In my view it would be a grave mistake to try to turn the clock back. We have a historic opportunity to rethink from first principles what a welfare state fit for the twenty-first century could look like, and we owe it to the victims of neoliberal globalisation to give it our best shot. This demands something that is both more ambitious than attempting to recreate a patched-up version of the third quarter of the twentieth century (viewed through the rose-tinted glasses of the twenty-first), and more focused on the specific issues confronting the working class in a globalised digitalised economy.
To understand the nature of the challenge it is first necessary to appreciate the immensity of the transformation of the mid-twentieth-century welfare state that has taken place over the last seven decades.
In this book I first look, in chapter 2, at how the institutions of the welfare state have been transformed by a series of shifts and subterfuges from a means of improving living standards, increasing choice and redistributing wealth more equally across society to mechanisms for redistributing from the poor to the rich. Chapter 3 looks at changes in the labour market and how the twentieth-century standard employment model has been eroded, leading to widespread casualisation and the emergence of new forms of digitally managed precarious work. Chapter 4 outlines the changes that have taken place in the gender division of labour over the same period, thwarting many of the grand aims of 1970s feminism. It shows the way that developments in the welfare system and the labour market have interacted with each other to produce a vicious circle in which time poverty and financial poverty drive each other downward in a never-ending spiral, in ways that are highly detrimental to gender equality as well as to the quality of life, at work and at home.
The rest of the book looks at ways in which this vicious cycle might be reversed, and how policies can be developed that promote equality, choice and improved work-life balance, while also addressing some of the other major policy challenges facing us – including caring for an ageing population, developing local economies and tackling food and energy waste.
In chapter 5 I look at the mechanisms of redistribution and the underlying principles that must underpin such policies. I then go on to make some concrete suggestions: for a form of universal basic income that is genuinely redistributive (in chapter 6) and for a new charter of universal rights for workers (in chapter 7).
In conclusion, the book looks at the services that the welfare state provides, or should provide, to make these redistributive and egalitarian goals a reality. It focuses in particular on services which have the potential to be delivered via digital platforms, such as those involving transport, food delivery and the matching of supply and demand between workers and clients in services such as childcare and social care. It extends its scope beyond the services that have traditionally been delivered by the state to explore others, such as food distribution, that, if brought within the scope of democratic control, could contribute more broadly to the public good, creating decent jobs and improving work-life balance for both women and men, while also addressing some of the major environmental challenges facing us.
The book does not propose dogmatic solutions in relation to the scope of such services or how they should be organised. Rather it suggests a variety of different possible ways of delivering them, for example by integrated them into existing institutions or setting them up as partnerships, social enterprises or co-operatives, with the aim of encouraging a bottom-up approach at local level rooted in collaboration among a wide range of different social actors.
CHAPTER TWO
What Has Happened to the Twentieth-century Welfare State?
For those who did not live through it, and even among some who did, there is a real danger of romanticising life in Britain during the period following the Second World War. In reality, it had many downsides. It was pretty hellish if, for example, you were black, or gay or unfortunate enough to get pregnant without being married. Although new opportunities were undoubtedly opened up for some, working-class kids who got scholarships to university or women who aspired to be taken seriously as intellectuals often faced condescension and ridicule. Indeed, it was a reaction to such strait-jacketed constraint and bigotry that produced the social movements of the 1960s – for women’s liberation, for civil rights, for gay rights, for a democratisation of universities – led by the first generation of products of this post-war welfare state.
THE MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY WELFARE STATE: A CLUSTER OF CONTRADICTIONS
In retrospect, many of the demands raised by the radical ’60s generation that made their way onto political platforms in the 1970s have been collapsed by idealistic thinkers on the left into a fuzzy unity with those of the 1940s and 1950s – a sort of composite idea of the good old days before neoliberalism, when a post-Keynesian welfare state is presumed to have constituted an agreed consensus of minimum standards, upon which further progress could be built. Such a view glosses over the extent to which the third quarter of the twentieth century was marked by internal tensions and contradictions, some of which harked back to older tensions within the volatile assemblage of ad-hoc coalitions that has made up the British labour movement over its long and turbulent history.
One example is the tension between those, represented in the nineteenth century by followers of Ruskin and William Morris, who thought work should be meaningful and socially productive, and those whose goal was to put in the fewest possible working hours for the greatest possible reward – debates which resurfaced in the 1970s in discussions about Workers’ Alternative Plans and the Institute for Workers’ Control.
That is only one example. Many other tensions can be identified relating to other issues. Take, for example, the debates about women’s reproductive labour among second-wave feminists in the 1970s: Should domestic labour be socialised? Should there be ‘wages for housework’? Or should we rely on social pressure for men to do their share of unpaid work in the home?
Similarly, there were fierce disagreements about nationalisation and the position of workers employed by the state or in nationalised industries. Should they be regarded simply as members of the working class, who should negotiate with their employers in exactly the same way as those who worked for private companies? Or did they occupy a special position in providing services to citizens not for profit but for what Marxists called the ‘use value’ of these services?1
Such examples could be multiplied. The deeper one looked at how the welfare state functioned, the more contradictions emerged and the more challenging it became to imagine solutions that could create a successful balance between democracy and efficiency.
POST-WAR CIRCUMSTANCES FORGED