagship companies and grand buildings have raised a few quid here and there, all of which then promptly vanishes into the same ever-expanding maw. This perpetual crisis has been rendered still more acute by the implosion of another unexamined assumption of the postwar era: that the native population would continue to grow. Instead, Britain’s native population has been shrinking since 1973, meaning a welfare programme that was never very affordable to begin with is now making ever more demanding calls on a dwindling working-age tax base.
“Public utilities, railways, flagship companies and grand buildings have raised a few quid here and there, all of which then promptly vanishes into the same ever-expanding maw.”
The resulting fiscal and political impasse is painfully visible in our medical and adult social care services, where a growing proportion of spending is on age-related health and welfare interventions. Caught between the irresistible force of a population ageing expensively on the NHS, and the immovable object of Britain’s looming penury, so far government policy has been public sector supply-side reform via immigration: another kind of fire-sale, namely opening the country itself to migrants from elsewhere. In healthcare itself this takes the form of covert supply-side reform, which is to say using foreign healthcare professionals to dilute NHS staff bargaining power. Even so, it is never enough: now, despite the high-flown rhetoric that surrounded last week’s Parliamentary vote to legalise doctor-assisted suicide for the terminally ill, the obvious NHS cost-saving implications suggests a bureaucracy sufficiently desperate to tear up both its founding charter, and even the Hippocratic Oath, by adding deliberate killing to its list of “treatments”.
What will the addition of euthanasia do to the assumed solidarity underpinning the NHS mission? Lurking behind Beveridge’s proposal was always, in the background, a presumed “us” unified by the war effort: a group of people with a shared purpose, somewhat (if never monolithically) homogeneous, and from which it is therefore implicitly possible to be excluded. With the two wars on their way to disappearing entirely from living memory, will that sense of unity persist? Perhaps. But as things stand, the migration policy pursued by every government since Blair, in the hope of keeping our fiscal show on the road, is actively militating against this.
Even Keir Starmer himself is now warning that the country is becoming at best “an island of strangers”, if not a morass of competing religious and ethnic blocs. Such a transformation could hypothetically be halted; but net migration remains high, with Britain’s welfare regime serving both as justification, in the name of the employees, tax receipts, and GDP growth needed to sustain it, and also as attractor for those who wish to enjoy its relative munificence. This seems unsustainable though. If rapid demographic change risks curdling the politics of scarcity into bitter competition between in-groups, this could pose an existential threat to the welfare settlement full stop. Should the general electorate come to believe — however unjustly or at the instigation of activists — that Britain’s welfare system now functions not as a vehicle for solidarity within an overall national in-group, but a mechanism for fiscal transfers from one ethnic bloc to others, it is unlikely to continue commanding broad support.
Taken all together, then, Britain’s embrace of permanent wartime bureaucracy has a quality of tragedy. We’ve spent 80 years coasting on a cosy sense of big government and common purpose, held together by vague ancestral recollections of ration books, blackout wardens, brisk nurses, and national unity. Successive governments raided the piggy-bank again and again to pay for it, and have by now resorted to burning the furniture. Starmer’s rebels are just delaying the inevitable: as things stand, whether in the prospect of suicide on the NHS or the bitter politics of Channel boats and domestic scarcity, our welfare regime feels like it’s hurtling toward a dénouement it cannot avert without in some other way hastening the disaster. I don’t know what it would look like for Britain to establish a true postwar settlement, but at this point it is some decades overdue.
