(Mark 14.7)
Finally, from the same issue of The Friend of 27 October 2006, Edward Mackay looked at the historical context of attitudes to poverty in Britain.
If one thing could be said to unite the history of poverty in Britain it is a distrust of the poor and a disbelief in the necessity for the “relief of beggars and paupers” now described, often derisively, in terms of tackling social exclusion.
As early as 1536 and the first statutory regulation of poverty-relief, moves for the reduction of poverty were coupled with a desire to see “sturdy beggars” put to work. This, however, seemed positively liberal in comparison with the move 11 years later, which introduced slavery as a remedy for vagrancy. Enormously unpopular and rapidly repealed, the stage was set for the combative pitting of two attitudes: one places emphasis upon poverty as a social concern with social solutions, the other sees the poor as a body of undesirables to be removed from or absorbed into mainstream society. Funding for poverty reduction initiatives within this Elizabethan framework lay with the church in the rubble of reformations. With the concomitant centralisation and merging of ecclesiastical and state power (and the dissolution of the monasteries) previous systems of poor relief were drying up.
Acts of Parliament though the following century of revolutions absorbed what had been near-voluntary contributions for the purpose of poor relief into a system approximate to church taxation through tithing. Though resisted by our nonconformist forbears – often in lieu of more radical solutions – it is possible to discern a crude foreshadowing of the welfare state, albeit outside the state per se. Constitutional revolutions gave way to demographic ones and the eighteenth century saw a dramatic rise in population and therefore prices. This was coupled with an apocalyptic fear from within the emergent social sciences, most notably expressed in Thomas Malthus’ famous principle of population, which anticipated starvation as population rose well ahead of food production. Malthus’ long shadow, often dubiously coupled with a simplistic social application of the theory of natural selection, hung over the Victorian era and persists to this day. It was present in the satirical words placed in the mouth of Ebenezer Scrooge: “Are there no prisons? … And the Union workhouses? …Are they still in operation?… The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?… I was afraid, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course… If [their occupants] would rather die…they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Indeed, the Poor Law was in full vigour and though the amendment act of 1834 solidified this system it was a step towards the welfare state in that it placed responsibility squarely in the hands of the state, refusing to fall back on the churches which, for the first time, were being genuinely tolerated in their ungovernable plurality. Edward Chadwick’s name, and his brand of utilitarian philosophy, dominated the intellectual underpinning of this system, focussing on decreasing expenditure, aiming to discipline an “irresponsible population.”
More familiar names began to emerge, such as B.S. Rowntree with his meticulous documentation and Charles Booth who identified old age as major source of poverty and began the momentum which led to the Joseph Chamberlain’s 1908 Old Age Pensions Act. The social flagship of Asquith’s Liberal administration, celebrated by the emergent Labour movement, it was an imitation of the German system introduced a generation previously, which was financed by a weekly contribution. National Insurance followed in 1911 and the Unemployment Assistance Board Act in 1934-5. Even at the philosophical moment when utilitarianism was giving way to paternalism a new force was shifting the emphasis in the increasingly politicised Labour movement.
The phrase ‘welfare state’ was coined in the 1930s in contrast to the armament focussed ‘warfare state’. In the closing years of the Second World War, the potential harvest that could be gathered from collective effort turned to peace seemed like the natural inheritance of the experience of the Home Front.
The following years are too easily simplified into a post-war consensus for welfareism which came crashing down in 1979. It’s not far off, but reality is, of course, patchier. The arguments are more familiar and the preserve of the other writers in this edition. Nonetheless, echoes of Elizabethan contempt for sturdy beggars can be heard in Norman Tebbitt’s bicycling advice and the first policy statement made by Blair as Prime Minister in 1997 advocating American-style euphemistic ‘welfare-to-work’. As personal debt in the UK well exceeds the trillion mark, ‘slavery for vagrancy’ ceases to seem so far off. And as the pressures of foreign policy commitments revive a keen interest in the voluntary sector for both Brown and Cameron there is the discernable footprint of the juggling of poor-relief responsibility between church and state through the war-torn seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The poor – and the arguments with and about them – will indeed, it seems, be with us always.
