Just Finished Reading: The Nanny State Made me – In Search of a Better Britain/A Story of Britain and How to Save It by Stuart Maconie (FP: 2020) [281pp]
I picked this up for several reasons in addition to the standard ‘Buy one get one Half price’ deal: It was about the Welfare State, it was written by someone I’m aware of and haven’t read anything by him before and it was (by and large) about the North or at the very least from a Northern perspective. Although initially it took me a while to settle into this rather rambling narrative at times, I ended up liking it quite a bit. I’d heard the author talk several times on TV (he worked/works for the BBC), so I actually ‘heard’ him chat away in his own voice in my head as I read along – and ‘chat’ was definitely the word here.
Part history of, and indeed love letter to, the Welfare State (although in nothing like the detail of my previous book on the subject naturally), part polemic against those who opposed its founding and are even now trying to dismantle it and part autobiography, this was an interesting look into the impact the Welfare State had on also all of us growing up in Britain. Very early on the author makes a very valid (and funny) point. Those in positions of power who disparage the Welfare State by calling it a ‘Nanny State’ are the only ones who HAD nannies – unlike the rest of us. It is, I think, a telling argument. It is only our ‘betters’ who generally oppose a system that is meant to alleviate the conditions that prevailed before its arrival in the late 1940’s - poverty, ill health, ignorance and poor-quality housing. Using his own life story growing up in the North of England – primarily in Wigan, a mere 7 miles where I was coming of age around the same time – as well as fellow beneficiaries of Welfare provision (from schools, libraries, doctors and public parks) this was a very personal ‘take’ on the making of modern Britain. Naturally, given the state of things, this is not simply a tale of good news, a tale of community over greed or a tale of civil society over wealth inequality. It is also a defence of the provision of welfare in all its aspects in an environment where such a provision is under attack as never before, from library closures, privatisation of bus services, ‘redevelopment’ of public parks, the lack of social housing, and the chronic underfunding of so many of the services so many rely on.
Reading through this rambling but often entertaining (with laugh out loud moments) narrative, I was struck time and again by the close correspondences with my own life. The author was born 18 months after and 11 miles further east than me. He spent his formative years in and around Wigan – only 7 miles away where I lived ages 10-23 – and even taught (briefly) in Skelmersdale College only 2 years after I left with good enough A Levels to attend University. So, we almost met (as he taught Sociology – a subject I took at the College). Weird! Inevitably this was, in many ways, a cosy comfortable read being focused (mostly) on life in the North of England in the years I lived there. Interesting and informative on many levels and full of interesting insights and people this is a great piece of social history. Definitely recommended to anyone who wants to understand how the Welfare State works at the ‘coalface’ and what its loss would mean to so many. More from this author to come I think!
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2 comments:
I'm sympathetic to a degree -- beginning my political thinking as a social democrat, before I grew antagonistic toward the state and wary of how corporations can use laws meant to govern them into laws meant to protect them from smaller competition. in the US, one of the reasons expanding the welfare state has such critics is because it has, since the seventies, created a permanent underclass who game the system, and has worsened the problems of the working poor by creating dis-incentives to marriage and the black. Numerous black commentators (Sowell, Williams, Riley,etc) have pointed to the steep collapse of the black family after the sixties and seventies as one of the reasons for that community's lingering poverty. This is not something I accepted as a college progressive, not wanting to hear anything that would attack something I accepted as an absolute good ('helping others') but after 12 years of working in a public library and seeing the effects close up, I can't deny them. I know of far too many people who claim 'disability' who are able-bodied and able-minded. There's helping people and then there's enabling people to persist in poor behavior. Bailing out banks, for instance, is welfare that enables corporations to persist in poor behavior!
I think Social Security & the Welfare State provision have a very different history and very different applications in both countries. I think, as far as I know, that we were were you are now before 1948. The circumstances around our implementation of the Welfare State is very particular and depended on our experiences with armed forces provision prior to WW1 and promises made (and not delivered) after the Great War. I understand that a more 'socialist' welfare provision might have been brought in either by LBJ or Nixon. That might have changed everything...
The argument that support crates dependence is an old and perennial one. There's *some* truth to it but I don't think that you should motivate people by fear or starvation. Give them a decent minimum of support when they need it and then pay them decent wages when they do work. There will *always* be those who play the system. The solution is either to ensure that its difficult to do so or simply accept the fact and ignore it - basically whichever is most cost effective. What I also think is that welfare recipients 'gaming' social security is a LOT less of a problem that corporations avoiding their taxes. We're looking at the wrong problem/target.
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