CHAPTER VIII - British public policy, 1776–1939

Summary

The four transitions

British public policy in the century and a half or so before the Second World War was characterized by four simultaneous transitions. The first was from landed rule in the eighteenth century, via dominance by the middle classes in the high Victorian age, to an uneasy and sometimes tense confusion between middle and working classes in the 1920s and 1930s. The second carried economic policy from the British form of mercantilism, via a period of state abdication unique among industrial nations, to the sudden adoption of an elaborate system of macro-controls in the 1930s. The third moved social policy from a provision that was minimal and local, via a complex set of struggles over particular issues between philanthropists and workers on the one hand, and cost- and profit-conscious business men on the other (mediated by parliament, the bureaucrats and the intellectuals), to a far-reaching commitment to welfare. The fourth was the elaboration of a system of implementation and control such that policy-making came to be shared between parliament and the senior members of the bureaucracy. The circumstances governing these four concurrent evolutions, their timing, and the relationships between them, provide the outline agenda for a consideration of the course of state action on the economy and society. So complex a pattern is best viewed in terms of successive time spans, five in all.

Policy, industrialization, and war, 1776–1815

In the 40 years between the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1776 and Waterloo in 1815 Britain gestated the first industrial society. But no obvious and systematic policy shift is perceptible. Policy did, of course, change in significant ways, but it did so mainly by a mixture of inadvertence and wartime improvization. For in spite of the emergence of new forms in the economy and society, a longer-term continuity in terms of power was present.