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Conservative Thought and the Welfare State

The welfare state is now undergoing the most sustained analysis in a generation. Although it is true that conservatives have been in the forefront of the major criticism they are in a slightly embarrassing situation since they have traditionally taken credit for some of the modest state interventions that were made from the nineteenth century onwards. It is often claimed that the post-war British welfare state was not so much a product of the Labour government's innovations but was a continuation, and rationalization, of measures that were taken earlier in the century. The changes in social insurance, the introduction of a nationalized health service and the state-sponsored expansion of education at all levels emerged from the war-time Coalition Government's deliberations rather than exclusively from the rational plans of the post-war Labour Government. The same is true of Europe. It was Bismarck's Germany which pioneered the idea of social insurance, and ended what was a burgeoning voluntary system. Although in the US conservative Republicans have always been sceptical about state welfare they did eventually accept the implications of Roosevelt's New Deal (including its Social Security provisions), and for a while acquiesced in the extensions to this brought about by President Johnson's Great Society programmes. It was only the more radical free market branches of conservatism that persistently opposed the structure of the welfare state, i.e. the collectivized delivery of unemployment insurance, health care, pensions and so on. But even classical, or economic liberals (I shall use these terms interchangeably) still believed in some residual role for the state in aiding the deprived. What they objected to was what has come to be known as the `institutional' welfare state, or the collective and compulsory (though not necessarily monopolistic) delivery of such welfare goods as unemployment insurance, health care, pensions etc. Such arrangements were thought to be a threat to both freedom and eciency. But only a very small minority of dogged advocates of the minimal state resisted, the, what had become by the late 1950s, overwhelming consensus. The dierences were mainly about the form that state welfare should take. That consensus has to some extent broken down and an obvious consequence of this has been