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The Beveridge Report
Dear All
Does anyone know where I can get hold of a copy of this landmark work? I have found a 20 page excerpt on the interwebthingy but not the full 300+ page epic.
If it was in pdf format so much the better; but then 1942 does pre date Mr Gates working life just a bit…
Any clues?
Regards
Richard Stacey
Library? I read the report back in the 90’s while doing a course at Johh Moores Unitversity in Liverpool and it was held on microfiche (SP) in the library there. Worth a try if no-one else knows anyway.
Thank you; I’ll nip round in the morning and terrify the poor librarian lol….
You can’t. It’ll be closed down.
There’s a bit more of it here:
Think this might be the full copy:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/19_07_05_beveridge.pdf
(I love a challenge!)
Just wait until you get to the bit about the role of married women being to raise the next generation to lead the Empire (no single parents in those days don’t you know).
I’m led to believe it was the best selling White Paper of all time (before the digital age anyway). There is a classic cinema newsreel of people queuing outside a wartime book shop to buy it (available on Utube?).
It really is the most turgid read ever! But significant.
Well done Steve! :)
BBC website has a report on Beveridge, including various contributors including Kelvin MacKenzie….
Jose Harris, author of Beveridge: A Biography, says that even during the Hungry Thirties public suspicion of the scrounger existed.
But the war banished that with its sense of common purpose and social solidarity. High emergency taxes and rationing imposed a redistributive, egalitarian economic model. Above all there was work for everyone.
“There were no scroungers,” says Harris. “You were put to work in the Army, the pioneer corps or the factories.”
Kelvin Mackenzie, who edited the Sun during the 1980s, says he’s angered at the vista of satellite TV dishes on central London council estates. “They’re getting a flat in central London subsidised by the taxpayer and yet these guys can still find £60 to £80 a month to subscribe to Sky TV.”
The public’ s suspicion that most people could find a job or are “on the fiddle” just don’t stand up to reality, says Times columnist David Aaronovitch. He offers a Freudian analysis. Working people on tight budgets could blame the bankers, but they are more likely to round on people who are like them but claiming benefits.
“The very rich are not like you - you might resent them from afar. But these people, the claimants are very close to you, you might even know them. You don’t feel you are making enough money so you resent people asking for help,” Aaronovitch says.
For the whole article, see Beveridge report: From ‘deserving poor’ to ‘scroungers’?
The State of Welfare, BBC Radio 4’s three-hour special report, is on Tuesday 27 November at 10:00 GMT
Just noticed the link I gave on Friday is only Part 1.
Whole thing is here in PDF:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2560775/pdf/10916922.pdf (takes ages to download)
or here in html: http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/1942beveridge.asp
Must spare a few days to read it sometime!
see also Toynbee Hall’s series of free policy lectures marking the 70th anniversary of the Beverige Report ....
http://www.toynbeehall.org.uk/page.asp?section=555§ionTitle=Beveridge+Lecture+Series+2012/13
hi steve ...
still only getting summaries at those links ... challenge still on!
cheers - shawn
Back to the analogue library by the looks of things!
Not the report, but an interesting historical item, nonetheless. Check out the budget projections for Beveridge’s figures for 1965 on page 160.
http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pdfs/small/cab-66-31-wp-42-547-27.pdf
A blog on 10 things you may not know about Beveridge’s report.
6) The Welfare State. Beveridge hated the term because to him it implied a ‘Santa Claus’ state. ‘Benefit in return for contributions, rather than free allowances from the State, is what the people desire,’ he said in the report. He preferred the term ‘social service state’ with an emphasis on duties rather than rights. In the late 1950s, an old friend recorded in his diary that Beveridge had met him for lunch in distress that ‘his original ideas had been mutilated, reversed and taken completely out of his hands although given his name; that he had come to loathe both the caption “Welfare State” and the title “Beveridge Plan” which had become like advertising slogans, which taken together had led many people hopelessly to misunderstand what he had truly worked for’.
For the other top 10 points pop-pickers, see 10 things you may not know about the Beveridge report
(the author also says “The report itself is not available anywhere in full online that I can discover”)
From Declan Gaffney - “drawing a blank - main online libraries don’t seem to have full report .Various extracts & summaries.”