British Politics and Social Policy during the Second World War
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8958563 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kevin Jefferys (St. Mary's College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1987 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 123-144 |
| Publication date | 1987-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Historical Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-246X • E-ISSN: 1469-5103 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0018246x00021944 |
| OpenAlex | W1986784453 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 21 |
| References cited | 18 |
This article sets out to examine the relationship between party politics and social reform in the Second World War. The issue of government policy towards reform was raised initially by Richard Titmuss, who argued in his official history of social policy that the experience of total war and the arrival of Churchill's coalition in 1940 led to a fundamentally new attitude on welfare issues. The exposure of widespread social deprivation, Titmuss claimed, made central government fully conscious for the first time of the need for reconstruction; the reforms subsequently proposed or enacted by the coalition were therefore an important prelude to the introduction of a ‘welfare state’ by the post-war Labour administration. These claims have not been borne out by more recent studies of individual wartime policies, but as a general guide to social reform in the period the ideas of Richard Titmuss have never been entirely displaced. In fact the significance of wartime policy, and its close relationship with post-war reform, has been reaffirmed in the most comprehensive study of British politics during the war – Paul Addison's The road to 1945 . For Addison, the influence of Labour ministers in the coalition made the government the most radical since Asquith's Liberal administration in the Edwardian period. The war, he notes, clearly placed on the agenda the major items of the post-war welfare state: social security for all, a national health service, full employment policies, improved education and housing, and a new system, of family allowances
Administration (probate law · Government (linguistics · New Deal · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social policy · Social security · Social Welfare · Sociology · State (computer science · Welfare · Welfare reform · Welfare state · World War II · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Public Administration
How useful are feminist theories of the welfare state
Fighting the People's War
Social Patriotism and the British Working Class
Thatcherism
The Labour governments 1974–1979
The “Good Citizen” as a “Respectable Worker
War and Social History
The State of Twentieth-Century British Political History
Perspectives on the Working-Class Family in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945
The Forgotten Anniversary? An Examination of the 1944 White Paper, “A National Health Service”
Want
Enterprise and Welfare States
The Postwar Consensus Revisited
The British State and the Structure of Political Opportunity
How Socialist is Solidaristic Social Policy? Swedish Postwar Reform as a Case in Point
The Second World War, Inequality and the Social Contract in Britain
The Ruling Compassions of the Late Colonial State
The Politics of Disease and Disorder in Post-War Malaya
Revisionists and Fundamentalists
Rationing, austerity and the Conservative party recovery after 1945
The strange death of Liberal England
Change, choice, and conflict in social policy
Problems of social policy
The Foundations of the Welfare State
The Emergence of the Welfare State in Britain and Germany 1850–1950
The Coming of the Welfare State
Problems of the Conservative Sub‐committee on Education 1941‐45
John Anderson. Viscount Waverley
Harold Nicolson
R. A. Butler, the Board of Education and the 1944 Education Act
The 1945 General Election Reconsidered
The British General Election of 1945
War and Economic Development
Opening address
The "Keynesian Revolution" in Economic Policy-making
| Unique citing works | 21 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,55 |
| Citation span | 1988 - 2022 (35) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 20 |