Description
For the past decade at least 25% of the UK population and 30% of children have been in poverty by internationally accepted measures, and the numbers keep rising.
In The Rise and Fall of the British Welfare State, Pat Thane analyses the history of state welfare in Britain from 1900, and sheds light on its aims, achievements, and failings.
Beginning with the poverty surveys of Booth and Rowntree, and the implementation of early welfare measures such as free school meals, Thane offers a vivid snapshot of social welfare in Britain c1900, and the growing demands for improved welfare provision leading to the beginnings of the welfare state. Now a major cause of poverty is the decline of the welfare state.
She describes the gradual growth of state welfare until the major expansion from 1945 to its peak in the unduly denigrated late 1970s. Then decline under Thatcher in the 1980s, still more since 2010, with some respite under New Labour.
She suggests that if poverty could be so much reduced (though never eliminated) in the past, it can, and should happen again.