The 2nd Stage of My Transformation UK Project
It is the 80th anniversary of the Beveridge Report which was published in November 1942. There was a Wartime Coalition government in power, made up of all political parties. Conservative Prime Minister Winston Churchill commissioned William Beveridge, a Liberal, to chair a committee to "survey the existing national schemes of social insurance and allied services, including workmen’s compensation and to make recommendations.”
Beveridge went far beyond his brief, and came up with his plan for a Social Democratic Welfare State that was to become TRANSFORMATIVE in the way it reshaped the UK.
Beveridge was so shocked by the conditions that the working classes lived in that he described them the victims of 5 Giant Evils:
Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.
Beveridge saw the healthy and employed workingman, his wife and family as the 'cornerstone' of society, and his Report reflected that.
By this time the War had ended and Labour had been elected under Clement Atlee, and they embraced the Beveridge Plan and made it central to their policies.
This is how the Guardian newspaper records it:
"Whatever Attlee thought of him, Beveridge was no socialist. He thought taking the burden of healthcare and pension costs away from corporations and individuals and giving them to the government would increase the competitiveness of British industry while producing healthier, wealthier, more motivated and more productive workers keen to buy British goods.
And he was right. The sustained post-second-world-war period of economic growth and near full employment that lasted until the late 70s saw falling poverty, slum clearance, the founding of a free health service and education system alongside rising real incomes and falling inequality – which, in turn, led to higher tax revenues and the Rowntree Foundation concluded that the problem had largely been erased."
There is a need in 2022 for another Beveridge type Plan to Transform the UK
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