largely out of national insurance contributions levied both on workers and
employers. The scheme was to ensure not only the previously acquired right to
an old-age pension, but to put unemployment pay, sickness and injury benefit,
and a variety of other financial protections against hardship, on to a regularized
basis. In the past such matters had either not been attended to at all, or were
covered byad hocand usually inadequate legislation. The welfare state, while
having no detailed content, is the general idea that misfortunes that have
financial consequences to those unable to manage should all be dealt with by
the state, through its taxing power. Arguments raged, and still do, about how
extensive welfare should be. Should it cover only the small number of the
almost destitute, or should it be a safety net for many, or should everyone in
society be granted an automatic protection against potential disaster? In some
cases, as with the British National Health Service (NHS), the entire population
is covered by a system of free, or highly subsidized, medicine. In other cases
means tests are used to direct special benefit payments, for example to families
with low incomes and several children, and to those particularly in need. The
spirit, if not the content, of the welfare state has never been seriously
challenged in Britain since the 1945–51 Labour governments implemented
the basis of the Beveridge Report. No one need now rely on private charity to
sustain a basic, if low standard of living, whatever ill fortune in terms of
unemployment, illness, industrial injury, family breakdown or whatever may
happen. At times, though probably misleadingly, the idea of the welfare state is
extended to cover the social services, so that the general principle outlined
above is coupled with the rather less unanimously popular existence of a large
bureaucracy of social workers of various kinds.
In recent years the proportion of gross national product spent on the various
social services has caused concern in a number of Western political systems, and
ways have been sought to curb expenditure on these services. Although the
Thatcher administration in Britain (1979–90) made considerable efforts to cut
back the range of welfare services, and often talked of the need for private
charity to play a more important role, little real impact was made to the
structure of the system. General cuts in public expenditure, however, seriously
reduced the actual value of benefits and services. The need for cut-backs in the
welfare state continued to dominate domestic policy throughout Western
Europe, and even more in the previously communist East where a huge
percentage of GDP was dedicated to welfare benefits. No government has
so far found a way radically to cut the expenditure burden in these areas. Some
areas, like the British NHS, actually require huge additional resources because
of historic underfunding. In others, especially the payment of support to one-
parent families and the long-term unemployed, trends in both society and the
economy have arguably increased the funding required. As these trends have
coincided with a political position throughout the West which makes tax
Welfare State