 William Beveridge Born: 1879, British India (now Bangladesh) Died: 1963 (aged 84) Oxford, England William Henry Beveridge was a British economist and Liberal politician who was a progressive and social reformer. His 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services (known as the Beveridge Report) served as the basis for the post-World War II welfare state put in place by the Labour government elected in 1945.He was considered an authority on unemployment insurance from early in his career, serving under Winston Churchill on the Board of Trade as Director of the newly created labour exchanges. Later, he was elected as a Liberal MP. Following his defeat in the 1945 general election, he entered the House of Lords, where he served as the leader of the Liberal peers.
Beveridge's father was an early humanist and positivist activist - an ardent disciple of the French philosopher Auguste Comte. Comte's ideas of a secular religion of humanity were a prominent influence in the household and had a lasting influence on Beveridge's thinking. Beveridge himself became a 'materialist agnostic' in his own words. Like George Bernard Shaw, and equally disappointingly, Beveridge was a member of the Eugenics Society, which promoted the study of methods to 'improve' the human race by controlling reproduction'. In 1909, he proposed that men who could not work should be supported by the state "but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights – including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood." (!!!) As a labour voter I was really shocked about this piece of history! Nothing's ever that simple is it? The good all mixed up with the appalling. Like Shaw, Beveridge could hardly be called a Humanist by todays standards. Quite the contrary :-( Eugenics is the dirty little secret of the British left. The names of the first champions read like a roll call of British socialism’s best and brightest: Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Marie Stopes, the New Statesman and even, lamentably, the Manchester Guardian. Nearly every one of the left’s most cherished, iconic figures espoused views which today most of us will find absolutely repulsive. Still - at least this disappointment leads us to a sterling feature of Humanism : the way it acknowledges how social attitudes shift over time. This is why Humanists don't have a fixed treatise, set in stone for all eternity in the way that the world's religions do. But rather a set of values, laid out in the Amsterdam Declaration, that we revise periodically, as we learn more about the universe and our human values evolve. |
