Public Policy in the UK - Assignment Example

Public policy in UK has followed a tradition of responses to policy problems as they arise. This approach has a rational predictive element containedwithin the political structure. The 'successive limited comparisons' has been the framework of British Policy responses leading to, what has been termed as 'Instrumentalism' (Lindblom.1959). The public welfare policy decisions that UK government took across the partisan divide demonstrate this over the period since Industrial Revolution, till the end of consensus in the 1980s. The Industrial Revolution created a new set of policy problems concerning welfare. Poverty was described as the economic state of "all the people without income from property or profession and therefore dependent on their manual labour for a living" (Cowherd. 1977; pp.1-2). These poor were distributed across the land and were not clustered together and therefore could not be organized. The problems arose from rapid urbanization and clustering of demographic units around major industrial centers after the industrial revolution. This increased the visibility of the poor and there destitution, so poignantly documented in Dickensonian literary genre, on one hand and led to coalescing of poor in to extra-state organization like trade unions etc. on the other hand. Repression of organized poor during 'the period between the French Revolution and the later 1820s should was of severe repression as reflected in Combination Acts and the use of Military Force to quell Luddites in 1812' (Daunton. 1995). However this repressive regime was seen to be counterproductive and it can be seen that, 'from mid-1830s to 1850s the repression eased out and a major advances for working class organizations such as trade unions, cooperative societies and friendly societies' emerged (Crafts.1997). This trend shows that Public Policy response had tacitly admitted the political legitimacy of the organized poor. This admission also meant that an appropriate response was to be given at the state level to demands of organized poor. This point on the historical space-time continuum can be termed as the beginning of welfare policy in UK. Another dimension of change in the perception of policy makers relates to the impact of Laissez-fare economic policy. 'By 1830s income and real wages increased and civil rights improved markedly but there was a perceptible decline in mortality conditions and heights, indicating a decline in living conditions of the poor' (ibid). This presented a new policy paradox to the decision makers. The existing belief about the correlation between income increase and the general state of living was not materializing. The state needed to review its bystander status according to Laissez-fare non-intervention principles. The side-effects of Capitalism were becoming starkly observable. The recognition and legitimacy granted to trade union and other public forms of organizations also necessitated a rethinking of their increasingly vocal demands. By the turn of the twentieth century a policy response became imminent for alleviating the conditions of the poor and to ease the ravages of Capitalism and to co-opt the political dissent of trade unions. The vision of welfare state perhaps rested on the belief that, "state needed to compensate for the diswelfares of Capitalism: [it needed] to provide means of resistance to the destructive reign of market forces" (Titmuss.1968). It has also been argued that, 'though the welfare state had emerged as a universal feature of capitalism, this was not so because of any ideological dialectics but it was a technocratic and " authoritarian" attempted response to offer compensation for the "inherent contradictions of Capitalism"(Offe.1972; pp.485). The state's response initially was through pro-poor legislation of the Liberals after 1906 General Elections. This also may have coincided by overtures to the vote bank commanded by the trade unions. The Liberals had the ideological space to accommodate the trade union dissent. " The ultimate vision of a fully comprehensive and highly specialized interventionist welfare state was embodied in the dissenting Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws of 1905-1909, a report written by Beatrice and Sydney Webb (1909)" (Dean.2000). The various Liberal reforms legislations include; Old Age Pensions Act 1908, Workers Compensation Act 1906, Education Acts of 1906 and 1907, Housing and Town Planning Act 1909, National Insurance Act 1911 and Minimum Wage Act 1912. This proactive legislation signifies a paradigm shift from Laissez-Fare disassociation of the state to more active and intrusive state model. It may be emphasized here that this rapid and copious legislation does not indicate that it was a drastic policy change, the strand of our argument about incremental change as the decision making rule still holds valid. The World War I and the subsequent Great Depression increased this reason for coming up with policy answers. It has been argued that these cataclysmic events generated a set of policies aimed at welfare but the focus was only the working class, all the legislation like Industrial Injuries Act, related to addressing the demands of the industrial workers and aimed at creating a consensus in the working class in support of the War effort (see Atherton.2002). This specific selectivism of the state was more of a war effort measure then anything else, but nevertheless it did achieve what it aimed to achieve, i.e. a universal support for the War. The Great Depression also raised the issue of employment and invited further state interventionism in market. These events eroded the credibility of Adam Smith Economics and facilitated the rise of Keynesian Economic mode. Full Employment became the target of general policy direction under the assumption that 'if most people will be employed, poverty will be reduced to a manageable minimum' (ibid; pp.307). The Keynesian revolution (the publishing of General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.1936) was not a mere academic event. It radically influenced the design and conduct of public policy in the western world. The post depression years reinforced a bipartisan rethinking for a change. The 'Hungary Thirties', the crowds of unemployed, who could have been easily lured to communist utopia or Fascist propaganda were a cause of concern in Britain across the political divide. The 'war time display of patriotism by the working class and the sacrifice rendered necessitated an institutional response from the state to focus on welfare and employment, " a war launched largely for power political reasons must retrospectively receive idealistic and material justification"( Harrison.1999). The state was perceived as an agency and provider of economic growth, employment and well being. This perception of state's role was bipartisan at the political level as well as at the level of electorate and the general public. Capitalism was seen to be flexible enough to "deliver abundance without class confrontation" (Macmillan.1938). Post War Consensus was thus 'a system of beliefs, moral values and social aspirations held in common by the majority of powerful agents and institutions ...[which] specified the general direction of government's policy'(Warde.1982,pp4-5). This consensus focused on employment and welfare, as two corresponding systems of delivery. All the welfare benefits were designed around these two policy percepts. It has been argued that the definition of the working class was focused on those people who earned their living through salary or wage, this essentially meant the middle class and welfare benefits actually enlarged the middle class (Atherton.2002). It has been however argued that the 'poor of the poor', 'the marginalized of the marginalized', 'the forgotten Englishman' were ignored, the "welfare state further marginalized those who remained among the poor" (Coates & Silburn. 1970). At the same time it created a class from amongst the middle class who became a protected class unto themselves, 'lacking incentives to contribute productively to the society' (ibid;pp.309), essentially creating what has been called a dependency syndrome. We have attempted to outline the story of Welfare as it has unfolded since the Industrial Revolution. It has been viewed through multiple conceptual lens. It has been argued that welfare was a set of institutional incremental policy responses to multiple challenges. It has also been demonstrated how it has fallen short of reaching out to the abject poor. References: 1. Marshall T.H.(1950), Citizenship and Social Class. Reprinted in Marshall TH, Bottomore T (1992), Citizenship and Social Class. London, Pluto. 2. Lindblom, C.E. (1959), The Science of 'muddling through', Public Administration Review, 19,pp. 78-88. 3. Cowherd, R.G. (1977), Political Economist and the English Poor Laws, Athens: Ohio University Press. 4. Coates, K. and Silburn, R. (1970), The Forgotten Englishman, Harmondsworth: Penguin. 5. Atherton C (2002), Welfare State: A Response to John Veit-Wilson, Social Policy & Administration, Vol.36, No.3, June 2002, pp.306-11. 6. Daunton, M.J.(1995), Progress and Poverty: an economic and social history of Britain, 1700-1850, Oxford. 7. Crafts N.F.R. (1997), Some, dimensions of the 'quality of life' during the British Industrial Revolution, Economic History Review L,4 (1997), pp.617-639. 8. Titmuss R (1968), Commitment to Welfare. London, Allen & Unwin. 9. Offe C (1972), Advanced Capitalism and the Welfare State. Politics and Society 2 (4). 10. Dean H. (2000), Social rights and social resistance: opportunism, anarchism and the welfare state, International Journal of Social Welfare 2000:9: 151-157. 11. Warde, A. (1982), Consensus and Beyond; Manchester, Manchester University Press. 12. Harrison, B. (1999), The Rise , Fall and Rise of Political Consensus in Britain Since 1940; The Historical Association, Blackwell Publishers, OX4 1JF, UK. 13. Macmillan, H. (1938), The Middle Way , quoted in op.cit. Read More