Sturdy Beggars or Deserving Poor. A Brief History of the Welfare State

When George Osborne started his strivers versus shirkers dialogue, he revived the age old rhetoric of hate, employed by the ruling classes whenever their purse strings are tweaked. Older even than the barony to which he is heir. The first crisis of capitalism brought about the origins of the welfare state. A collapse in the exchange rate, and massive inflation, combined with foreign debt, and declining taxes, led to an unprecedented increase in poverty. Over half of the population were living on less than 20% of the average income, mainly in rented accommodation, with rising rents, and household bills. The most deprived area in Britain, the North West, saw a massive increase in charity, as even the working poor were unable to feed themselves. 15% of the population lived in food poverty. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? The Burgeoning media fuelled popular perceptions of rising poverty, and reactionary politics soon became the order of the day. The moral indignation in the shires and City predictably led to legislation that first classified the poor. The conception of the welfare state was not in 1946 under a Labour Government, nor even the Liberals of 1906 (Ah when the Liberal Party cared for the Poor). No, the welfare state was conceived in 1572, but Osborne’s rhetoric is older still. Unsurprisingly, it was the Merchants of London who wrote to the crown in 1553, “It is obvious to all men that beggars and thieves are everywhere. And we found the cause was that they are idle”, with those words was born the strivers versus shirkers debate. In the first Elizabethan Age as now, the Government of the day did at least recognise (for the first time) that the plight of the poor was not always their own fault. The first step was made toward the government accepting responsibility to help people to find work. Where this was not possible, they would be given the dole paid by those people in work. Who though truly deserved support? The sick and infirm were of course protected, and the elderly to be looked after. It was the working age poor, the vagrants and the idle, that were to be identified. Whilst the practice of whipping the undeserving poor has fallen into disuse; there is still demand for it below the line on the Mail. We Elizabethans are much like our forefathers of old. The Tudor poor laws remained the basis of Government responsibility for the plight of the working classes, until Gilbert’s Act 1787, which placed responsibility for the workhouse at a county level. The Act emphasised the status of the infirm and sick, but again regarded the working poor as idle. Even the benevolent Thomas Gilbert proposed banning pubs, except for out of town travellers and property holders, to discourage the poor from wasting their lives in idleness. Perhaps Alec Shelbrooke, Conservative Member of Parliament for Elmet and Rothwell, had been reading his history books before delivering his 10-minute rule bill for a Welfare Cash Card. Predictably, it was not the Tory party that made steps at improving the lives of the working classes. In 1834, the first liberal government for thirty years began to reform Welfare with the Poor Law Amendment Act. It was not popular, attacked by the right for its expense, whilst satirised by Dickens in Oliver Twist.

The principle of poor relief changed dramatically as the Victorian Age unfolded, but the spectre of the workhouse or starvation still held terror for the working class. Yet, even Dickens could not attack the poor laws, without in turn epitomising the idea of the sturdy beggar characterised by Bill Sykes, one of the few Dickensian characters without a single redeeming feature. In 1906, the Liberal Party again challenged the ideas about the states responsibility to the poorest in society. The introduction of old age pensions, unemployment benefit, labour exchanges, universal education and access to healthcare transformed the idea of poor relief into the Welfare State. Lloyd George funded the reforms by taxing the rich in his People Budget, “This is a war Budget. It is for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness. I cannot help hoping and believing that before this generation has passed away, we shall have advanced a great step towards that good time, when poverty, and the wretchedness and human degradation which always follows in its camp, will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests" Opposition to the bill was virulent in the extreme. The phrase “Taffy was a Welshman Taffy was a thief,” became the slogan of the Conservative opposition, that culminated in Parliamentary crisis. The Tory peers ultimately destroyed the power of the Lords, in their desperate attempts to throttle Lloyd George’s bill. The introduction of the Parliament Act established the primacy of the Commons over the Lords based upon their elected status. A fact that escaped the much diminished (in stature as well as membership), modern Liberal party when they attempted to complete the reform of the Lords last year. http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/362838/Heavens-Above-Movie-Clip-I-m-The-New-Vicar.html The European crisis that unfolded in the first half of the twentieth century, left little time for welfare reform. Whilst Ramsey Macdonald did try to end the horror of the workhouse, it was not until the Atlee administration that the modern Welfare State was born. However, the criticism of expense did not end. In the sixties, the golden age of the welfare state, the argument was still rumbled on. Erik Sykes caricature of a scrounger in the Peter Sellers satirical masterpiece Heavens Above, is still recognisable in the arguments over the cap on Welfare benefits today. The same theme was there in the darker character of Yosser Hughes in the 80s “Boys from the Blackstuff”. The 1980s saw the decline in health of the welfare state. Whilst spending began to be curtailed in the financial crisis of 1976. It was under the incoming Conservative government that the link (in some cases established by statute law, in others simply convention) between the value of social security benefits, and measures of other incomes or earnings was broken. Cash benefits no longer rose with national prosperity at times of economic growth. Their value has therefore been steadily falling in relation to the incomes of those at work. The imposition of a 1% cap finally ends even a link with inflation. Any in rise in social security will now be at the whim of the Government, rather than economic necessity. During the boom years of the Blair/Brown administration, the divisive language that abounds today was largely muted. Indeed, the scrounger in the media became an antihero in comedy dramas such as Shameless and Rab C Nesbit. The portrayal of characters like the Gallaghers, feeds into the perception of the scrounger today. The attack on the Welfare State is the same as it always has been. Four hundred and thirty one years of Shirkers and Strivers. It is the argument that has always been used to curtail social reform, and to protect the vested interests of the rich. This time perhaps is different, in that it returns us to ideas of class war. The shirkers did not cause the economic crash no matter how many Telegraph Articles claim that. The responsibility rests solely with the very people now screaming for a cap on benefits. That is not healthy for our society. Post Modern Britain risks a social division in which everybody will lose. Despite Osborne’s second class degree in History, he has failed to learn the lessons of the past, as much as he has failed to understand the economic pressure of the present. With that failure of understanding he risks condemning Britain to a broken future.