The welfare state was constructed to combat what William Beveridge – academic, patrician and Liberal – called the five Giant Evils: Disease, Want, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.
What has made the edifice so durable has not been the unwavering commitment of politicians to the principle of contributory universalism that Beveridge proposed but rather the enthusiasm of the British people for the greater security in their lives that Beveridge’s high morality promised and that the welfare state then started to deliver.
That enthusiasm made socialised security a success and this, then, created the conditions for individualism to flourish. Of course it was Margaret Thatcher who then exploited and corrupted this individualism so as to try to unpick the welfare state at its weakest point – housing.
Today, the security of our lives is diminishing across all age groups. We have teenagers on low pay or loaded with educational debt, we have zero-hours contracts, enforced part-time working, home-ownership out of reach, a social security safety net made of barbed wire, a crisis for those in care, a rise since 2010 in death rates.
ONS reports death rates are rising from Daily Telegraph 16 February 2016
It is not just the Labour party that is concerned about this insecurity – the living wage for over-25s has cross-party support.
But to address programmatically the major sources of insecurity in our lives first requires a similar moral purpose to the one that drove Beveridge to identify the Giant Evils. That purpose has been lacking from politics as moral narratives have been dislodged by an amoral yet seemingly rational neoliberal economic narrative.
What is the moral purpose that we need? It is to establish the chance for every person to live a long, healthy, fulfilled life. Entrenched social injustices prevent this from happening. ‘Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale’ is the way it was put by a 2005 World Health Organisation report whose lead author was British epidemiologist Michael Marmot, among others.
In his 2015 book[1] based on the report, Marmot sets out how and why deficient opportunities, education, housing, planning, financing, democracy and governance shortens and damages the lives of the 99 per cent. It is a solid, evidence-based indictment of government weakness or failure in governance and governments.
However, he stops short of proposing the laws that are needed to end this killing on a grand scale. That is a task for political parties. For the Labour party, it is surely a duty.
The sub-title of the WHO Commission report is: ‘Health equity through action on the social determinants of health’. On the face of it, one might mistake it for a contribution to healthcare policy. That would be a profound mistake. In his book, Marmot rebukes ministers who have confused treating the symptoms with tackling the causes of shortened and damaged lives. That is not to say that GPs and hospitals do not need to contribute to tackling those causes.
The WHO is endorsing many of the actions required for humanity to restructure society so that all of us can lead long and fulfilled lives. This,
requires a strong public sector that is committed, capable, and adequately financed. To achieve that requires more than strengthened government – it requires strengthened governance: legitimacy, space, and support for civil society, for an accountable private sector, and for people across society to agree public interests and reinvest in the value of collective action. In a globalised world, the need for governance dedicated to equity applies equally from the community level to global institutions. (Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. Closing the gap in a generation. WHO. 2005.)
This is the basis in the United Kingdom for party political manifestos, for a new social contract, for civil society empowerment, for an onslaught on all forms of exclusion, for global leadership in re-engineering socialised insurance.
This can engage the enthusiasm of the British people for greater security in their lives today. I should perhaps like to say that only Labour can do this. But that wouldn’t be true. Rather, it is the opposite: Labour’s success is in jeopardy if it does not develop a programme to end this fatal social injustice and if it does not campaign in ways that recognise that tribal politics merely prolongs it.
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Martin Yuille is a member of Withington constituency Labour party