文章基本信息

标题：The Liberals and Family Welfare, 1906-1922
本地全文：下载
作者：Pat Thane
期刊名称：Cercles : Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone
电子版ISSN：1292-8968
出版年度：2011
期号：21
页码：1-10
出版社：Université de Rouen
摘要：Between 1906 and 1914 the Liberal governments laid the foundations of the welfare state that developed in Britain through the rest of the twentieth century, to the present. What did the Liberals do after 1906 and why. There had been growing demand in Britain since at least the eighteen seventies for new kinds of provision by the state for people in need. This was partly due to increasing understanding of the causes of poverty and the diversity of those causes. In Particular there was growing understanding of how the economy worked and greater realisation that if people were unemployed it was not necessarily because they were lazy, which had been the underlying premise of the existing public welfare system, the ancient Poor Law, but that at certain times the economy did not provide enough jobs for everyone [HARRIS 1972]. There was also increasing awareness that a fit, active, educated population was good for economic growth, at a time when the British economy was facing increasing competition from expanding economies overseas. And that mass poverty, of the kind that was revealed in highly urbanised Britain at the end of the nineteenth century dragged the economy down, for example, Charles Booth's finding from his massive survey in the eighteen nineties that 30 per cent of the population of London lived in severe poverty [BOOTH 1902].