The Beveridge Report, widely regarded as the founding document of Britain’s welfare state, was released 70 years ago this week. The document had been commissioned 18 months earlier but the timing of its publication was fortuitous. In late 1942, the American navy halted Japanese expansion in the Pacific, the British army defeated Rommel in north Africa and Russian troops were encircling the German forces at Stalingrad. While the war would last another two-and-a-half years, its outcome was becoming daily more clear.
The report was an immediate best seller. Arthur Greenwood, the Labour minister responsible, told the House of Commons that “no document within living memory has made such a powerful impression, or stirred such hopes, as the Beveridge Report”. The Treasury, inevitably, opposed it, and Winston Churchill and many other Conservatives expressed reservations. But public opinion forced the wartime coalition government to accept its recommendations.
And so William Beveridge became an iconic figure. For many on the right, he was a utopian who bears substantial responsibility for Britain’s postwar economic decline. For many on the left, subsequent failures of social policy are largely attributable to the failure of successive governments to implement Beveridge’s vision. Neither portrait has much basis in fact.