The Beveridge Report

The Beveridge Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services is in its way a portent in English politics.Though it is in form a report made by Sir William Beveridge to the Minister of Reconstruction, Sir William Jowitt, K.C., M.P., who held the rank and office of Paymaster General (and is now Minister without Portfolio), and though the Report admittedly raises matters of policy which are 'so important as to call for decision by the Government as a whole,' the issue of the Report was heralded by a regular campaign of advance publicity and propaganda which appeared to be designed and calculated to impose the document on Parliament and the people; and its actual publication was accompanied by such a fanfare of trumpets, in the Press and on the Radio, as made one to understand, almost for the first time, the technique and power of publicity in the hands of a totalitarian régime and its habit of treating Parliament no longer as a deliberative assembly, but rather as a body accustomed obediently to register the decisions of the Party, or the Fuhrer. Thus, within twenty-four hours of its publication, summaries of the Report (as yet unconsidered by the Government or by Parliament) were broadcast in twenty-two languages as a forecast of the line of social legislation to be followed by Great Britain in the post-war reconstruction

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