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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2024
The Beveridge Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services is in its way a portent in English politics.
Though it is in form a report made by Sir William Beveridge to the Minister of Reconstruction, Sir William Jowitt, K.C., M.P., who held the rank and office of Paymaster General (and is now Minister without Portfolio), and though the Report admittedly raises matters of policy which are ‘so important as to call for decision by the Government as a whole,’ the issue of the Report was heralded by a regular campaign of advance publicity and propaganda which appeared to be designed and calculated to impose the document on Parliament and the people; and its actual publication was accompanied by such a fanfare of trumpets, in the Press and on the Radio, as made one to understand, almost for the first time, the technique and power of publicity in the hands of a totalitarian régime and its habit of treating Parliament no longer as a deliberative assembly, but rather as a body accustomed obediently to register the decisions of the Party, or the Fuhrer. Thus, within twenty-four hours of its publication, summaries of the Report (as yet unconsidered by the Government or by Parliament) were broadcast in twenty-two languages as a forecast of the line of social legislation to be followed by Great Britain in the post-war reconstruction.
1 One ought in fairness to state that the Report is currently said to have been written in sections, each section being submitted, as drafted, in advance of publication, to the appropriate departments of Government. But these drafts were not final and are said in fact to have been freely revised.
2 The distinction between ‘independent’ and ‘dependent’ citizens was much used by members of the Eugenics Society and suchlike in the campaign they waged, in the years before the war, for the introduction among ‘dependent’ persons of birth prevention and sterilisation and even euthanasia as a means of relieving the excessive taxation of ‘independent’ citizens.
3 The statement (at p. 131 of the Report) that ‘every woman on marriage will become a new person’ would seem to be a little extravagant from the point of view of Christian philosophy: but one does not expect modern State documents to show any particular perception of Christian principles.
4 It is right to observe that this is admittedly one of the matters which are said (at p. 115) to be ‘open to argument.’
5 The section of the Report which deals with changes 12 and 13 (at pp. S7–8) is briefly and discreetly handled. The price to be paid for loss of freedom is likely to vary in different places and at different times and will depend on the interplay of moral and social as well as political forces.
6 The criticisms formulated by these bodies nre (save in their demand for justice) not in the least likely to have any relation or reference to the principles of Christian philosophy.
7 We may none the less be permitted to think of the birds of the air and the lilies of the field in their proper context.
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