It is significant that the invention of the term ‘welfare state’ is credited to William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury between 1942 and his premature death 1944. Temple attended university with the great Christian socialist economist R.H. Tawney, and was deeply influenced by Tawney’s plan for a system which would make adequate provision for the poorer members of Britain’s then increasingly urbanised, industrial society. Along with William H. Beveridge, J.H. Oldham, John Maynard Keynes, Tom Johnston in Scotland, and others, Tawney proposed a scheme of universal contributions funded by a national insurance mechanism, which would enable every person’s basic educational, health and pension needs to be met free at the point of delivery. Although some policies along these lines had been initiated by the Liberal government of 1906, it took the acute economic depression of the 1930s to reinforce the attractiveness of an integrated, collective solution to the problems of poverty, disease and illiteracy which prevailed in Britain’s major cities, and which threatened other communities, too.
For Temple, these principles of universal provision for universal benefit resonated deeply with Christ’s law of ‘bearing one another’s burdens’ (Gal. 6.2). He took it as a basic theological imperative that any civilised society, and especially one as steeped in the Christian tradition as Britain, should maintain a minimum standard of living, housing, learning and medical care for all its citizens. In his 1942 book Christianity and Social Order, Temple argued that this imperative related to that dignity of every person which derives from their having been made in the image of God, and from the fact that Christ died for all people ‘absolutely independent’ of their ‘usefulness to society’. The State, he wrote, ‘exists for the citizen, not the citizen for the State.’ Universal welfare provision was an expression of gospel ethics for Temple because it could enhance people’s freedom to fulfil their potential in ‘social fellowship’ with others, as well as offering a check on the sinful, selfish abuse of freedom to which they were prone as fallen individuals. However, Temple did not view this ‘Welfare State’ as wholly usurping smaller-scale charitable provision. More localised works of ‘self-sacrificial service’ had long been led by church organisations and mission agencies, he observed, and would continue to be necessary if people were not to slough off all personal and communal responsibility onto government.
In expounding the Welfare State in this fashion, Temple very deliberately sought a ‘middle way’ between communism, which he saw as overly centralised and forcible in its redistribution of wealth, and an unbridled capitalism which makes no provision for those unable to participate in or benefit from the market, and which leaves all social care to private philanthropy. Aware of the appeals made by ‘Christian communists’ to texts such as Acts 4.32-5.11 on the one hand, and by ‘Christian capitalists’ to Jesus’ focus on a spiritual rather than earthly kingdom on the other (John 18.36), Temple’s central Anglican faith impelled him to steer a course between these two ideological poles. His ‘six point plan’ for delivering on these broader convictions duly urged new legislation to secure decent housing, education, pay, union representation, holiday time and free expression for all.
It is important to realise that these proposals were made in the darkest days of the Second World War - a time when the need to organise social services on a national scale was clear, obvious and urgent. In the same year that Temple published Christianity and Social Order, Beveridge delivered on behalf of the coalition government a report which echoed many of Temple’s concerns, and which changed the cultural and political landscape of Britain immeasurably. The Beveridge Report, officially entitled Social Insurance and the Allied Services, was enthusiastically implemented by 1945 Labour government, which used its large majority to ensure that by the early 1950s most of its key provisions were in place - from the National Health Service (NHS) to a wide-scale council house building programme, from state pensions to universal secondary education. Although Labour lost power in 1951, this grand new social system expanded through the 1950s and 1960s, its evident necessity and appropriateness doing much to define the ‘consensus politics’ of that era.
By the 1970s, however, an expanding and ageing population, rising costs of maintaining public services, and growing expectations of what government should deliver, combined to create growing concern about the capacity of the Welfare State to address social needs in the way that Beveridge had envisaged. Certainly, it had not eradicated poverty, many ‘high rise’ council blocks had been condemned, and even then it was clear that if demographic trends and life expectancy continued as they had in preceding years, state pensions would come under severe pressure by the turn of the century. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 could be seen in some ways as a reaction to this. Her government pursued a new approach based not on the socialist paradigm but on ‘monetarism’ and ‘free market economics’, which maintained core social services while cutting income tax and reforming national insurance to encourage a greater degree of privatisation in the public sector. ‘Internal markets’ and ‘GP fundholding’ were created in the NHS, free dental care was minimised, limited commercial funding of state education was allowed, council house tenants were allowed to buy their own homes, and utilities like gas and electricity, which had been nationalised in the 1940s, were privatised in the 1980s.
Defending this approach in her famous ‘Sermon on the Mound’ to the Church of Scotland Assembly in May 1988, Mrs Thatcher appealed to the parables of the Good Samaritan and the talents to stress the importance of personal responsibility and entrepreneurialism. One of her chief advisers on this speech, and in social policy generally, was Brian Griffiths - a committed evangelical Christian who published several lengthy theological defences of this new Conservative worldview.
Although the Conservatives lost power to Labour in 1997, Tony Blair’s government committed itself to building on, rather than dismantling, the Thatcher inheritance. Its emphasis on a ‘public-private partnership’ reflects the shifting realities of universal social provision since the war, and may even be seen as not so far removed from Temple’s ‘middle way’ between centralised welfare and more personal and local responsibility. Welfare provision remains a live debate regarding the extent to which the state should itself deliver services and the extent to which it should organise and regulate others to do it.
