The Labour Party and the welfare state

Despite the images of radical reform sometimes associated with the Labour Government of the 1940s which introduced most of the institutional framework of the post-war British welfare state, Labour’s policy on welfare throughout the three decades following the war was very much contained within the ‘Butskellite’ consensus on the role and the scope of what Therborn has called ‘welfare state capitalism’. Labour’s economic realism in the 1970s created a political and economic legacy, which the Conservative Governments of the 1980s under Thatcher were able to exploit, and which Labour in opposition found difficult to shake off. Throughout most of the 1980s, Labour’s policy on welfare showed little change from the policies, though not necessarily the practice, of the 1960s and the 1970s. Labour’s 1983 manifesto was rather cruelly dubbed the ‘longest suicide note in political history’.