ABSTRACT
This paper is concerned with the Labour Party’s approach to the welfare state in the post-war period and beyond. Labour Governments, operating within the broad framework of Keynesian economic management, created and developed the welfare state according to a dominant ethic of ‘welfare collectivism’ derived from a mixture of pre-war Labour thinking, ‘blueprints’, like the Beveridge Report, associated with wartime reconstructionism, and the practical implementation of welfare legislation by the Attlee Governments in the late 1940s.1 As the first part of this paper suggests, Labour in power was continually confronted by the dilemmas created by this welfare collectivist legacy, prime among which was the persistent need to reconcile economic and social priorities. If in opposition the Party tended to assume sufficiently strong growth levels to ease the pain of increased social spending commitments, the experience in office in the 1960s and 1970s was rather different. Although Labour Governments attempted to maintain high levels of spending even in adverse economic circumstances, not only were they forced to make cuts to proposed increases, thus breaking manifesto promises, but they were also forced to rely on a combination of high levels of progressive taxation and incomes policies to make up the ‘gap’ created by falling productivity and an ever-increasing Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR). Because Labour was reduced to pursuing what amounted to little more than a pragmatic economic and social ‘strategy’, in which proposed socialist goals seemed increasingly elusive, Labour Governments alienated key elements of the wider labour movement, creating in the process an air of instability and crisis which the electorate hardly found appealing.
