Columbia University History Professor Writes about Sir William Beveridge and his U.K. Reforms

            Professor Susan Pedersen, a historian specializing in British history at Columbia University, has written an essay-style review of the new book, Bread for All: The Origins of the Welfare State (2017). We are talking about the British welfare state here, and Pedersen reports that the author, Chris Renwick, “tops and tails” his account “with the well-known figure of Sir William Beveridge.”

            This item immediately caught my interest, as one recalls that it was the famous report by Beveridge that prompted reforms in England immediately after World War II which terminated workers’ compensation as a stand-alone program.  That development constitutes an irony of sorts, since the nation whose laws largely inspired U.S statutes chose to eliminate workers' compensation as familiarly understood ... while the American states have continued chugging along with the same model for another 70 years.  (Aspects of  industrial injury compensation, notably, remain in the country.)      

           Pedersen, in her London Review of Books (lead article, 2.8.2018) essay, notes the "amalgamation of programs," but enriches our understanding. Here is a sample:

Social Insurance and Allied Services, the improbably named 300-page tome released by His Majesty’s Stationer’s Office on 1 December 1942, didn’t just propose amalgamating the patchwork of existing programmes – accident insurance, health insurance, unemployment insurance, widows’ and old-age pensions – into a single scheme, although it did do that. (In brief, Beveridge categorised the whole population in terms of individuals’ relationship to the labour market, identified the factors that might prevent them from working, and proposed a single contributory scheme that would provide adequate subsistence during any of those non-working life-stages or crises – except motherhood, about which I shall say more later.) But this new and universal scheme, as historians of social policy never tire of telling us, built on and did not break with the two key principles of its interwar precedents – first, that any systems of cash support should be contributory and not tax-funded, and, second, that labour market participation was the foundation for entitlement….”

The full review can be read here, I think for free: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n03/susan-pedersen/one-man-ministry.