Labour And Income Redistribution

Abstract

The history of social reform in Britain has rarely been discussed except in terms that are highly flattering to the sound common sense, tolerance and political maturity of the British people. Like the British Constitution, which down the years is supposed to have enlarged its democratic character by an uninterrupted process of political reforms, so the improvement in social legislation is believed to have continued steadily and without serious hindrance over the past century. Since those early decades of the nineteenth century when Lord Shaftesbury is still thought to have taken up almost single-handed the cause of factory legislation,' the sturdy growth of social conscience within the body politic has resulted in an ever-widening area of welfare services and remedial legislation, culminating in the Welfare State of the post-1945 years. Even the Tories lay claim, as indeed they have a right to do, for much of the social legislation of the past. For G. M. Trevelyan-still the most widely read of all popular historians-social progress in the second half of the nineteenth century was "advancing like a silent tide making in by a hundred creeks and inlets," and as for the twentieth century: "The progress actually made in the first forty years. . . particularly in education and in social services, has perhaps been as much as can be expected of limited human wisdom." In all the writing on these matters there is usually some emphasis on the fair play common to Englishmen of all creeds, and, even more important, of all classes, which has triumphed over sectional demands or narrow party interests; and the general implication, widely accepted at the present time, is that a social evil has only to be exposed to be remedied. There is the further assumption that this growth of social conscience, while not perhaps limited entirely to the British people, is yet more strongly marked among us than elsewhere: and the associated belief that the structure of social services erected in Britain during the twentieth century, and more particularly in the years after 1945, is more advanced than among other mature industrial societies.