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Creating the Welfare State in Britain, 1945–1960

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2009

Noel Whiteside
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Abstract

Political consensus on the scope and structure of the welfare state in post-war Britain has been much overstated. The Labour governments (1945–51), committed to universalism and a planned economy, gave state welfare a central role in guaranteeing ‘fair shares for all’ and used it to help secure union co-operation over wage restraint. The Conservative governments (1951–64), committed to the restoration of ‘sound finance’, abandoned these objectives and attacked components of the welfare state designed to control prices and mediate demands for higher wages. The author concludes that, for comparative social policy studies to be effective, differing frameworks of state welfare have to be more exactly defined.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , January 1996 , pp. 83 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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