The switch to a war economy had also virtually eliminated unemployment. By the summer of 1941 it was down to 200,000 and falling. In 1943, soon after Beveridge reported, it had fallen to a mere 62,000, most of whom were in transit from one job to another.73 Not only that, wages were rising. And Keynes, the uncertain prophet in the wilderness of the early 1930s, had now become the fount of Keynesianism. He had published his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936 and had been in the United States where he had seen in Roosevelt’s New Deal the effects of ideas similar to those he advanced. Since June 1940 he had been inside the British Treasury, his influence plain on the 1941 Budget. While there were battles still to be fought before Keynesian economics ruled, the results of the government’s ever-growing economic intervention appeared to be demonstrating that his theories worked on this side of the Atlantic, too.
Things plainly were changing. The Times had gone pink, or so it seemed to right-wing Tories. In October 1941, Geoffrey Dawson, who had done so much to scar the paper’s reputation by his support for appeasement, was replaced by Robin Barrington-Ward, a Balliol contemporary of Beveridge. The paper’s official chronicler records Barrington-Ward as a radical Tory who was ‘inclined by temperament to welcome social change in advance, prepare for it, and so control it.’74 He took the paper to the left. Earlier that year E. H. Carr, the leftish historian, had been appointed assistant editor, from which position he argued consistently for the need to espouse social justice as the aim after the war. In a sense, the then small group of Tory reformers, whose views had first been clearly articulated in 1938 when a rather obscure back-bench rebel called Harold Macmillan had defined the politics he was to follow in a book called The Middle Way, had found a voice in the leader columns of The Times. Even before Dawson left, however, a new tone had begun to emerge. An editorial on 1 July 1940 declared:
Over the greater part of Western Europe the common values for which we stand are known and prized. We must indeed beware of defining these values in purely 19th Century terms. If we speak of democracy we do not mean a democracy which maintains the right to vote but forgets the right to work and the right to live. If we speak of freedom we do not mean a rugged individualism which excludes social organisation and economic planning. If we speak of equality we do not mean a political equality nullified by social and economic privilege. If we speak of economic reconstruction we think less of maximum (though this job too will be required) than of equitable distribution.
Labour’s right-wing egalitarians, Tony Crosland in the 1950s or Roy Hattersley in the 1990s, could have said amen to that. One Tory MP was later to growl (though not in the context of the welfare state) that The Times had become merely ‘the threepenny edition of the Daily Worker’, the Communist Party paper which was suppressed for a time during the war.75 If the voices on The Times were a-changing, they were not alone. The Economist, long the guardian of financial orthodoxy, could pronounce that the ‘old controversy’ over ‘the question of whether the state should make itself responsible for the economic environment’ was ‘as dead as a doorknocker – that is, useful for making a noise but nothing else’.
Newspapers may shape the world around them, but they also reflect it. The churches had found a new vigour in siding with the underdogs, running meetings demanding social justice after the war. In this William Temple, appointed on Churchill’s recommendation as Archbishop of Canterbury in early 1942, played a key role. He was to bless Beveridge’s marriage later that year and still later was to be contemptuously described as Beveridge’s ‘warm-up man’ by Correlli Barnett, the Cambridge historian whose influential reinterpretation of the Second World War puts Beveridge high on the list of Great Satans responsible for Britain’s post-war decline.76 In 1941, while still Archbishop of York, Temple had written Citizen and Churchman in which he defined the ‘Welfare-State’ in contrast to the Power-State of the continental tyrannies.77 A meeting of the Industrial Christian Fellowship in the Albert Hall in October 1942, at which Temple spoke, drew ten thousand participants. ‘The general demands included … a central planning for employment, housing and social security,’ Picture Post reported.78 It was thus fertile ground into which Beveridge was to plant his dragon’s teeth, seeking to raise up giants to respond to the ‘five giant evils’ he had identified.
Moreover, during 1942 the Conservatives found themselves losing by-elections to some of the oddest characters ever to sit in Parliament. Labour, the Liberals and the Tories did not stand against each other because of the coalition – indeed, Labour actively backed some of the Conservative coalition nominees. The awkward independents, standing on the vaguest and most confused of platforms, still won. Screaming Lord Sutch should have been born earlier. Soon Labour was to find its own candidates losing by-elections in similar circumstances.
Mass Observation, the pioneering opinion poll organisation, found in December 1941 that one person in six said the war had changed their political views. ‘Eight months later, in August 1942 [four months before the Beveridge report], the proportion was one in three,’ Angus Calder records. ‘At this time it was also found that only one-third of the voters expected any of the existing parties to get things done as they personally wanted them after the war. This minority was mostly Labour or Communist.’79 The old Conservative front was collapsing. What might be dubbed the new progressive centre of Tory politics which was to receive Labour’s inheritance in 1951 was yet to have its day.
The sense that something more than victory over Nazi Germany had to be planned was also present in government itself, even if the terms were not yet very clearly defined. Churchill had, after all, appointed Arthur Greenwood Minister for Reconstruction – the same Greenwood who as Labour deputy leader, standing in for an ill Attlee in the Commons debate on the eve of war, had been urged by Leo Amery from the government benches to ‘Speak for England, Arthur.’
Churchill, back on the Conservative benches, had his days as a Liberal social reformer the better part of thirty years behind him, but he still retained Liberal or even Whiggish sentiments. His interest in home affairs had dissipated in the 1930s in the face of his concern for Empire and the threat of Fascism. But addressing the boys of his old school, Harrow, in 1940, he said: ‘When this war is won, as it surely will be, it must be one of our aims to establish a state of society where the advantages and privileges which have hitherto been enjoyed only by the few shall be far more widely shared by the many, and by the youth of the nation as a whole.’80 He had sent R. A. (‘Rab’) Butler to the Board of Education and appointed him chairman of a new Conservative Post-War Problems Committee. In August 1941 he met Roosevelt for the first time off Newfoundland where they agreed on the Atlantic Charter – a joint statement of war aims, even though the United States was not yet formally in the war. The pair called on all nations to collaborate ‘with the object of securing for all improved labour standards, economic advancement, and social security’. Peace should bring ‘freedom from fear and want’.81 Beveridge was to exploit that statement in his report, citing it as backing for his plan.
And against this background, as Sir William prepared his report, the war raged outside Britain itself. On 22 June 1941, less than a fortnight after Beveridge’s appointment, Hitler had attacked the Soviet Union. Britain at last was not alone. For those with an abiding loathing of Communism, and who had seen the perfidious Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 allow the Soviet Union to swallow Finland and the German tanks to roll into Poland barely a week later, this was as hard a moment as any in the war. Not least for Churchill. In a broadcast that showed both courage and statesmanship, he declared that Nazism was indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism. ‘No-one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have been for the last 25 years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it.’ But he went on to declare that with the tanks rolling, ‘the [Soviet] past with its crimes, its follies and its tragedies flashes away … I see the ten thousand villages of Russia … where maidens laugh and children play …’ and ‘… the cause of any