Death of a Dream? Social Democracy and Political Economy of the English Working Class since 1945

In 1945 Britain set out to create the world’s first cradle-to-grave Welfare State. This project aspired to universal and free education and health care, tailored to the needs of each citizen; decent high-quality housing for all those who needed it, at prices they could afford; a social insurance system designed to smooth the shocks which could plunge people into poverty; a managed economy to avoid mass unemployment; widespread slum clearance; a planning system designed to improve the physical condition and beauty of the cities and countryside; the creation of the Arts Council (to sponsor the very best in all the arts); and a major expansion of  the BBC.

This was not a specifically socialist (or even social democratic) project.   The project had (and has) widespread popular support, so much so that politicians of all colours have since then had to reassure the public at election time that (as Mrs Thatcher put it) ‘the NHS is safe in our hands’.  But most of its initial structures were created by the post-war Labour government.

This course sets out to examine what happened to that vision of a better world, as politicians, academics and administrators tried to put it into practice.  Despite huge successes – in medical care, in education, in the physical condition of houses, and so on – there was by the end of the twentieth century a widespread perception that the system was in crisis. Some of this was a matter of resources; but to say this begs the question of why (since they wanted the welfare state) people were not willing to pay enough tax to fund it.  But there were also other, perhaps deeper, problems; a lack of agreement about what objectives such as ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’ actually meant in practice; the sheer complexity of managing social change on such a huge scale.