Did British workers want the welfare state? G. D. H. Cole's Survey of 1942

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Abstract
Many commentators on British politics in the early twentieth century assumed that extension of state social welfare would be one of the inevitable consequences of opening up the franchise to members of the working class. As Sidney Webb put it in 1894, collectivist social policies were the ‘economic obverse of democracy’: a view that has been widely quoted ever since by historians of the welfare state. However, a few years ago the assumption that workers automatically equated state welfare with the promotion of their own interests was criticized by Dr Henry Pelling. He argued that such evidence as was available suggested that British workers were much less interested in state welfare schemes than in the more tangible benefits of secure employment and cheap food. Other recent studies of early twentieth-century social history have stressed the ambiguities in workers' attitudes to welfare. Popular support for more extensive social provision was often mingled with such factors as fear of bureaucratic power, dislike of form-filling and regimentation, defence of the traditional voluntary ethic and (in the case of skilled workers) resentment against the state's efforts to extend minority privileges to majority groups. Dr Pat Thane, in one of the few direct comments on Dr Pelling's thesis, plausibly suggested that early twentieth-century workers' organizations welcomed some forms of state welfare and resisted others; they disliked those which subjected workers to remote and impersonal forms of official regulation or which took the form of disguised regressive taxation; they welcomed those which allowed for a high degree of participatory democracy and encouraged working-class traditions of self-help.

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