Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our range of experts tackle this question and identify the individuals whose decisions caused the country’s biggest problems. • David Cameron: The unlikely villain who casually killed the Conservative Party• Tony Blair: A sincere deceiver who broke Britain’s trust on migration• Ed Miliband: the man to blame for the wreckage of this Labour Government• Denise Coates: The queen of a 24/7 gambling culture that ‘destroys families’• Steve Jobs: The twisted genius who turned us all into lonely, anxious addicts• The historic blunder of one ‘Tory toff’ that means your council is utterly useless• The man who buried students under a Himalayan mountain of debt

Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our range of experts tackle this question and identify the individuals whose decisions caused the country’s biggest problems.

• David Cameron: The unlikely villain who casually killed the Conservative Party• Tony Blair: A sincere deceiver who broke Britain’s trust on migration• Ed Miliband: the man to blame for the wreckage of this Labour Government• Denise Coates: The queen of a 24/7 gambling culture that ‘destroys families’• Steve Jobs: The twisted genius who turned us all into lonely, anxious addicts• The historic blunder of one ‘Tory toff’ that means your council is utterly useless• The man who buried students under a Himalayan mountain of debt

When putting together a list of suspects for who broke Britain, I suspect few would nominate William Beveridge, one of the founding fathers of the modern welfare state, post the Second World War.

But bear with me, because I suspect that had he lived to see the consequences, one man who might well put his name forward would be Beveridge himself. Despite his good intentions, he ripped the heart out of Britain’s thriving culture of helping our neighbours and instituted what would become the faceless, exploitable and exploited welfare state that is dividing our country from itself.

There are two Beveridges. The first is the hazily remembered folk figure, the slayer of the “Five Giants” (Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness) and handmaiden of the post-war settlement introduced under Clement Attlee.

The other was the author of the now-forgotten Voluntary Action, a book well worth revisiting today. It is nothing less than a hymn of praise to the civic culture which the relentless expansion of the state has all but destroyed – and a useful corrective to the popular myth that Britain lacked a welfare system before 1945.

Pre-war Britain actually had a diverse but vigorous social security system. There was a dense network of private, religious, charitable, and cooperative organisations above a foundation of parish relief, which had been laid down by Sir Edwin Chadwick’s Royal Commission on the Poor Laws in the 1830s.

The sheer extent of the coverage will come as a surprise to anyone who thinks the welfare state was called into existence overnight. When National Insurance was first introduced it covered 11 million people; but no fewer than nine million of them already had social insurance through other means.

Likewise, the creation of the National Health Service did not involve the opening of a single new hospital. That’s a good thing too, as expanding coverage doesn’t actually appear as an argument in the government pamphlet explaining the NHS plan. (The Health Service would not open a hospital under its own auspices until the 1960s.)

This system wasn’t perfect; there were certainly gaps in it which were worthwhile targets for reformers. But to an old Victorian such as Beveridge, this system’s merits extended beyond the mere extent of its coverage. As the name of his forgotten book suggests, it was the system’s voluntary and communal basis which so strongly recommended it.

Pre-war Britons donated an extraordinary (by modern standards) share of their income to charity. The share of middle-class household incomes given to charity in late Victorian Britain was 10 per cent, according to a Times survey, while half of working-class and artisan households also maintained weekly subscriptions to charities. It’s not a perfect comparison, but today’s top earners give about 0.2 per cent of their income to charity. There was also a high level of direct volunteering, with many citizens directly involved in the provision of care to the less fortunate.

Meanwhile social cooperatives, known as “friendly societies”, not only provided social insurance to millions but also promoted honesty (people are less likely to defraud or steal from people they actually know), responsibility (members were expected to serve a stint as a society officer) and social mixing (as friendly societies were far less stratified than the society of the time).

Beveridge did not intend to dismantle this system, but to supplement it. Indeed, much the same can be said for many of the architects of the modern welfare state, whose speeches and pamphlets attest that their innovations and interventions are not intended to dismantle the good habits and good outcomes of the old order.

Yet dismantle it Beveridge – or at least, his famous 1942 Report, which paved the way for the welfare state – did. Not in one go, perhaps, but piece by piece. As the state annexed one element of welfare after another, the civic culture which had sustained the whole edifice withered away. As taxes rose to pay for the new system, the national habit of charitable giving faded.

The great innovation of the welfare state was the state, not the welfare. But so enduring has been the transformation of our attitude towards both that not only do modern Britons broadly think it right that the welfare of the less fortunate is the state’s responsibility, but many have a hard time imagining that any other system is possible. One need think only of how frequently people conflate universal healthcare, a standard almost every first-world democracy provides, with the NHS, a particular form of state monopoly provision no first-world nation has copied.

Beveridge was not the sole author of the modern welfare state, by any means. In the long view, his Report was less a radical innovation and more simply another swing of the pendulum between liberality and severity which has characterised the welfare policy debate since Tudor times.

He deserves the nomination, however, not merely because of the totemic consequences of the reforms he advocated but their tragic contrast with his own beliefs. Were you to somehow transport William Beveridge to 2026, and explain our welfare state to him, I believe that he would fear he’d broken Britain.

For he would see not merely a nation in which Voluntary Action was forgotten, but one which can barely imagine that such a world was even possible. A Britain with a clear divide between the bureaucratic administrators of social security and its disempowered recipients; and a Britain where Idleness, the unfashionable Victorian hangover of his Five Giants, looms larger than ever.

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This is the doom of most reformers, even the best-intentioned: they imagine that they can simply dispose of what they dislike about a system whilst keeping everything else; that generous welfare will have no impact on people’s appetite for work, or the replacement of their neighbours with the remote and abstract taxpayer on their proclivity for cheating. In fact all of those, lamentably, have proved mistaken beliefs.

The welfare system and civil society described in Voluntary Action had its shortcomings. But fixing them did not require the wholesale dismantling of that system, and in so doing its many virtues were not only lost, but forgotten.

It is the Britain described so warmly and in such detail in Voluntary Action – a charitable, generous, and civically-engaged Britain – that William Beveridge broke. In its place we have a Britain of sprawling welfare bureaucracies and multi-generational worklessness – a land still stalked by the Five Giants. And had we the chance to put the question to the man, as opposed to the myth, I think he’d be the first to admit his profound error.

Henry Hill is deputy editor of Conservative Home, a blog which is independent of the Conservative Party

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