Towards and just after the end of the Second World War great changes were wrought to our society through the Education Act 1944 and the establishment by the post war Labour government of the National Health Service. The Labour government implemented the Beveridge proposals for national insurance. In theory, the state provided a financial safety-net from the cradle to the grave. Beveridge considered his proposals would advance the cause of social justice and that governments would follow economic and fiscal policies to achieve full employment which he defined as no more than 3% of the population being unemployed.
Such was the vision and hope for the post war social settlement.
Welfare UK, as I dub the post war social settlement, has been lurching along the track for years and the riots of the past few days could be the catch-points which hurl the whole rotten lot off the line and smash it to pieces.
Respect and deference to authority, in whatever form, began to collapse in the early 1960s and has continued relentlessly since. The heady release from moral, ethical, social and legal restrictions those of us born in the immediate post-war period luxuriated in has been passed on to our children and thence to our grandchildren. Alongside this has been the development of the concept that people have rights, but scant regard to the existence of duties. We have seen a boom in consumer expenditure.
Since 1945 there has been an acceleration in immigration, increasing ethic tension, insistence on multi-culturalism and the zealous application of political correctness. It might just have been possible to keep Welfare UK on the rails but for the advent of new technologies, loss of manual jobs and periodic economic recession. The Beveridge vision of social justice has sunk without trace and we have incubated, hatched and seen grow a section of the population in low incomes jobs or benefits, with no educational qualifications, in poor health and in poor housing. Successive governments have connived at supporting the welfare dependency culture. Little effort or resource has been put in to tackling the causes of disadvantage, indeed some policies have encouraged dependency. What we have seen is vast sums expended on maintaining the status quo.
I have spent many years working in areas of deprivation and have met many good people who have been overwhelmed by the system. Poor schools, poor health, poor physical environment, threatening neighbourhoods, low income. What has surprised me is that the explosion has taken so long to happen as indicators that it could have been around for a long time.
No-one should seek to condone the outbreaks of violence and looting of recent days, but we do need to understand and counter the deep-rooted causes of the problems. The problems demand attention and would have even if the opportunistic criminality of the last few days had not occurred. What has happened is that the issues have shot up the political agenda.
Governments of all political persuasions are to blame for the failure to address the myriad causes of deprivation and it will be interesting to see if the parties retreat into their outmoded and useless mindsets or come up with radical proposals for change. In this context the following link is to an interesting article:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100100666/uk-riots-left-and-right-look-for-simple-answers-to-a-complex-problem/
In the narrow fields of community development and community engagement I argued last week that policies had failed in particular the people they are aimed at. The problems to be overcome are multi-faceted. We need to strike a balance between the welfare model of the past and a purely utilitarian approach. There has to be a period of transition. The problems we have created over the last 65 years will take a long time to overcome. We must avoid knee-jerk solutions, otherwise the events of the past few days will seem minor when the outpouring of anger at social injustice erupts.
The current lawlesness have been sporadic and opportunistic, but people are learning how to organise. Next time it will be volcanic. The post war settlement has broken down irretrievably, not through the fault of the poor, but as a consequence of the abject failure of the political and administrative elites: not only have they failed to tackle problems, they have exacerbated them.
Since I wrote this article I have come across the following which may be of interest:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/8693544/Our-political-leaders-seem-to-be-paralysed-by-crises.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/8693521/Liberal-certainties-tested-to-destruction.html
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