The concept of a social contract for welfare support and national health, the 1942 Beveridge Report and what this Liberal politician termed the ‘five giants’ – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness – still strikes me as ground-breaking.

Even the old posters used to campaign for its implementation remain as powerful today as they surely were then. In one, the ‘giants’ are portrayed as people. I’m most struck by idleness depicted as a forlorn unemployed man slouching against a lamp post, a factory behind him with a large ‘closed’ sign hanging over it. 

In terms of disabled people today, we’d likely have a ‘scrounger’ or ‘fraudster’ sign, perhaps combined with some representation of disease. But maybe ‘hopelessness’ would be a better term than idleness? 

The idea of the five giants took hold at a time when there was less division in society. When, good or bad, the delineation between classes was more comfortably understood. When Winston Churchill made the much-shared statement: “Rank me and my colleagues as strong partisans of national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave.” 

But we now take for granted those measures that led to the founding of our NHS, when political parties cooperated on matters of importance to society as a whole.

The odds were different then. This was in the midst of the Second World War, when a healthy, fighting fit proletariat was required, and there was nothing to take for granted. Those five giants loomed everywhere outside of the gentry and their financial security. My mother remembers the lottery of dentistry during her 1930s childhood – sharing gruesome stories of who could have a filling first in a family of many siblings.

There was pragmatism in the debates back then; an awareness of sickness that was horrifically close to most people’s lives. Now, we have an established narrative, urged on by recent governments – and the overwhelming dross in the mainstream media – which wants to deny the modern equivalents of those five giants as relevant. 

We are promised so much in our technological age, on the back of a strain of Conservatism that enjoys promoting the idea that we can somehow sidestep poverty, illness and impairment.

I’m fearful that it’s too late. That we’ve taken for granted for so long the notion of state support that we believed would always be there: a reliable NHS hovering in the background, somehow still operating, even as eager politicians score points for its failings or successes and it shatters under the weight of so much pressure.

I’ve lived through my own sociology experiment in social care and NHS support. I’m my own test subject, pushed through various medical departments and services both as an inpatient and outpatient. My experience suggests that the NHS is not only broken but gorged upon by the private sector with a sly side-glancing secrecy, as it sucks up every chance to make profits.

But I refer to myself as an NHS baby. And to think of this in the broadest sense encourages me to puff up with a strange patriotic and perhaps socialist pride. Even a sense of ownership, from all those years lived through a system that worked to keep me well, and more recently alive, brings me hope.

I remember my GP regularly visiting my home from a young age to examine my joints. I remember the touching trust I felt in most of my doctors and health professionals. They were there for me. They knew me over the course of many years. 

Recently, faceless managers and administrators make me feel as though I’m making a fuss, that I don’t understand cost implications, and that I want too much – as if my needs are an outrage. 

I can’t even begin to talk about the attacks on benefits, social care, and the 2005 closure of the much-loved means of choice and control gained by disabled people via the Independent Living Fund.

It’s very difficult to argue that the original principles underpinning the NHS remain. If you have no money you can no longer expect a decent, functioning level of support from systems that are supposedly there to manage your health and ability to thrive. These failures begin, as in my case, within the home. With doctors who don’t visit. Services that aren’t available. Dots on a chart; numbers on a spreadsheet. None of which equates to the delivery of everyday workable healthcare and support.

The problem is every one of us will experience illness, damage, sickness, impairment, disability and, inevitably, old age. And so, if we believe in a fair society that operates with compassion and equity, we need to reformulate our own five giants that are relevant today. 

A healthy, cared for, society that has few wants at a basic level will surely thrive and, at a personal level, the construction of artificial barriers via attitudes and environment can and should be removed. Very few of today’s politicians have the interest or the humanity to do so.

The pandemic undoubtedly stands as a sombre wake-up call for such disregard. Millions dead and many more living with the ongoing consequences of the Coronavirus. So much for the Brave New World of the unbreakable, never-damaged, uber human! Through my own lived experience, and that of others, I know this is the ultimate lie.

Churchill, as a Conservative, spoke of the ‘cradle to the grave’. William Beveridge was a Liberal politician. And it was a Labour Government that enacted his report to create our welfare state and the NHS. It was an achievement of cross-party cooperation – not perfect, but of a like that we simply no longer see. 

With all its flaws, let’s remember all the years so many of us have reaped its benefits. Not simply because we pay in for ourselves, and feel happy to pay in for those who can’t, but because it is the right thing to do.

There is now a grotesque disconnection between governments and public services, resulting in more than poor communication. We are a nation let down, in poor health, disappointed and baffled. Yet the individuals I meet, who care for me so well in hospital, keep my humanity alive and remind me that, in the end, there is good in people and the world.

Let’s remember the humanity those five giants brought out in our society and politics. And prepare to renew our fight with their latest incarnations again today.

In an excerpt from the introduction to her new book, Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail, Associate Professor of Political Economy at LSE’s European Institute Abby Innes considers how factors including the rise of neoliberalism have destabilised Britain’s governing institutions.

Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail. Abby Innes. Cambridge University Press. 2023.

Find this book: 

Why has Great Britain, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed? This book demonstrates that a major part of the answer lies in the transformation of its state. It shows how Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions. This history has direct parallels not just in the United States but across all the advanced capitalist economies that adopted neoliberal reforms. The shattering of the British state over the last forty years was driven by the idea that markets are always more efficient than the state: the private sector morally and functionally superior to the public sector. But as this book shows, this claim was ill-founded, based as it was on the most abstract materialist utopia of the twentieth century. The neoliberal revolution in Great Britain and Northern Ireland – the United Kingdom – has failed accordingly, and we are living with the systemic consequences of that failure.

Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions.

The rise of nationalist populism in some of the world’s richest countries has brought forward many urgent analyses of contemporary capitalism. What this book offers, by contrast, is the explanation of a dark historical joke. It explores for the first time how the Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fail for many of the same reasons. Leninism and neoliberalism may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but when we grasp the kinship between their forms of economic argument and their practical strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in both systems, as well as their calamitous results.

Comparing the neoclassical and Soviet economic utopias, [w]hat emerges are mirror images – two visions of a perfectly efficient economy and an essentially stateless future.

Britain’s neoliberal policies have their roots in neoclassical economics, and Part I begins by comparing the neoclassical and Soviet economic utopias. What emerges are mirror images – two visions of a perfectly efficient economy and an essentially stateless future. These affinities are rooted in their common dependence on a machine model of the political economy and hence, by necessity, the shared adoption of a hyper-rational conception of human motivation: a perfect utilitarian rationality versus a perfect social rationality. As the later policy chapters demonstrate, these theoretical similarities produce real institutional effects: a clear institutional isomorphism between neoliberal systems of government and Soviet central planning.

When it comes to the mechanics of government, both systems justify a near identical methodology of quantification, forecasting, target setting and output-planning, albeit administrative and service output-planning in the neoliberal case and economy-wide outputs in the Soviet. Since the world in practice is dynamic and synergistic, however, it follows that the state’s increasing reliance on methods that presume rational calculation within an unvarying underlying universal order can only lead to a continuous misfit between governmental theory and reality. These techniques will tend to fail around any task characterised by uncertainty, intricacy, interdependence and evolution, which are precisely the qualities of most of the tasks uploaded to the modern democratic state.

In neoliberalism, the state has been more gradually stripped of its capacity for economic government

The Soviet and neoliberal conceptions of the political economy as a mechanism ruled by predetermined laws of economic behaviour were used to promote pure systems of economic coordination, be that by the state or the market. Leninism, as it evolved into Stalinist command planning, dictated the near-complete subordination of markets to the central plan. In neoliberalism, the state has been more gradually stripped of its capacity for economic government and, over time, for prudential, strategic action, as its offices, authority and revenues are subordinated to market-like mechanisms. Both Soviet and neoliberal political elites proved wildly over-optimistic about the integrity of their doctrines, even as they demonised the alternatives.

For all their political antipathy, what binds Leninists and neoliberals together is their shared fantasy of an infallible ‘governing science’ – of scientific management writ large. The result is that Britain has reproduced Soviet governmental failures, only now in capitalist form. When we understand the isomorphism between Soviet and neoliberal statecraft, we can see more clearly why their states share pathologies that span from administrative rigidity to rising costs, from rent-seeking enterprises to corporate state capture, from their flawed analytical monocultures to the demoralisation of the state’s personnel and, ultimately, a crisis in the legitimacy of the governing system itself. This time around, however, the crisis is of liberal democracy.

The book’s policy chapters in Part II explore how the neoliberal revolution has transformed the British state’s core functions in the political economy: in administration, welfare, tax and regulation and the management of future public risk.

After setting out the philosophical foundations of these ideologies, the book’s policy chapters in Part II explore how the neoliberal revolution has transformed the British state’s core functions in the political economy: in administration, welfare, tax and regulation and the management of future public risk. In Part III I examine the political consequences of these changes, and demonstrate how Britain’s exit from the European Union has played out as an institutionally fatal confrontation between economic libertarianism and reality. The final chapter considers how the neoliberal revolution, like its Leninist counterpart, has failed within the terms by which it was justified and instead induced a profound crisis not only of political and economic development but also of political culture.

Under ‘late’ neoliberalism we can see a similar moment of political hiatus, as neoliberal governments likewise resort to nationalism and the politics of cultural reaction to forestall public disillusionment and a shift in paradigm.

I use different periods of Soviet history as an analytical benchmark throughout the book, but the Brezhnev years (1964–1982) were those of the fullest systemic entropy: the period of ossification, self-dealing and directionless political churn. Under ‘late’ neoliberalism we can see a similar moment of political hiatus, as neoliberal governments likewise resort to nationalism and the politics of cultural reaction to forestall public disillusionment and a shift in paradigm. I use the United Kingdom as the case study because it was both a pioneer of these reforms and, in many respects, has gone furthest with them. If neoliberalism as a doctrine had been analytically well-founded, it was in the United Kingdom, with its comparatively long and strong liberal traditions, that we should have seen its most positive outcomes.

By the early 2020s the Conservative government of Boris Johnson had sought to criminalise peaceful protest, to constrain media independence and to insulate the political executive from parliamentary and public scrutiny.

To be clear, Britain’s neoliberals were never totalitarians of the Soviet variety. They never used revolutionary violence to create a one-party state, deployed ubiquitous intelligence agencies to enforce repression or used systems of mass incarceration and murder for political ends. Britain’s neoliberal consensus has nevertheless favoured a one-doctrine state, and the violent suppression of specific, typically economy-related, protests has been a periodic feature of its politics since 1979. Britain’s neoliberal governments have also developed an increasingly callous attitude to social hardship and suffering. Most troubling of all is that the more neoliberalism has been implemented, the more the country has been driven to the end of its democratic road. By the early 2020s the Conservative government of Boris Johnson had sought to criminalise peaceful protest, to constrain media independence and to insulate the political executive from parliamentary and public scrutiny. In short, it had abused its authority to disable legitimate political opposition. What I hope to explain is why any regime that commits itself to neoliberal economics must travel in this direction or abandon this ideology.

What follows is an argument about the collapse of the empiricist political centre and its replacement by utopian radicalism. Specifically, this is a story of how the pioneering and socially progressive philosophy of liberalism is being discredited by utopian economics and the practically clientelist methods of government that follow from it, just as the politics of social solidarity essential to a civilised world was undermined by the violence and corruption of the Soviet experiment. As the old Soviet joke had it, ‘Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is its exact opposite.’ There are, of course, many challenges distinct to neoliberalism and I pay attention to them, but my purpose here is to see what we can learn about the political economy of the neoliberal state when we look at it through the lens of comparative materialist utopias.

Note: This excerpt from the introduction to Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail by Abby Innes is copyrighted to Cambridge University Press and the author, and is reproduced here with their permission.

This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

Image Credit: globetrotters on Shutterstock.

Welfare is commonly understood in socio-economic terms of equity, highlighting distributive issues within growing capitalist economies. In times when the unequal distribution of wealth in the ‘advanced’ capitalist world has returned to levels of the 19th century, the question of whether we can and should ‘afford the rich’ is indeed central. The traditional response of welfare researchers – that issues of inequality can be solved by redistributing the primary incomes of capital and labour within economically growing economies – however, is not only difficult to achieve in an increasingly unfettered global capitalism but is also controversial. While GDP, income growth and rising material standards of living are normally not questioned as political priorities, there is growing evidence that Western production and consumption patterns and the associated welfare standards are not generalizable to the rest of the planet if environmental concerns are to be considered. For that to happen we would indeed need four to five Earths.

In an attempt to take planetary boundaries such as climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss seriously, our new book Sustainability and the Political Economy of Welfare discusses the implications for ‘the’ economy and associated welfare standards. It raises the issue of what would be required to make welfare societies ecologically sustainable. In doing so, we regard the current financial, economic and political crisis and the corresponding recalibrations in Western welfare state institutions as an impetus to also considering environmental concerns. We are furthermore concerned with the main institutional obstacles to the achievement of sustainable welfare and wellbeing (especially the social structures of global finance-driven capitalism), how these could feasibly be overcome, and how researchers can assist policy-makers and activists in promoting synergy between economic, social and environmental policies that are conducive to globally sustainable welfare systems.

These are complex issues that tend to overstretch the terms of reference of single disciplines. My co-editor Oksana Mont and I felt accordingly privileged to have the opportunity to assemble an interdisciplinary team of researchers from five Lund University faculties as well as Kate Soper, Hubert Buch-Hansen and Ian Gough, who wrote the preface, and to work together for eight months at the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies. We subdivided the book into three parts: conceptual issues of sustainable welfare, policies towards the establishment of sustainable welfare and emerging practices of sustainable welfare in countries such as France, the US, Sweden and China.

Our concept of sustainable welfare attempts to integrate the two previously separate disciplines of welfare and sustainability research. Taking environmental limits seriously in welfare theorising means, first of all, to ask whose welfare should be met. Distributive principles underlying existing welfare systems would need to be extended to include ‘non-citizens’, those affected in other countries and future human beings. Hence, sustainable welfare is oriented towards the satisfaction of human needs within ecological limits, from the intergenerational and global perspective. It is only at global level that thresholds for matter and energy throughput as well as for greenhouse gas emissions can be determined in order to effectively mitigate global environmental challenges such as climate change. At the same time, these biophysical conditions and global thresholds delineate the room for manoeuvre within which national and local economies can evolve and within which welfare can be provided. This suggests a new mix of private, state, commons and individual property forms with a much lesser steering role for the market than at present.

In the policy-oriented second part of the book, several authors place emphasis on the detrimental effects of the financial system within the international political economy and highlight various degrowth visions of practical transformation strategies that could frame more specific policy packages. Here, research has a potentially vital role to play but can only do so in close dialogue with diverse societal actors – particularly if it produces insights into the mechanisms, groupings of actors and their institutional embedding as well as into the ways in which governments and governance networks may support voluntary and civic bottom-up initiatives. If sustainable welfare is going to be practiced at all, then it will most likely be in different ways in different countries due to their diverse points of departure in terms of the institutional particulars of market coordination and welfare systems. While research on the potential diversity of future welfare systems is still in its infancy, it is important to explore the opportunities and potentials that exist within current welfare systems since these must be built upon in any move towards sustainable welfare.

Part III of the book argues that a potential opportunity for the establishment of sustainable welfare lies in the diversity of perceptions about the ‘good life’ and the relationship between individuals and governments in initiating transformative processes and legitimizing sustainable lifestyles. People are becoming increasingly disenchanted with the consumer culture due to its growing negative side effects such as time scarcity, high levels of stress, traffic congestion and the increasing displacement of other pleasures of life and wellbeing through the shopping mall culture. We may already find seeds of alternative visions and practices in craft movements, the service economy, socio-ecological enterprises and forms of collaborative consumption. A ‘slower’ life and more free time should not be seen as a threat to the ‘Western way of life’ but as sources of individual and communitarian wellbeing, genuine individual fulfilment and opportunities for greater involvement with various social networks that have the potential of improving social relations and creating trust. This could also facilitate to breaking the link between resource-intensive economic growth and hegemonic perceptions of societal ‘progress’ – and to ending the monopoly of the prevalent consumer culture over alternative definitions of wellbeing and the ‘good life’.

The post Sustainability and the political economy of welfare appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).