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This special series of Social Policy and Society themed sections marks the eightieth anniversary of the ‘Beveridge Report’. Published in the aftermath of World War II, the report plays a crucial part in the history of welfare development in the UK and beyond. It stressed the role of the state in promoting welfare for individuals and society and highlighted the ‘Five Giant Evils’ against which social policy ought to be directed (ignorance, disease, idleness, squalor and want).
Over the past eight decades, the idea of the Welfare State has been supported, challenged and reconsidered, also in light of the changing shape of an increasingly interconnected world. Though recent concerns have gone much beyond the Five Giant Evils, these remain an essential reference point in analysing Social Policy issues nationally and internationally. This bears witness to the impacts of the Beveridge Report on our drive to seek social progress. By adopting a forward-looking approach, this series aims to encourage a continuous debate on the welfare state in response to the needs and challenges of the 21st Century.
Post the ravages of WW2, the Beveridge report mapped a blueprint to build back a more inclusive and democratic state based on contributory social insurance systems, enhanced age pensions, and universal public services in health and education where citizens would be free from deprivation and need. Eighty years later, the parallel is obvious: we are now faced with building back after the pandemic and reconstructing welfare institutions in the context of even greater near immediate challenges of climate change, loss of biodiversity, automation, and digitalisation.
The contributions to this thematic section begins from the perspective that social policies should be evaluated from the perspective of their contribution to sustainable wellbeing and human flourishing, in contrast to the underlying agenda of economic development animating much of contemporary social policy debate. Each article, to differing degrees, assesses the degree to which we can break existing cognitive locks and enable new insights into transitioning beyond hitherto productivist paradigms to develop sustainable welfare from a multiplicity of perspectives.
The Beveridge report and its efforts to imagine and design a welfare state from ‘cradle to crave’ can be strikingly juxtaposed with Pinker’s (1970) enduring observation that stigma is a habitual technique for rationing ‘scarce’ welfare resources, and the most common expression of coercion and violence in democratic societies. This themed section interrogates welfare stigma as a potent force continually informing welfare state practices that discipline and divide in complex ways, construing and determining who does not, but also who does, deserve welfare. As current debates about re-imagining welfare are prompted by so many concerns including the ongoing violent legacies of austerity and neo-liberal inspired welfare reforms; reflections on the 80th anniversary of the Beveridge report; and thinking about the possibilities and opportunities for progressive welfare reform post-pandemic; the need to address and challenge welfare stigma should arguably be at the centre of these debates.
Fresh thinking about how to conceive of and conduct meaningful comparisons of welfare states is long overdue. In this themed section for Social Policy and Society, scholars from the East and West examine recent changes in the challenges and responses of welfare polities in Russian, EU15 and EU8 contexts.
This section is guest-edited by Professor Linda Cook of Brown University, USA and Professor Mike Titterton of the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, RF.
Browse archive content from the last 20 years of Social Policy and Society related to the Beveridge Report.