Review

Beveridge rides again

The five giants: a biography of the welfare state
Nicholas Timmins
HarperCollins, £9.99

Anyone who can turn the history of British welfare policy into a gripping blockbuster novel deserves a medal — and although Nicholas Timmins, public policy editor of The Independent, hasn’t quite done that, he’s come as close as anyone is likely to get. The result is a highly readable, authoritative and yet hugely enjoyable excursion through 50 years, and 500 pages, of the political twists, turns and blind alleys which have brought welfare to its current state.

‘The five giants’ refers, of course, to Beveridge’s five giants on the road to post-war reconstruction: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Correspondingly, Timmins traces the development of post-war policy on social security, health care, education, housing and social services from the relative clarity of principle of the Beveridge report through the subsequent policy swings and pragmatic compromises of successive Labour and Conservative governments.

The emphasis is on capturing the spirit — and the personalities — of the times, on reporting the political dilemmas faced by Dick Crossman, or Barbara Castle, or Patrick Jenkin as if they were today’s — as indeed they still often prove to be.

Timmins’ style tends naturally towards journalism rather than academia, and the text fairly buzzes with the verbatim comments of civil servants, ministers and policy advisers as furious debates are had and the welfare state lurches to left or right.

Yet the book is anything but superficial, and covers key developments in sufficient depth to be sure of unearthing surprising findings. For example, we discover that the internal market in the NHS — supposedly the invention of the US economist Enthoven in the 1980s — actually first appeared as a proposal in the coalition government’s 1944 white paper on the NHS.

Timmins’ skill lies in leavening a potentially heavy meal of social policy with enough fascinating personal detail to produce an easily digestible, and thoroughly rewarding, result. Highly recommended.