Welfare legislation and the unions during and after the first world war

Abstract

In an important article (The Historical Journal, xx III (1980), 857-74), Dr Whiteside has transformed from relative obscurity to considerable significance the administration of unemployment insurance during the First World War. It is to be hoped that there will now be some revision of conventional accounts of welfare legislation in which the fudged compromises of inter-war social policy have for too long been contrasted unfavourably with the imaginative boldness of the pre-war Liberal reforms. Dr Whiteside has well demonstrated trade union opposition to wartime plans to extend unemployment insurance and has thus exposed the political weakness of pre-war bureaucratic rationalism (the old Board of Trade spirit in which ‘you govern labour for the good of labour, on behalf of labour, but keep labour at a distance’).1 By inference, a more sympathetic light is cast on the ‘stoical realism’ of inter-war administrators who recognized the pluralistic bounds of policy-making (the acknowledgement, for example, by one ministry of labour official that ‘an antagonistic attitude on the part of the public may often turn the right thing to do into the wrong thing to do’) A reappraisal of the practical achievements of inter-war civil servants, within the political constraints of the time, is long overdue. © 1982, Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.