How Clement Attlee's best intentions led to the problems we face today

I think the biggest mistake made by the British government was made with the best of intentions. It was the post-war Clem Attlee government that had swept to power at war’s end, the electorate having turned their backs on Churchill, not wishing to return to the Tory-dominated depression of the 1930s. That had been a time when unemployment and need ran hand in hand, and if you were without work and receiving a paltry state benefit it was means tested.

Meaning that if you had a clock in your house you had to sell that before you could get benefit. You had to be abject and so needy that even the small amount handed out was a blessing.

William Beveridge was commissioned in 1940 to write a report about what could be done in the post-war years that would bring more social justice. Clem Attlee’s government, largely made up of very well-intended, middle class, public school and university graduates (with some notable working class inclusions), took the conclusions and made it into a large part of post-war government policy.

The Attlee government adopting and adapting the report was how we got the incredible creation of the 1948 welfare state. Clearing the slums and creating better housing for the poor working classes, and creating a health service, was of vital importance. Social good would be directed from the top, and as the Labour government was full of zealots for social change it seemed a foregone conclusion that the post-war world would be better for most people who worked with their hands and were described as working class.

• Post-war Britain was a place of renewal, opportunity and optimism for working-class people. What happened?
• Decades of initiatives didn’t solve poverty. What can we do now?

The middle classes did incredibly well also out of this social fillip, this redirection of state aid towards those in need. There were so many new jobs for middle-class people, from teaching to social work, health and commerce, bureaucracy. Capitalism, though, did not stand still. Prosperity and trade, sponsored by a burgeoning world market led by the US, saw a growth of a consumerist boom and gave people many gadgets and products that ensured working people felt they were not being left behind.

But alas, left behind they were. For the welfare state had never addressed education and social culture. In spite of slum clearances and mass housing, many still lived in poor-quality housing. With a lack of sanitation, often without bathrooms and proper kitchens, the working classes carried on with their largely manual jobs, and what was dismissively called unskilled jobs. What social housing that was around never covered the vast part of the working class, 60% of them still living in private, sub-standard rented accommodation in 1960.

Because of the power of the unions over post-war governments, industry was never developed and modernised. So a vast part of the British working class was caught up in doing jobs that had hardly changed from the Victorian times. Unions did not want modernisation because that would lead to redundancies, with a smaller work force, and governments were caught in this rock-and-a-hard-place scenario.

But the foundation stones of the welfare state created the major problem that held the UK back in developing what you might call working-class education, social mobility and the new skills of new industries. And therefore not for a working class being dynamised out of manual labour and into a new skilled class of workers with the education to go with it.

As a recipient of secondary modern education I was among the ones that failed. The supposed clever workers were separated off to become the managing class through a grammar school education. For the rest of us, the problem was not so much the curriculum, but more the fact that none of us understood the significance of this learning and the potential that flowed from it.

My class was largely semi-literate; after school leaving at 15 they went into labouring jobs that led nowhere in later life. I was fortunate, as I often say, to always being in trouble with the police, and in being locked up I was always taught new things, finally finishing off my reading education in a boys’ prison aged 16. But the vast majority of people in the British working classes were not given the advantages of education in a young offenders institution; my five brothers were left behind to remain manual labourers.

What the welfare state did not break was the horrendous evils of the British class system. The middle and upper class, even in their fine thoughtfulness and kindness, saw us as a different species. And they catered for our low education and low social status, never taking a lead in breaking the powerlessness that undereducation condemns you to: to an unskilled and unfulfilled life. 

Now almost 80 years later, we reap the harvest of this class system. Most people in prison come from an inheritance of poverty. Most of the unemployed and economically inactive, a vast cost to society, come from this forgotten, warehoused class. No, we inherit a forgotten legacy that dominates public life. The acceptance of an underclass without opportunity or mobility.

The nearly 10 million economically inactive citizens will be the children’s children of the left behind. If we are going to break through the ineptness of former governments trying to play catch-up with the post-war acceptance that ‘workers would always be workers’ then that’s going to take a big leap in government thinking.

That’s why I keep going on about the need for a Ministry of Poverty Prevention. To break the inheritance of poverty by getting a government department devoted to it.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. Big Issue exists to give homeless and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy of the magazine or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.