ABSTRACT
This chapter explains about wartime developments in the non-emergency areas of social policy or about the planning of post-war reconstruction. It examines the light that they throw upon the political assumptions behind wartime social policy formation and upon both popular and official expectations of the post-war welfare system. The chapter considers just how far they substantiate Titmuss's perception of the relationship between war and the British 'welfare state'. Titmuss saw the war as affecting the history of welfare on three different levels – popular attitudes, information about social problems, and governmental response. It argues that the circumstances of the Second World War created an unprecedented sense of social solidarity among the British people, which made them willing to accept a great increase of egalitarian policies and collectivist state intervention. The British war economy, before the nature of the consensus is fully understood and before the wider aspects of the Titmuss thesis can be either rejected or sustained.
