Back to the future: the history of the British welfare state 1834–2024

The history of the British welfare state was once written as a story of progress from small and unsympathetic beginnings in the early nineteenth century. This paper argues that versions of the demographic, medical, and welfare issues of that period still affect us in comparable ways, two centuries after the infamous New Poor Law of 1834. The history of the British welfare state is captured here by examining three periods of its accelerated development in the 1830s, 1900s, and 1940s, and in the work of key thinkers and policy-makers associated with each of these phases: Jeremy Bentham and Edwin Chadwick in the first; David Lloyd George and Charles Booth in the second; and William Beveridge and Aneurin Bevan in the third. The contradictions between the respective plans of Beveridge and Bevan that have shaped the modern welfare state lie at the heart of the welfare system’s problems today.