Since 2010 the UK has enacted radical welfare reforms that have led to greater poverty, homelessness, indebtedness, and foodbank use. It has diverged from other European countries experiencing similar economic and social trends, who have not enacted such dramatic cuts and reforms. Until recently, however, the changes proved very popular with the public, who increasingly hated the welfare system and viewed its users as lazy, undeserving, and likely to be cheating. In this book, Tom O'Grady focuses on policies that provide relief from unemployment, poverty, and disability to uncover why Britain's welfare system has been reformed so radically and why, until recently, the public enthusiastically endorsed this programme. Using a comparative and historical perspective, he traces the evolution of British welfare policy, politics, discourse, and public opinion since the 1980s, and argues that from the 1990s a long-term change in discourse from both politicians and the media caused the British public to turn against welfare by 2010. That, combined with the financial crisis, left the system uniquely vulnerable to cuts. This book explores the roots of public opinion on the welfare system, the motives of politicians who have revolutionized it, and the ways in which the system and its users have been spoken about. It is an account of how the public came to consider deserving recipients of help as scroungers; of when and why politicians and the media vilified them; of political parties whose discourse and policies were transformed, almost overnight; and of Britain's journey from providing welfare as generously as the average European country in the 1970s to becoming an outlier today.

This text traces the evolution of British welfare policy, politics, discourse, and public opinion since the 1980s, and addresses two main questions: why Britain reformed its welfare system so radically, and why, until recently, these reforms were so popular with the public.

This book has become the standard text on the course of social policy and social ideas in Britain since the Industrial Revolution. To the first edition Professor Fraser has added a new foreword which sets out the variety of approaches which now exist to the history of social policy. Each chapter has been up-dated and revised in the light of recent research and five further documents have been added to the appendix. In a new postscript Professor Fraser discusses the welfare state in the period since 1973 and suggests what its future may be in the 1980s. The bibliography has been completely revised and contains a full survey of articles, so providing a fully up-to-date second edition which offers new insights and material in the light of current research. A third edition, which will bring this classic text up to the 1990s will be published in 1996.

The welfare state arouses controversy whether attention is focused on its recent past or future development. Leading experts in welfare history draw together the latest research in essays combining broad policy surveys and detailed case studies. The key questions are 'What is a welfare state?' and 'How can it best be analysed?'. The history of the British welfare state suggests that the traditional approach has been too narrow. Current policy should be informed by a greater sense of history.

How did Britain transform itself from a nation of workhouses to one that became a model for the modern welfare state? The Winding Road to the Welfare State investigates the evolution of living standards and welfare policies in Britain from the 1830s to 1950 and provides insights into how British working-class households coped with economic insecurity. George Boyer examines the retrenchment in Victorian poor relief, the Liberal Welfare Reforms, and the beginnings of the postwar welfare state, and he describes how workers altered spending and saving methods based on changing government policies. From the cutting back of the Poor Law after 1834 to Parliament’s abrupt about-face in 1906 with the adoption of the Liberal Welfare Reforms, Boyer offers new explanations for oscillations in Britain’s social policies and how these shaped worker well-being. The Poor Law’s increasing stinginess led skilled manual workers to adopt self-help strategies, but this was not a feasible option for low-skilled workers, many of whom continued to rely on the Poor Law into old age. In contrast, the Liberal Welfare Reforms were a major watershed, marking the end of seven decades of declining support for the needy. Concluding with the Beveridge Report and Labour’s social policies in the late 1940s, Boyer shows how the Liberal Welfare Reforms laid the foundations for a national social safety net. A sweeping look at economic pressures after the Industrial Revolution, The Winding Road to the Welfare State illustrates how British welfare policy waxed and waned over the course of a century.

This survey of British social policy provides an appraisal of the Poor Law, the factory question, education, poverty and philanthropy; the social impact of two world wars, the Attlee years and the challenge to the Welfare State since 1951.