Facts And Theories Of The Welfare State

The early months of the third post-war Labour Government in Britain provide a fitting opportunity to review the present state of the debate on the nature of the welfare state. The notion that there is something specifically 'socialist' about higher pensions has been given fresh currency by the suggestion that foreign bankers have looked with disfavour upon the new government's proposals in this respect, cautious and limited though they were. In the immediate post-war years the 'welfare state' was generally regarded as an almost exclusively British phenomenon. It was identified as the 'achievement' of the 1945 Labour government and it acquired in those years a 'socialist flavour.' Only critics of the far or idiosyncratic Left were to be found asking: What was 'socialist' about it? In what ways had the capitalist system been fundamentally modified by it? Or, if not, by what other tests did it rank as a socialist achievement? Adapted from the source document.