The politics of welfare

The work of various philanthropists, and of the inspectorates, together with the very scale of deterioration in some parts of society which they revealed, led in the 1880s and 1890s to a kind of rediscovery of poverty and ‘the social problem’. It inspired the revealing phrase ‘the perishing and dangerous classes’. By the later nineteenth century the evangelical urge had begun to undergo a mutation in the direction of humanism; the redemptive passion, though still powerful, had by 1914 assumed a more or less secular form, as embodied, for example, in the Webbs. It generated a new phase of social data gathering from the mid-1880s, led by Charles Booth (1840–1916) and Seebohm Rowntree (1871–1954).

There was a gradual weakening of the assumption that in a competitive system those who lost out were inherently inferior either genetically or through moral failing in the form of a disposition to idleness; but the old notion never wholly departed, and indeed in some quarters continued an active existence. Its chief protagonist was the Charity Organisation Society, founded in 1863; fundamental to the outlook of the COS was a distinction between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor. The former were the proper concern of charity, the latter were the responsibility of the poor law. As the old century ended and the new one began, the two great political parties and the emergent new one were being increasingly pressed by a miscellany of proposals toward the adoption of a consistent and to some degree comprehensive view of the welfare responsibilities of the state.