The Conservative Party and the Creation of the Welfare State

This book explores the origins of the post-war Welfare State in the UK, the creation of which is almost universally considered—to an extent which is regarded here as being tantamount to a myth—as being solely a Labour Party creation. The book examines the various contributions to the development of ‘welfarism’ across the first half of the twentieth century, and in particular those of Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain and William Beveridge. It assesses the effects of two World Wars; the daunting economic challenges of the 1920s and 1930s; the stimuli to post-war reconstruction; the 1945 Labour government’s implementation of the wartime Coalition Government’s post-Beveridge conclusions; and the Conservative Party’s attitude after 1945 to Labour’s legislative programme. The book invites the reader to accept that, taking developments over the half-century as a whole, the greater share of the credit for the creation of a welfare state belongs to the Conservative Party.