William Beveridge

William Beveridge was the man who was most influential in starting the Welfare State. It began with [ allegedly ] good intentions, then became a monster, making the problem worse not better and far more expensive. It came to us by way of the Beveridge Report [ in 1942 ]. Bill was QUOTE so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists — in particular by Beatrice Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report — that he could readily be considered one of their number...... The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. During his time as Director, he jousted with Cannan and Robbins, who were trying to steer the LSE away from its Fabian roots UNQUOTE. The Fabians were communist Subversives. Bill was, at best one of their Useful Idiots which is why they infiltrated him into the system.

How well did he do? Regarding his five great evils :-
Want                       failed - try living on the dole and feel poor
Disease                    succeeded - the health service is usually adequate but expensive
Ignorance                failed - the Education industry is a Propaganda machine promoting ignorance and an agenda
Squalor                    failed - go round council estates and see the graffiti, the rubbish....
Idleness                   failed - millions are third generation career layabouts - they like it.
The cost is monstrous, billions every year in money, with moral degradation to boot.

It is fair to say that Bill was sound on Eugenics - see below for what the Wiki has to say about the man and the policy. It does not quite say that he favoured castrating dossers but he was certainly thinking about removing them from the gene pool in some fashion or other. He was bright enough to see that the dole would create the Poverty Trap and screw the poor.

He is not the only one to blame for a dole bill of £437 billion [ £194 billion 'social protection', £32 billion 'personal social services',  £122 billion 'health',  £89 billion 'education' - source Treasury pie chart below ]

There are plenty of others but he started it. The cost  corresponds to some £7,283 a year for every man woman and child in the land.

 

William Beveridge ex Wiki
QUOTE
William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge (5 March 1879 – 16 March 1963) was a British economist and social reformer. He is perhaps best known for his 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services (known as the Beveridge Report) which served as the basis for the post-World War II Welfare State put in place by the Labour government.

Early life and career
William Beveridge, the eldest son of Henry Beveridge, an Indian Civil Service officer and scholar Annette (Akroyd) Beveridge, was born in Rangpur, India (now Rangpur, Bangladesh), on 5 March 1879. After studying at Charterhouse School and University College, Oxford, he became a lawyer.

Lord Beveridge was so highly influenced by the Fabian Society socialists – in particular by Beatrice Potter Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report – that he could readily be considered one of their number. However, he was perhaps the best economist among them – his early work on unemployment (1909) and his massive historical study of prices and wages (1939) being clear testaments to his scholarship. The Fabians made him a director of the LSE in 1919, a post he retained until 1937. His continual jousts with Cannan and Robbins, who were trying to wrench the LSE away from its Fabian roots, are now legendary............

Three years later, Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour in the wartime National government, invited Beveridge to take charge of the Welfare department of his Ministry. Beveridge refused, but declared an interest in organising British manpower in wartime (Beveridge had come to favour a strong system of centralised planning). Bevin was reluctant to let Beveridge have his way but did commission him to work on a relatively unimportant manpower survey from June 1940 and so Beveridge became a temporary civil servant. Neither Bevin nor the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry Sir Thomas Phillips liked working with Beveridge as both found him conceited.........

The Report to the Parliament on Social Insurance and Allied Services was published in 1942. It proposed that all people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance contribution. In return, benefits would be paid to people who were sick, unemployed, retired or widowed. Beveridge argued that this system would provide a minimum standard of living "below which no one should be allowed to fall". It recommended that the government should find ways of fighting the five 'Giant Evils' of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Beveridge included as one of three fundamental assumptions the fact that there would be a National Health Service of some sort, a policy already being worked on in the Ministry of Health.........

Beveridge saw full employment (which he defined as unemployment of no more than 3%) as the pivot of the social welfare programme he expressed in the 1942 Beveridge Report, and Full Employment in a Free Society (1944) expressed how this goal might be gained. Alternative measures for achieving it included Keynesian-style fiscal regulation, direct control of manpower, and state control of the means of production. The impetus behind Beveridge's thinking was social justice, and the creation of an ideal new society after the war. He believed that the discovery of objective socio-economic laws could solve the problems of society..........

Support for eugenics
Beveridge was a proponent of Eugenics. He argued in 1909 that “those men who through general defects are unable to fill such a whole place in industry, are to be recognised as 'unemployable'. They must become the acknowledged dependents of the State... but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights — including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood.“
UNQUOTE
Whether his last bright idea meant castrating the idle is not explained. There is a lot going for it. Ditto for spaying the idle sluts who get themselves up the duff in order to get council flats at our expense.

 

 

Beveridge Report
William Beveridge brought us his report. It sounded well meant. It was very popular with the public at the time. There were even some good effects but it turned into a monster. He told us that he was against five great evils. His results are:-
Want                       failed - try living on the dole and feel poor
Disease                    succeeded - the National Health Service is usually adequate but expensive
Ignorance                failed - the Education industry is a Propaganda machine promoting ignorance and an agenda
Squalor                    failed - go round council estates and see the graffiti, the rubbish....
Idleness                   failed - millions are third generation career lay abouts - they like it

That is one success and four failures at a price which makes the rest of us poor. He is not the only one to blame for a bill of £437 billion [ £194 billion 'social protection', £32 billion 'personal social services',  £122 billion 'health',  £89 billion 'education' - source Treasury pie chart below ] a year which is around £7,283 a year for every man woman and child in the land, way back in 2010/11. It is worse now but they hide the statistics. Compare that with the average man's income to know that we are getting remarkably bad value and robbed blind. He was spot on regarding "means-tested" benefits. They were used to create the Poverty Trap and and screw the poor.

 

Beveridge Report
The Beveridge Report was the Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services chaired by William Beveridge, an economist.[1] The report identified five "Giant Evils" in society: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease, and went on to propose widespread reform to the system of social welfare in the United Kingdom to address these. Highly popular with the public, the report formed the basis for the post-war reforms known as the Welfare State, which include the expansion of National Insurance and the creation of the National Health Service.

Background
In 1940, during Second World War, the Labour Party had entered into a coalition with the Conservative Party. On 10 June, 1941 Arthur Greenwood, the Labour MP and Minister without Portfolio, had announced the creation of an inter-departmental committee which would carry out a survey of Britain's social insurance and allied services. Its terms of reference were:

To undertake, with special reference to the inter-relation of the schemes, a survey of the existing national schemes of social insurance and allied services, including workmen's compensation, and to make recommendations.

Its members were civil servants from the Home Office, Ministry of Labour and National Service, Ministry of Pensions, Government Actuary, Ministry of Health, HM Treasury, Reconstruction Secretariat, Board of Customs and Excise, Assistance Board, Department of Health for Scotland, Registry of Friendly Societies and Office of the Industrial Assurance Commissioner.

The Report
The Report offered three guiding principles to its recommendations:

  1. Proposals for the future should not be limited by "sectional interests" in learning from experience and that a "revolutionary moment in the world's history is a time for revolutions, not for patching".

  2. Social insurance is only one part of a "comprehensive policy of social progress". The five giants on the road to reconstruction were Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.

  3. Policies of social security "must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual", with the state securing the service and contributions. The state "should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family".

Beveridge was opposed to "means-tested" benefits. His proposal was for a flat rate contribution rate for everyone and a flat rate benefit for everyone. Means-testing was intended to play a tiny part, because it created high marginal tax rates for the poor (the "poverty trap").

Reaction
Inside the Cabinet there was debate, instigated by Brendan Bracken, on 16 November 1942 over whether to publish the Report as a White Paper at that time. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Kingsley Wood, believed the Report to be "ambitious and involv[ing] an impracticable financial commitment" and therefore publication should be postponed. However the Cabinet decided on 26 November to publish it on 2 December.[2]

The Ministry of Information Home Intelligence found that the Report had been "welcomed with almost universal approval by people of all shades of opinion and by all sections of the community" and seen as "the first real attempt to put into practice the talk about a new world". In a sample taken in the fortnight after the Report's publication, the British Institute of Public Opinion found that 95% of the public had heard of the Report and that there was "great interest in it" but criticism that old age pensions were not high enough. They also found that "there was overwhelming agreement that the plan should be put into effect".[3]

The Times said of the Report: "a momentous document which should and must exercise a profound and immediate influence on the direction of social change in Britain". The Manchester Guardian called it "a big and fine thing". The Daily Telegraph said it was a consummation of the revolution began by David Lloyd George in 1911. The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, said it was "the first time anyone had set out to embody the whole spirit of the Christian ethic in an Act of Parliament".[3]

There was a planned debate in Parliament on the Report for February 1943 so the Cabinet appointed the Lord President of the Council, Sir John Anderson, to chair a committee to consider the Report and to set out the government's line in the Commons debate. In the Commons debate the government announced they would not implement the Report immediately. The Tory Reform Committee, consisting of 45 Conservative MPs, demanded the founding of a Ministry of Social Security immediately. At the division at the end of the debate, 97 Labour MPs, 11 Independents, 9 Liberals, 3 Independent Labour Party MPs and 1 Communist voted against the government.[4] A Ministry of Information Home Intelligence report found that after the debate the left-wing section of the public were disappointed but that "an approving minority" thought that the government was correct in waiting until the post-war financial situation were known before making a decision. An opinion poll by the British Institute of Public Opinion found that 29% were satisfied with the government's attitude to the Report; 47% were dissatisfied and 24% "don't knows".[5]

Churchill gave a broadcast on 21 March, 1943 titled "After the War" where he warned the public not to impose "great new expenditure on the State without any relation to the circumstances which might prevail at the time" and said there would be "a four-year plan" of post-war reconstruction "to cover five or six large measures of a practical character" which would be put to the electorate after the war and implemented by a new government. These measures were "national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave"; the abolition of unemployment by government policies which would "exercise a balancing influence upon development which can be turned on or off as circumstances require"; "a broadening field for State ownership and enterprise"; new housing; major reforms to education; largely expanded health and welfare services.[6]

While the Liberal Party and the Conservative party quickly adopted Beveridge's proposals, the Labour Party was slow to follow. Labour leaders opposed Beveridge's idea of a National Health Service run through local health centres and regional hospital administrations, preferring a state-run body.[7] Beveridge complained about the opposition of Labour leaders, including that of Ernest Bevin: "For Ernest Bevin, with his trade-union background of unskilled workers... social insurance was less important than bargaining about wages." Bevin derided the Beveridge Report as a "Social Ambulance Scheme" and followed the Coalition Government's view that it should not be implemented until the end of the war (he was furious in February 1943 when a large number of Labour back-benchers ignored their leaders and voted against delay in implementing Beveridge).

Implementation
The Labour Party did eventually also adopt the Beveridge proposals, and after their victory in the 1945 general election, they proceeded to implement many social policies, which became known as the Welfare State. These included the Family Allowances Act 1945 , National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act 1946, National Insurance Act 1946, National Health Service Act 1946, Pensions (Increase) Act 1947, Landlord and Tenant (Rent Control) Act 1949, National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act 1948, National Insurance Act 1949..............

COMMENT:-
The third recommendation has been widely, sincerely, deeply ignored. The State is an Engine of Extortion giving us millions of layabouts with no intention of ever  doing an honest day's work in their lives. Many of them are Third World parasites who came here to be idle.

 

Poverty Trap 
QUOTE
A poverty trap is "any self-reinforcing mechanism which causes poverty to persist." If it persists from generation to generation, the trap begins to reinforce itself if steps are not taken to break the cycle. In countries with large welfare states which use means testing, the poorest individuals may face high effective marginal tax rates if they increase their income or wealth. This can seriously weaken their incentive to work their way out of poverty.
UNQUOTE
Robbing them of the incentive to work is bad news especially if they are lazy. Lack of training does not help either.

 

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Updated on 26/01/2018 09:10