The Same problems, 60 years on?

Enoch Powell is, to many, a divisive character. For good or for ill, his name has become synonymous with a single speech - The Birmingham Speech - which was delivered on 20 April 1968 to a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham, United Kingdom. What is less known about Powell by modern audiences is that he was a prolific speaker and is regarded as one of the best British orators of the 20th century. His deliberative and emotive style was famously employed, on a number of occasions, in the Commons itself over his long tenure as MP for Wolverhampton and later South Down. Speeches on the Hola camp brutality and his proposal of a law prohibiting research on embryos are fine exemplars of his broad and extensive catalogue, oft forgotten in favour of the infamous 'Rivers of Blood'.

I count myself fortunate to have a not insubstantial collection of Powell's own books as well as his wider writings so, when the topic of the Conservative Party Conference came up in our regular founders meetings, I thought I would take a look back through Reflections of a statesman (a collection of the writings and speeches of Enoch Powell) and see if I could find some of his own addresses to the same conference. Below I have reproduced, in full, a speech delivered 60 years ago to the CPC in Brighton on the topic of the welfare state.

It will be interesting to see if this speech is reflective of the calibre of speeches over the coming week at the CPC in Manchester. More interesting still will be to learn how the party faithful plan to approach the topic of welfare in the coming years; just what does 'levelling up' mean for public finances and how exactly the Conservatives plan to address (or not) the present problems of health and social care aptly identified here, by Powell, six decades ago:

THE WELFARE STATE

Speech, Brighton, 12 October 1961

The Roman poet says, 'dulce est desipere in loco', 'an opportunity for indiscretion is sometimes pleasant'. If the doctrine of collective responsibility can never quite be forgotten or discarded, at least it weighs most lightly on the wearer in the bracing, not to say rarefied, intellectual atmosphere of the CPC. Therefore I do not see why tonight I might not occasionally, if the argument should lead that way, be guilty of saying in office some of the things which I have said out of office.

The Plowden Report on Control of Public Expenditure contained, amongst other nuggets of wisdom, the following sentence which I should like to take as my starting-point: 'The social changes of the last fifteen years have altered the incidence of hardship, so that there now may well be excessive social services for some purposes and inadequate ones for others.'

I should have thought that, in the abstract, no one was likely to quarrel with that statement. Indeed, the reference to the ‘social changes of the last fifteen years' makes it an understatement: for there is not a single social service today which was not framed more than fifteen years ago. The conception of all of them, in more or less their present form, dates from the social revolution of 1942 to 1944. Yes, you heard me correctly: I said 1942 to 1944. The general election of 1945 was in some ways only a consequential recognition of the revolution which took place under, and inside, the Coalition Government at the height of World War II, and was announced to the outside world by a cloud of White Papers - on planning, social insurance, employment, a national health service - much as the election of a new Pope is first evinced by the smoke from the burning ballot papers. But not only does the framing of the existing social services date back twenty years already. The conditions in the light of which those services were then framed were the conditions of the inter-war years - the only available peacetime background for the wartime revolutionaries to use. If the Plowden Committee had referred therefore to 'the social changes of the last thirty years' instead of fifteen, they would have been guilty of no inaccuracy. Those thirty years span some of the sharpest changes of trend in modern history, from persistent deflation, for instance, to persistent inflation, or from unemployment averaging 10 per cent to unemployment averaging 2 per cent, as well as a rise of at least one-third in national income per head.

It is therefore wildly unlikely that the Plowden Committee's assertion should not be well founded, that ‘there now may well be excessive social services for some purposes’. It is also quite likely that there is truth in the other half of their assertion, which sounds as though it were consequential, but really is a quite unconnected proposition, namely, that there now may well be inadequate social services for other purposes. However, without for the moment looking at the two halves separately, I imagine everyone would be prepared to accept the proposition in theory. In theory, too, the Plowden Committee left it. They did not - and it was admittedly no part of their business to do so – inform us for which purposes the existing social services are 'excessive'; and it may be observed that other commentators, political and non-political, though they are frequently willing to indicate social services which in their opinion are ‘inadequate', are extremely taciturn when it comes to illustrating the more obvious half of the truism with specific examples. Admittedly the CPC itself, in its 1958 symposium on The Future of the Welfare State, and more recently the Bow Group too have ventured to step upon the tail of this coat. But these are exceptions which prove the rule.

Inertia and Institutionalisation

Acceptance of a proposition in principle and rejection of it in practice is a perfectly normal human attitude, as common outside politics as inside. It is, I suppose, one manifestation of man's indomitable urge to have it both ways at once'. None the less an examination of the special reasons why the Plowden proposition is accepted as a truism in general but treated as an abominable heresy in particular may be worthwhile.

The most obvious of these reasons are political ones, in the pure, party, vote-catching sense of that term. In politics it is more blessed not to take than to give. The termination of a benefit or a payment or a service is a sharp, specific assault upon identifiable individuals; it gives political opponents something solid to talk about; they can actually produce the bodies and point to the wounds. By contrast, the failure to introduce new benefits, payments or services is a much blunter grievance: political opponents have only something hypothetical to discuss; individual electors do not easily identify themselves with the deprived. As Pericles told the Athenians in the Funeral the deprivation of what we are accustomed to, that we feel and regret.' Ministers of Health would have incurred little or no extra criticism if they had failed to provide the services which the £25 million yielded by the prescription charges have made possible; what criticism there was, would have been diffused over a hundred objects and none of it would have made a distinct impression on the mind of the electorate. Yet the utility of those services to the public is out of all proportion greater than the continuation of prescriptions free or at one shilling each would have been.

Moreover, while the minus is always identifiable and indisputable, the plus is often not identifiable separately or not identifiable as a consequence of the minus. No one, for example, can take hold of twenty-five million pounds' worth of health services and say that these, and these precisely, are owed to the fact of a prescription charge: you cannot point to the beds, the treatments, the nurses and demonstrate that these would not individually have been provided, however undeniable the fact may be in general. Even if the equation could be established, the beneficiaries are not the same or do not see themselves as the same: the patients paying two shillings for their bottles of medicine do not identify themselves with the patients admitted to hospital sooner or treated more efficiently. Similarly the citizen as a taxpayer does not identify himself - and indeed is only partially identical in fact - with the citizen as a recipient of tax-financed benefits.

Finally, there is the fact of human nature summed up in the saying, ‘There's no gratitude in politics.' Even if there were equal numbers of equally identifiable gainers and losers, the political resentment of the losers would outweigh the political gratitude of the gainers. When an addition is made to the system of state-provided services, it is only made because there is a general opinion that the time is ripe for it and that such provision is ‘only right’. The beneficiaries thus regard themselves as having received no more than their due, to which they were entitled anyhow, while those whose benefits are discontinued regard themselves as cheated of what they had a right to and had been encouraged to expect.

Politically, therefore, the inducements to continue what the Plowden Committee call 'excessive social services' are much stronger than the inducements to discontinue them or to supplement any which may happen to be 'inadequate'. But it would be a cynical mistake to limit the forces of inertia to these narrowly political ones.

It is the characteristic of social services that they become rapidly and strongly institutionalised. True, all acts of government policy create a presumption that they will remain in force and are an invitation to the citizen to adapt his private behaviour accordingly; but the tendency of decisions in the social service field to create vested interests is of a quite peculiar order. Take, by way of comparison, the fiscal system: even here, as in all human affairs, it is easier to leave things alone than to alter them. But look at the effective freedom which a Chancellor of the Exchequer possesses to make major alterations over a comparatively short span of time in the methods by which a given amount of revenue is raised. Surtax, profits tax, fuel tax - none of them, not even Schedule A of the income tax, has achieved the independent existence and power of survival which belongs to an institution. The institutionalisation of the social services is an interesting study in its own right, especially for Tories, who are the connoisseurs of institutions, and I should like to offer some case histories.

Subsidised Housing

I will begin with what I always think is the queerest of the social services, and the one with the strangest story - subsidised housing. This was the social service which happened by accident. The story is well known, but always worth retelling. At the end of the First World War it was confidently and almost universally assumed that after a short time money would be back to its pre-war value and market prices (including market rents) to their pre-war levels. Meanwhile, as a very temporary measure, wartime rent restriction was retained and, equally as a very temporary measure, since new houses would not be built to let commercially in these circumstances, a subsidy was introduced to bridge the gap - between pre-war and post-war rents.

We know the sequel. Pre-war values never did come back; rent restriction never did cease to be considered necessary, even after the building of three or four million new houses; subsidies never were discontinued. Instead, they became an institution, and a vested interest. Mankind has a powerful desire to rationalise its actions; and when people found themselves ten, twenty years after the First World War still paying housing subsidies, this desire to rationalise, and perhaps a natural sense of shame, forbade them to recognise that they were doing so merely out of unwillingness to recognise that 1914 prices and money values had gone for ever. So it began to be asserted that this was a social service, and that there was something inherently reasonable and even laudable about subsidising the price of rented house-room - though how it could be reasonable or laudable to reduce by arbitrary and locally varying amounts the rents of an arbitrarily selected minority of families who have no common economic Or other characteristic, is something which no one to this day has attempted to explain. It is as if we were to pay family allowances to every third family on a different scale in each place.

The natural history of the upas tree of housing as a social service, growing from the twin roots of rent restriction and indiscriminate subsidy, would be a fascinating subject for a long book. At each stage the vested interests - of protected tenants, of council tenants, and of local and national politicians - in the system, grew stronger and more complex, so that the wonder is not that it lived so long but that two men were found at last, in Duncan Sandys and Henry Brooke, of sufficient courage and determination to lay the axe to the roots and start hewing a way back to sanity.

If anyone thinks my language exaggerated or highly coloured - and such there might well be, considering that no one here under pensionable age can have any recollection of a world without rent restriction or subsidised rents – let him recall another upas tree which we only managed to cut down in the nick of time ten years ago. It was growing from the twin roots of controlled food prices and food subsidies. Perhaps you have forgotten about the food subsidies? Sir Stafford Cripps in 1950 pegged them at £410 million. (But after all he also pegged the cost of the National Health Service at £400 million!) If the incoming Conservative Government had not swept them away at once it would today seem no less difficult to abolish the 'social service' of subsidised food than the 'social service of subsidised housing.

Luckily we killed it before it became a full-blown institution and today no one seriously expects that food, or clothing, or even that overriding necessity, a television set, should be subsidised for all consumers, still less for a minority. Otherwise, in the production and distribution of food we should have all the corresponding phenomena to those we actually have in housing: ten million family budgets based on artificially low rents; the machinery of house production divided sharply into two, councils building to rent, companies building to sell; the price of rented house-room a voting issue in local and parliamentary elections. In short, the ration book would have become a national institution like the council house.

As I said, housing is perhaps the extreme instance of irrationality among all the social services; each has its own peculiar form of institutionalisation.

Health Service and Education

The National Health Service was created by nationalising the hospitals and placing comprehensive state contracts for medical, dental and ophthalmic services. The new structure replaced the previously existing variety of organisations through which medical care had been financed: national health insurance, a multiplicity of forms of private insurance, local government finance, private contracts and payments, charity and endowment in all manner of guises. Comparison with other advanced countries, where medical care is financed in different ways, and with the trends in this country before the National Health Service, suggests that if the forms of organisation which the National Health Service replaced had continued and developed, the quantity, quality and distribution of medical care here today would not be very substantially different from what it is under the National Health Service. This does not mean, however, that it is practicable to switch out of this system again. The old channels through which the relevant resources flowed have dried up or been dug up. Without underestimating the possibility that we may still witness some increase of private medical insurance, it would not be realistic to pretend that one can see how an alternative system could now grow up beside, or be substituted for, the channelling of this £1,000 million of the national income through government agencies.

Indeed, this institution is self-perpetuating positively, and not only negatively - not only through inertia, but through activity. When the responsibility for providing medical care is focused and vested in a department of government, all the aspirations to improvement are bound to strengthen the institution. In the hospitals, for example, a Minister of Health who is trying to do his duty must aim at increasing the corporate sense, morale and public esteem of the service, because he knows that this will be one of the ways of raising standards. In proportion as he succeeds, the institution itself will be that much more deeply rooted. In this respect the National Health Service is unique among the social services: it is the only instance where the great majority of a specific service is the direct responsibility of an organ of the central government. This makes it very different from education, where only the supervisory responsibility is central, while direct responsibility rests with between one and two hundred executive bodies, deriving their authority from a local electorate. Nor is the public education system historically the product of an act of nationalisation: it is the slow outcome of the fostering of voluntary, as well as the planting of state, establishments. Moreover, the commitment of the state to provide education is still quantitatively controlled, in a sense in which the commitment of the National Health Service to provide medical care is not: for example, the state fixes a compulsory period of school attendance, defines the standards of provision in schools within the system, and indicates the stages and branches in which further commitments will be accepted. It should perhaps be added that, although neither the National Health Service nor the education system is exclusive in the sense of prohibiting private provision, the prestige and importance of independent provision is immensely greater in the field of education than in that of health. 

Pension Expectations

An interesting example of a different type of social service institution Is that concerned with the provision of livelihood for those unable to earn by reason of sickness, disablement, lack of work, or above all, age. Provision for the subsistence of those no longer working has always been made by the community. It is the organisation for collecting and distributing that provision which changes. The history of state insurance and assistance from the early years of this century is one in which social and demographic changes intertwine strangely with political theories and motives. Socially and demographically the period has been dominated by two factors - the fall in the size of families and the increase in the expectation of survival to retirement,

the effects of which are still far from having exhausted themselves. These changes stimulated the search for some substitute for the individual proof of need or 'means test'. In very broad outline, the first stage (1908) was to pay, subject to means, a pension well below subsistence which would supplement income from other sources. The next stage (1925) was to increase the pension but make it conditional on having paid certain contributions, which were compulsory below a given income. The third stage (1946) was to increase the pension to what was intended to be subsistence level, but render it conditional on retirement and make contribution compulsory for virtually all.

Thus, leaving the graduated scheme out of account for a moment, the position we have reached today is that the state pays to all retired persons, without regard to means, a pension roughly of subsistence value. It finances these pensions from a flat-rate weekly poll tax, called a contribution, and a levy on employers per head of employee, with some supplement from general taxation. The amount of the pension is not related actuarial to the sums which each recipient has actually paid in contribution, but the right to receive it is treated as flowing from the possession of a contribution record, and indeed the pension rates are represented as related to the contribution rates, assuming contribution over a full working life.

In this social service, therefore, the institutional element consists not in the great organisation over which John Boyd-Carpenter presides, with its large and efficient staff and its famous calculating machine at Newcastle. It consists in the expectation on the part of the whole population that they will receive from the state on retirement a pension sufficient for subsistence, whatever their income. They have been indoctrinated for nearly forty years with the belief that their pay it but is a right vested in the individual by virtue of certain payments made by him, and analogous to what would be his entitlement under a contract with an insurance company. This expectation has rather been confirmed than otherwise by the superimposition in the last two years of an element of graduation in the contribution, the additional yield of which for many years to come will mainly help to finance the standard pension but which creates a right to additions to it which will gradually build up over the next forty years on an actuarial basis.

Meanwhile, assisted and deliberately encouraged by various tax remissions, an increasing number of people are covered, to an increasing extent, by non-state pension schemes, many of which provide benefits well above subsistence. A priori it might have seemed logical that as these increase and spread, they would render the state pension superfluous and enable the system of compulsory redistribution which finances it to be discontinued progressively. In practice, the state scheme contributions pre-empt a slice of incomes which would otherwise be available for saving through pension schemes, and thus to that extent would be expected to slow down the growth of non-state provision. The great obstacle, however, to a withering away of state pension is the fact that, although in economic reality current pensions are paid from current contributions and other taxes, the state pension scheme has been institutionalised as a structure of vested rights or expectations stretching forward over half a century.

Compared with the social services we have been examining, the residue present the institutional problem only in a comparatively mild form. Even the family allowances, though based in their present form upon the experience and conditions of the inter-war years - when Seebohm Rowntree's surveys in York suggested that one male in four earned less than was necessary to maintain a man, wife and two children above the poverty line - consist of a simple system of payments and enter into budgetary habits and expectations no more and no less than the fiscal allowances, of which I once suggested to a CPC conference they might be regarded as an extension.

Coping with Crime

So let us turn from the obstacles to applying in practice the theoretical truism in the first proposition of the Plowden Committee - that 'there may now well be excessive social services for some purposes' - and consider the second proposition - that there may now well be 'inadequate ones for others'. If we have blind spots, in what sectors will they lie? What social services ought this generation to be constructing which the next or next but one will erect when the need for them is already yielding place to others? Can we catch up, by a little clairvoyance, on the persistent tendency of state provision to come thirty years late? I will offer two guesses, in as many words - crime and age.

Ten years ago I remember I used to think that it was our mental hospitals which later generations would regard as the most staggering and incomprehensible blind spot of our time, on which they would look back as we do upon the generations which burnt witches or tried by ordeal. Thanks mainly to two or three key discoveries in the field of medical science, we now have it in our power and, I hope and believe, in our will, to expunge this blind spot. Treatment of the delinquent claims today the place which treatment of the lunatic but lately occupied, as a gross example of society's inadequacy to cope with its members. I am not referring to the debate on methods: the disagreements of the floggers and anti-floggers are dwarfed by the appalling facts of prison provision and the deficiencies of our penal system. It may not be a popular view, but I would dare to say that prisons are our most important, and also our most deficient, social service. Here, whatever else is obscure, the need for a much greater commitment of resources is indisputable: without, for example, a massive renewal and expansion of physical provision, men and methods will not avail, though men are the essence of the service and methods cry out for more and more exploration.

New methods will come, no doubt, with the fruition of that research which the Home Secretary has urged and supported; but we cannot even claim to be using existing methods, when 7,550 prisoners are sleeping tonight three in a cell, and when policies which, but for the war, would have been on the statute book in 1939, and have already been on the statute book for half a generation, have hardly begun to be carried into effect for lack of premises.

Responsibility for the Old

If the maintenance of law and the management of delinquency are fundamental to any ordered society, responsibility for the old is scarcely less so.

It seems as certain as anything can be that the absolute numbers of the old, and for a long time also their number relative to the whole population, will be far higher in future than anything experienced in the past. This large and increasing number of old, and very old, people will contain a high proportion of individuals who have either no family setting and connections, or at any rate none that is of practical relevance to their way of life. The altered structure of society - the small family size, the small dwelling unit, the substitution of mechanical aids for domestic service - has contributed as much as the mere increased expectation of survival to this striking phenomenon of a large and increasing number of aged and isolated individuals. The problem which it presents is not primarily a financial one, but a physical one. It is not a problem which is solved, or even touched, by another 10s. or £1, or £2, on the pension. It is the problem of how the necessary support, in a physical and environmental sense, which in different circumstances the old would obtain in the setting of a family or a closely-knit village community, can be available to these millions of ageing individuals isolated in a modern industrial society.

I mean no disrespect to the geriatric branch of the hospital service nor to the domiciliary services or the rapidly increasing old people's houses and homes provided by local housing, health and welfare authorities when I say that I believe we are still groping and fumbling with this problem - all of us, social scientists and politicians alike. I also believe that the size of it and the rate at which it is growing indicates the use of the central organising function of the state (which is one characteristic of a social service). At the same time I doubt whether the state alone can solve it. Of course, the problem can be expressed in economic terms the maintenance of a given number of aged people in the conditions of modern society is relatively more costly than in the past: in accommodation, in service, and in attention - but, as I say, money benefits and subsidies are not the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is the provision of a physical and social environment through which the members of society may gradually withdraw from it as securely and as worthily as they enter it through the environment of home and education. It is in this form that I would express the challenge of the social and medical revolution which has given rise to the modern problem of old age.

I question whether we have yet found the secret. The more I see of provision for the old, the more irresistibly a thought rises in my mind, which, however hesitantly, I will try to express. It seems to me that it lacks somehow a soul or a purpose. As more and more survive and are kept alive beyond the utmost limit of working life, the economic or social function of the individual provides less and less of a motive or framework for his survival; and when we ask Why? we find ourselves thrown back upon purpose in a sense which is neither economic nor social nor even secular. We are brought face to face with the question, 'What is the purpose of human life itself? The monastic rule of the Middle Ages expressed an answer to this question. ‘The purpose of man,' it declared, ‘is to praise God, and this, proper work, remains when all else is past or put aside.' The rule was a framework within which this answer to the question could be lived. I am conscious that I speak in parable; but all that vast organisation and provision which must be made for the old in the coming generation will bring disappointment unless the purpose at the heart of it is one that satisfies.

Principles and Practice

But I am straying from my theme. Enough if I have shown that if we care to do so, we can illustrate the second as well as the first half of what I may call the Plowden proposition. We see a range of existing social services, entrenched to varying degrees in institutional form, reflecting to varying degrees needs and economic conditions which have passed or are passing away. We see new needs, born of newer economic and social conditions, which call to be met. We recognise that logically this demands a transfer of resources and effort from the former to the latter, that in the words I have so often quoted, some social services are 'excessive' and others 'inadequate’ - that it was bound to be so and that it is so.

The question for us, for the Conservative Party, is whether, having seen this, we put the file into the 'Too Difficult’ tray and ‘pass by on the other side'. I can see the expediency of that course; I can see the expediency of ministers not making addresses which explore this kind

of territory and arrive at this kind of conclusion - except, of course, to the CPC, which is a living protest against the politics of expediency. However, I confess that I do not believe a party, any more than the society which it serves, can fail to suffer if it knowingly allows institutions to fall more and more out of correspondence with contemporary needs. In Britain of the 1960s this challenge of the Welfare State is not isolated: it is but one aspect of the challenge which confronts us throughout the whole political field. The world wants to know if Britain can adjust to the facts of life or will allow old fears, old habits, old prejudices, old prides to weigh down its vitality and eat up its resources, Dare I say, as a once member of One Nation, that the World wants to know if Britain dare make Change its Ally? I don't know the answer, for only the people can give it; but I do know that it is our duty to ask them.

The question falls to be posed in different terms in the different fields of policy. Here in the social services, which, in volume of resources involved, represent between one-third and one-half of the activities of the state, the question, it seems to me, cannot be posed by disconnected, spasmodic pluses and minuses but by presenting a broad and large conception of the manner in which resources ought to be redeployed to meet modern realities, and this will not be done without soberly assessing but boldly facing the in-built obstacles to that redeployment. This evening I have attempted a contribution to the work by taking the Plowden propositions and suggesting that if they are true in theory they demand recognition in practice. Perhaps in this operation the CPC can give a lead to the party and the Government. It would not be the first time that it had done so.

If you would like to read more of Powell's speeches you can find a great collection here