implications of the idea. The Labour Party was most enthusiastic. It
made a priority of implementing rapidly, in three years, the entire
project outlined by Beveridge, and it insisted on the universality of
social insurances. The Conservatives remained more reluctant, and
tended to prefer gradualism and selective programs, aimed specifically
at the poor. For the left, social insurance stood as a key instrument to
promote equality and the emergence of a fair society. For the right,
these programs appeared more as necessary expedients, which risked
burdening the state budget, undermining market mechanisms, and
penalizing individual success. Conservatives were willing to assist the
poor but did not wish to equalize income or hinder private property.
“We believe,” stated a 1950 Conservative pamphlet that echoed the
earlier preoccupations of Jean-Baptiste Say, in “the strong helping the
weak rather than [in] weakening the strong.”^44
The worldwide postwar debate on social protection was thus set.
Beyond the broad consensus over the welfare state, the left always
pushed for universality, equality, and public intervention, while the
right favored focused, selective, or contributory programs, and called
for approaches that relied as much as possible on private and market
mechanisms. The left was consistently quick to demand immediate
relief for social ills and generous benefits for all. The right recurrently
worried about excessive costs and potentially negative effects on
individual morality and behavior.^45
The impacts of these orientations on public policies were strong and
durable. The comparative literature on the welfare state demonstrated
clearly that countries governed by the left privileged universal rather
than selective approaches, and spent more, and in a more egalitarian
way, on social programs than countries where the right was stronger.^46
Partisan politics, concluded a recent study, “was the single most impor-
tant factor that shaped the development of welfare states through
(^44) One Nation(1950), quoted in Timothy Raison,Tories and the Welfare State: A
History of Conservative Social Policy since the Second World War,
Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1990, p. 27; Alan Sked and Chris Cook,Post-War
Britain: A Political History, second edition, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1984,
45 pp. 38–39; Fraser,The Evolution of the British Welfare State, pp. 266–67.
Hugh Heclo,Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden: From Relief to
Income Maintenance, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974, pp. 296–97.
(^46) Francis G. Castles,The Future of the Welfare State: Crisis Myths and Crisis
Realities, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 94.
120 Left and Right in Global Politics