The Approach Of The Conservative Party To Social Policy During Worl War Ii

This book is concerned with home affairs or social policy in the British system - in particular in education, health, housing, social security and aspects of the Home Office's work. It handles the subject in terms of what the Conservative Party thought and did about it from 1939 to 1988.

Between 1918 and 1939, 448 men who performed uniformed service in the First World War became Conservative MPs. This relatively high-profile cohort have been under-explored as a distinct body, yet a study of their experiences of the war and the ways in which they - and the Conservative Party - represented those experiences to the voting public reveals much about the political culture of Interwar Britain and the use of the Great War as political capital. Radicalised ex-servicemen have, thus far, been considered a rather continental phenomenon historiographically. And whilst attitudes to Hitler and Mussolini form part of this analysis, the study also explores why there were fewer such types in Britain. The Conservative Party, it will be shown, played a crucial part in such a process - with British politics serving as a contested space for survivors' interpretations of what the war should mean.

First Published in 1978. This is an historical study of the growth of government in Britain. It was begun in 1970, and that is the point down to which the study is really taken. The most recent developments in government necessarily receive only limited attention, and the author hopes to publish separately a fuller study of administrative change in Britain since the 1950s.

By analyzing the competing concerns of different social "actors" behind the evolution of social policy, this study explains why some nations had an easy time in developing a welfare state while others fought long entrenched battles.

This book explores the origins of the post-war Welfare State in the UK, the creation of which is almost universally considered—to an extent which is regarded here as being tantamount to a myth—as being solely a Labour Party creation. The book examines the various contributions to the development of ‘welfarism’ across the first half of the twentieth century, and in particular those of Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain and William Beveridge. It assesses the effects of two World Wars; the daunting economic challenges of the 1920s and 1930s; the stimuli to post-war reconstruction; the 1945 Labour government’s implementation of the wartime Coalition Government’s post-Beveridge conclusions; and the Conservative Party’s attitude after 1945 to Labour’s legislative programme. The book invites the reader to accept that, taking developments over the half-century as a whole, the greater share of the credit for the creation of a welfare state belongs to the Conservative Party.

The expansion of the British state was neither automatic nor accidental. Rather, it was the outcome of recurring battles over the proper boundaries of the state and its role in economy and society. The Politics of State Expansion focuses on the interests arrayed on either side of this struggle; providing a new and critical perspective on the growth of the `Keynsian welfare state' and on the more recent retreat from Keynes and from collective provision.