The final piece of luck and timing which ensured the report’s ecstatic reception lay with Montgomery and the British Eighth Army. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor a year earlier had seen the United States finally enter the war, but apart from survival, and the heroism of the Soviet Union, there had been little else to celebrate since 1939. Monty had gone into action at El Alamein at the end of October. The battle started badly. But on 4 November a BBC announcer, his voice shaking with excitement, delivered General Alexander’s Cairo communique stating that Rommel was in full retreat in Egypt. The news from North Africa only got better. Churchill in one of the war’s best remembered aphorisms pronounced on the 10th: ‘Now is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’95
Suddenly, after three years, there was a future to look forward to – and one that the times demanded should be very different from the past. On 15 November, for the first time since war was declared, Churchill ordered that the church bells ring out, not to announce invasion but to celebrate Monty’s victory.96 A fortnight later the Beveridge report was published, its own words ringing out like a great bell. In his final paragraph Beveridge became more Churchillian than Bunyanesque:
Freedom from want cannot be forced on a democracy or given to a democracy. It must be won by them. Winning it needs courage and faith and a sense of national unity: courage to face facts and difficulties and overcome them; faith in our culture and in the ideals of fair-play and freedom for which century after century our forefathers were prepared to die; a sense of national unity overriding the interests of any class or section. The Plan for Social Security in this report is submitted by one who believes that in this supreme crisis the British people will not be found wanting.97
There were – and still are – many battles to be fought against Beveridge’s five giants. His report’s popular impact was a matter, in Jose Harris’s judgement, ‘partly of luck and partly of careful calculation’ but partly also simply of the times in which it was made.98
Beatrice Webb commented rather acidly how odd it was that Beveridge of all people had become a national hero. But if one sentence had to sum up popular reaction, it is the breathless enthusiasm of the Pathé News interviewer on the night the report was published. The white-haired, waist-coated, oh-so-Edwardian figure of Beveridge intoned to the massed cinema audiences of the great British public: ‘I hope that when you’ve been able to study the report in detail, you’ll like it. That it will get adopted, and, if it’s so, we shall have taken the first step to security with freedom and responsibility. That is what we all desire.’
The interviewer replies, all italics and capital letters and deference: ‘Thank You – Sir William’.
This is the greatest advance in our history. There can be no turning back. From now on Beveridge is not the name of a man; it is the name of a way of life, and not only for Britain, but for the whole civilized world.
Beveridge to Harold Wilson shortly after his report came out, recounted in Wilson, The Making of a Prime Minister, 1986, p. 64.
THE PUBLIC RECEPTION of the Beveridge report was indeed ecstatic. The leader writers of all the newspapers, the Daily Telegraph excepted, blessed it.1 The Times called it ‘a momentous document’ whose ‘central proposals must surely be accepted as the basis of Government action. The main social standards on which the report insists are moderate enough to disarm any charge of indulgence.’2 A survey of public opinion shortly after publication showed 86 per cent in favour and a mere 6 per cent against. Most notably, the better off favoured it almost as enthusiastically as those who stood to gain most. Among employers only 16 per cent felt they would gain directly, but 73 per cent favoured its adoption. For those defined as upper-income groups, 29 per cent felt they would gain, but 76 per cent supported the plan. Among the professions the figures were 48 and 92 per cent.3 Home Office intelligence reports monitored, in Paul Addison’s words, ‘an extraordinary anxiety that somehow the report would be watered down or shelved’.4
Such anxiety was not without justification. Some instantly said it could not be afforded, even as others argued that the benefits Beveridge was proposing were too low. The journalist J. L. Hodson recorded in his diary the evening he heard Beveridge broadcast the details of his plan:
Some of the Big Business gentlemen are already calling it a scheme that will put us all on the Poor Law. Unless prices are to fall a good deal after the war, the scheme errs on the side of modesty of benefits paid. £2 a week [the sum Beveridge recommended for the pension and an unemployed married man] won’t go very far. T. Thompson writes me from Lancashire: ‘Beveridge has put the ball in the scrum all right. I wonder what shape it will be when it comes out.’5
It proved to be a rather different shape. But the first question was whether it would come out at all.
Sir Kingsley Wood, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, struck first, even before the report’s publication. On 17 November he minuted Churchill that the plan involved ‘an impracticable financial commitment’. Wood in his youth had led the battle by the Friendly Societies against Lloyd George’s 1911 health insurance package. He now told Churchill that Beveridge’s plan would increase taxation by 30 per cent. It would not abolish want, but it would give money to those who did not need it. ‘The weekly progress of the millionaire to the post office for his old age pension would have an element of farce but for the fact that it is to be provided in large measure by the general tax payer,’ Kingsley Wood declared, launching a theme that would be echoed time and again down the years. He added: ‘Many in this country have persuaded themselves that the cessation of hostilities will mark the opening of the Golden Age (many were so persuaded last time also). However this may be, the time for declaring a dividend on the profits of the Golden Age is the time when those profits have been realized in fact, not merely in imagination.’6
By contrast Keynes, whom Beveridge had repeatedly consulted over dinners in West End clubs, believed the plan broadly workable and affordable.7 He was later to argue that ‘the suggestion that is being put about in some quarters that there are financial difficulties is quite unfounded.’8 After listening to Keynes, Beveridge had in fact trimmed his original ideas considerably in an attempt to keep costs down. The biggest single factor here was his proposal that old age pensions should be phased in over twenty years as people’s contribution records grew. But he had also agreed that family allowances be paid only for the second and subsequent children, and he had dropped plans to have full insurance for housewives, and benefits for those unable to work because they were caring for sick or aged relatives.9
Some of Churchill’s closest advisers also disputed Wood’s view. Lord Cherwell, his economic adviser and close personal confidant, thought it ‘altruistic but worth its cost’, and likely to ‘improve rather than worsen our economic position’. But he worried that the expenditure would alienate opinion in the United States on whom Britain’s economy was now heavily dependent. Americans would think they were being asked to pay for British