From the Workhouse to Welfare: Introduction
Read Fabian General Secretary Sunder Katwala's introduction to the 1909 Minority Report centenary collection.
If we remember the dreaded workhouse today, it is often as we watch the creations of Dickens or Hardy struggle to escape the cruel twists of fortune in the latest BBC costume drama. The past is another country. Those authors intended to move and anger their contemporaries, but the workhouse’s manifest cruelty makes it an inexplicable social institution to us. We slip easily into thinking that it was swept away by some inevitable Whiggish evolution of our modern world, and that those who opposed change were gargoyles like Mr Bumble and Mr Gradgrind: caricatures served up for our amusement before finally getting their just desserts.

That is not what happened. Social change does not happen by chance. Abolishing the workhouse required heretical new ideas, fierce political arguments and dogged campaigns. It was resisted seriously and successfully, and by liberal reformers as well as those with most at stake in the entrenched order of things.

That is why the story of Beatrice Webb’s 1909 Minority Report on the Poor Law begins as a study in political failure. She failed to convince the Majority of the Royal Commission to back the argument of the Minority quarter; she failed to get the Liberal Government to adopt her vision, or even to pursue those modest ameliorative reforms she had persuaded the Majority to adopt; and failed again in the Fabian-led civic Campaign for the Abolition of the Poor Law’s attempt to challenge the political elite from below.

But this was perhaps the most important failure in welfare history and the history of British political ideas. The Minority Report mattered, and should matter still, because it began a new public argument about the causes of poverty, about responsibility for preventing it and, by extension, about the nature of citizenship. Those arguments continue today.

The Minority Report was too utopian a vision for 1909. It was no idle tilting at windmills but a particular, very practical utopianism. Any modern reader attempting the Minority Report finds a painstakingly researched deconstruction of the failures of the New Poor Law and a detailed account of the administrative challenges in the Webb’s alternative scheme. In this it reflects Denis Healey’s affectionately mocking tribute, in new Fabian Essays of 1951, to how the early Fabians “found socialism wandering aimlessly in Cloud Cuckoo Land and set it working on the gas and water problems of the nearest town or village. The modern Welfare State is their monument.”

Yet this also misses the point. What endures from the Minority Report is not the technocratic under-wiring of how a modern welfare system of universal healthcare, minimum wages, labour exchanges and unemployment assistance would operate but, as Tim Horton sets out in chapter 1, the somewhat buried philosophical account about why such provision must become a core condition of social citizenship. In this, Beatrice Webb offers the first articulation of the core principles, and many of the central recommendations too, which underpinned the Beveridge Report of 1942, the founding document of the ‘People’s Peace’ which the post-war welfare consensus sought to enshrine.  

There are legitimate criticisms to be made of the Beveridge Report; more still of its implementation; and above all of the failure to deepen the settlement or maintain the social consensus which underpinned it a generation later. Perhaps Beveridge and Attlee did more to address the problems of the 1930s than the 1960s, though that was no small achievement in itself: the post-war welfare settlement remains, by some distance, the greatest peacetime achievement of any British government. Those who want to counter that it was the great mistake of post-war British history, primarily responsible for relative economic decline (Correlli Barnett’s argument which retains a hold on the post-Thatcherite right) never explain how democratic consent could have been secured for a return to business as usual after 1945.

The road from 1909 to 1942 involves personal as well as intellectual connections. Beveridge worked as a researcher on the Minority Report, writing in his memoirs that “the Beveridge Report stemmed from what all of us had imbibed from the Webbs". The part-time organiser of the anti-Poor Law campaign went on to be Labour’s greatest Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, who four decades on, as the ashes of the Webbs were ceremoniously interred in Westminster Abbey, said that “millions are living fuller and freer lives today because of the work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb".

Yet how unfashionable the Webbs have become. If their influence is noted, it is usually to regret their dominance in shaping the politics of the 20th century British left and the welfare state. Beatrice Webb’s achievement in 1909 must surpass the impact of any woman on British democratic politics prior to female suffrage, as Diane Hayter sets out in chapter 5. Yet, announced by convention as ‘Mrs Sidney Webb’ on the Minority Report frontispiece, our age of feminism and post-feminism has subsumed her into this double-headed, dual-brained phenomenon of ‘the Webbs’, psychologically distanced from us perhaps less by their ideas as by their all-but-overwhelming sense of public duty. How few remember that, in Bernard Crick’s view, “Beatrice Webb must be numbered, however unexpectedly to some, among the great English diarists” with a rather greater capacity for gossip and intrigue than Roy Hattersley acknowledges in chapter 2. Sidney Webb’s authorship of the 1918 clause four of Labour’s constitution is taken to exemplify a commitment to socialism red in tooth and claw when, in its own time, this was the moderates’ charter by which gradualist democratic socialism would rebut the challenge of the Bolshevik revolution.

So the Webbs have become a convenient shorthand to caricature the Fabian tradition as grey-on-grey statism, and not only for the right to target the egalitarian left. Making villains of ‘the Webbs’ has often suited many on their own side too, as part of the continual and vital debate within the plural Fabian left about the pursuit of moral as well as mechanical reform.  

The shadow of Stalin looms large. The Webbs made a grave mistake, and no excuses should be made for it.  They were among too many on right and left who made major political misjudgements about the dictators of the 1930s. When still more was known of the Gulag a few years later, Orwell’s difficulty in having Animal Farm published reflected the closing of British establishment ranks against any criticism of Stalin after 1941. The relevance of the Webbs’ later naivety – in their seventies – in failing to see beneath the official Soviet line, to a judgement of the value of their pioneering work of thirty years before can certainly be challenged. But disentangling this matters, because the point of the charge is to prosecute the case that their later defection to Communism was no breach with their earlier Fabianism and democratic socialism, but a natural extension of it.

But this can not hold. Of course, the Webbs’ advocacy of 1909 does not lead inexorably to Stalin. The triumph – though perhaps personal tragedy – of their Fabian gradualism was that their strategy of political arguments, education and institutional permeation did its work despite the defection of its founders. Beveridge’s great report, Attlee’s cabinet of 1945 and the arguments being extended by Richard Titmuss and Peter Townsend at the LSE brought about a quiet social revolution, even if the Webbs could not by then recognise the scale of their achievement.

To accept this at the level of ideas would leave only the choice offered by Hayek in The Road to Serfdom: that only alternative to libertarianism will always lead to totalitarianism. That was rejected in 1945, and disproved in post-war Europe, yet the hard point arising from the 1909 Minority Report is still usually evaded in contemporary debate about the role of the state. The central question is not what the state should provide, but what the state must guarantee as the ‘basic minimum’ and a condition of citizenship. The contested issue is rarely whether there should be any basic minimum at all. After all, the Poor Law itself reflects the commitment – going back to 1600 in England – to some collective responsibility, albeit to prevent starvation and ensure basic subsistence, not the means of social participation. What the Minority Report insists on is that citizenship is only meaningful if the poor are treated as equal citizens, not grateful supplicants. This idea of equality of respect underpins their insistence on universal, not segregated, services.  Their critique of the workhouse exemplifies Titmuss’ argument fifty years later that services for the poor will always remain poor services; and that the NHS could survive, as much of the post-war settlement was ditched, offers important truths about how universalism best entrenches progressive change.

An analysis of poverty, however well-meaning, rooted primarily in individual behavioural causes within the ‘underclass’ fails to understand this. No doubt, the moralistic counter-argument will never go away: that accepting our collective responsibility ignores the moral failings of the individual, and that self-help must be central. The Webbs’ evidence proved in 1909 that this had been tried, had failed and that it kept people in the poverty trap of the workhouse. Self-evidently, the outcome was hardly sturdy independence but the broken self-respect and dependency culture of those stigmatised by the need to rely on charitable provision which proved deeply inadequate in providing even basic relief, to say nothing of prevention or cure.

A critique of statism which understands this foundational point about collective responsibility for an adequate minimum is very different from one which does not. Certainly Crosland’s generation, seeking a new Fabianism that could lead a social democratic revisionism of the 1950s, believed a public reaction against the Webb tradition was needed. Yet whilst Crosland’s famous liberal flourish in The Future of Socialism about “total abstinence and a good filing system” not being the signposts to the socialist Utopia is endlessly quoted, the argument that he stood on their shoulders to make it is always ignored. Crosland pays warm personal tribute to the Webbs and believes that the left now takes their public virtues for granted: ‘we have all, so to speak, been trained at the LSE, are familiar with blue books and white papers, and know our way around Whitehall. We realise ... that hard work and research are virtues ... That Fabian pamphlets must be diligently studied. We know these things too well. Posthumously, the Webbs have won their battle and converted a generation to their standards. Now the time has come for a reaction”.

At the start of 2009, that a different rebalancing is needed is universally acknowledged; what that should entail is much less clear. If we have been reminded that the market has limits too and that the state has a necessary place, any political project, whether of left, right or centre, must surely dig deeper and find more to say than that.  The Webbs forged a left which would understand the necessity of the state to achieve progressive ends. That lesson should not be forgotten, but it is important to know more than one thing. 1909 should also be reclaimed as part of a progressive tradition of radical ideas allied to movement politics. The early Fabian vision of educating, agitating and organising for change may once have seemed less urgent after the achievement of the Beveridge settlement. That it should be recovered today can surely not be in doubt.

 
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