Centenary of the Poor Law Minority Report

By Sunder Katwala

Labour’s greatest historic achievement is the post-war welfare state. The welfare settlement advocated by the Beveridge Report of 1942 and put in place by the post-war Attlee government was not perfect, but it remains the greatest peacetime achievement of any British government. Today, we mark the centenary of the moment that those arguments began.

The publication one hundred years ago of Beatrice Webb’s Minority Report on the Poor Law of 1909, with its clarion call not just for the abolition of the workhouse but for the idea of universal public services which reflect our common citizenship. Many of the ideas of Labour politics in the 20th century – labour exchanges, a national health service, a minimum wage – began with the Minority Report of 1909. (My colleague Tim Horton provides a useful bluffer’s guide to what the Minority Report argued and why this mattered). The Fabian Society and Webb Memorial Trust are publishing a collection to mark the occasion, and holding a centenary conference at the LSE on Saturday.

The lessons from the centenary are about the role of radical ideas in progressive politics, and about the importance of campaigning for change too.

Now that the dreaded workhouse belongs to BBC costume drama adaptations of Dickens and Hardy, we can easily think that its abolition was inevitable. But social and political change does not happen by chance. It took new ideas, fierce political arguments and dogged campaigns for change. Indeed, the call to abolish the workhouse was resisted, successfully, in 1909 – by the New Liberal government as well as those who believed in the principles that poor relief should be provided on a charitable basis, and must cruelly stigmatise its recipients to deter others from coming forward.

It is striking how often those deeply heated, ideological arguments of 1909 were the same ones debated about the “broken society” today. Are the poor to blame for their poverty, or are the causes structural? Would the state crowd out charity, or must a basic minimum be a condition of citizenship? There were Daily Mail campaigns against the costs to the ratepayer and the palatial conditions of “the workhouse de luxe” and the left had to mobilise new arguments and constituencies to change the debate.

Yet the Webbs have become deeply unfashionable. If they are remembered, it is bemoan their influence on the twentieth century left, and its excessive reliance on the state.

Perhaps, by learning the value of the state, the left came to forget that it had to win arguments in society too. The Webbs are often blamed for this but, in fairness, it was not their left which forgot that lesson.

Indeed, the distinctive feature of their left of the early 20th century was the creation of new social institutions and campaigns – the Fabian Society, the London School of Economics, the New Statesman, the Labour Party – which would take political arguments out into society and change the boundaries of what was politically possible.

Indeed Beatrice Webb offers, in her diary, perhaps the best description of why the new movement politics of the age of the internet matters, recounting an encounter with Winston Churchill, then a New Liberal member of the Asquith cabinet.

October 3rd – Winston and his wife dined here the other night to meet a party of young Fabians. He is taking on the look of the mature statesman – bon vivant and orator, somewhat in love with his own phrases. He did not altogether like the news of our successful agitation. ‘You should leave the work of converting the country to us, Mrs Webb, you ought to convert the Cabinet’. ‘That would be all right if we wanted merely a change in the law, but we want’, I added, ‘to really change the minds of the people with regard to the facts of destitution, to make the feel the infamy of it and the possibility of avoiding it. That won’t be done by converting the Cabinet, even if we could convert the Cabinet – which I doubt. We will leave that task to a converted country’

Return to the politics of 1909, and we find that the left which got us the Beveridge welfare state was different to the left which has lived off it. It is the tradition of radical ideas allied to movement politics which needs to be revived today.

* The Fabian Society publishes ‘From Workhouse to Welfare: A Centenary Celebration’ to mark the centenary of the 1909 Minority Report on the Poor Law, with contributions from Nick Bosanquet, Jose Harris, Roy Hattersley, Dianne Hayter, Tim Horton, Sunder Katwala, Seema Malhotra, Peter Townsend, Jon Trickett MP and Sarah Wise. The a centenary conference takes place at LSE on Saturday