“We need more than nostalgia. We need to rebuild the same working-class strength that forced concessions from a reluctant ruling class in the past, so that we can do so again”
By Jon Trickett MP
A simple truth
It’s hard to avoid noises coming from governing circles suggesting that our Welfare State needs to be cut while remaining quiet about the explosive growth in the wealth of the richest. But what is the background to these welfare-cutting noises?
There is a simple truth that the ruling class tries its very best to obscure: capitalism divides us into two classes. There are those who live off the labour of others, whether through the profits they extract from production or the rents they extract from owning the roof over someone’s head. Then there are those of us who must sell our labour to live. The first group controls the wealth that the second group creates. Every advance in social justice this country has ever won has come from challenging that arrangement and redistributing the wealth that working people produce but don’t own.
This was the understanding that built the British labour movement. It grew through the mills and mines of the nineteenth century, through the great suffrage struggles and the General Strike, into a political force that was strong enough by the middle of the twentieth century to reshape the British state itself.
Why 1945 happened
That moment arrived in 1945, and it’s worth remembering why. Demobilised soldiers who had fought fascism abroad were returning from war with no intention of going back to the poverty and unemployment they’d left behind. There was a working class that had tasted collective purpose during the war and would not be sent quietly back to the slums. And there was a broader recognition, shared even by sections of the establishment, that the old economic order that had produced mass unemployment, poverty, and ultimately the conditions in which fascism could grow, could not be allowed to return. Out of that pressure came a historic compromise. The ruling class conceded ground it would never have yielded voluntarily.
That is the context in which Clement Attlee’s government legislated the Welfare State. It is the context in which Aneurin Bevan, a miner’s son from Tredegar in South Wales, built the National Health Service against the bitter opposition of the medical establishment and the Conservative Party.
Nye understood that it was not a gift handed down. It was a battleground, and it remains so today.
The battle for renewal
We should be honest about where that battle now stands. The Welfare State we inherited bears only a passing resemblance to the one Bevan and his comrades envisioned. Social security has been redesigned as a system of punishment, sanctioning people for the crime of being poor. Council housing was once a source of security for millions but was sold off and never replaced, leaving a generation renting insecurely from private landlords. The NHS itself has been carved up piece by piece, with contracts handed to private providers who answer to shareholders rather than patients. Across the board, services that should operate according to human need now operate according to the logic of profit.
So, the task in front of us is not simply defence, though defence is necessary and urgent. It is renewal. We need to rebuild the redistributive settlement that 1945 represented. Progressive taxation on wealth has to be central to that, so that those who have hoarded the gains of forty years of privatisation and wage suppression are made to contribute their share. But redistribution alone will not be enough this time.
The Welfare State of 1945 was, for all its achievements, built from the top down. That model has proven vulnerable precisely because it left ordinary people as recipients rather than participants. If we are serious about renewing our Welfare State, we need democracy built into the foundations: patients and staff with real power over how the NHS is run; tenants with genuine control over housing; communities with a say over the public services that shape their daily lives. Ownership without democracy can easily produce new bureaucracies as out of touch as any corporate monopoly.
We have a lot to be proud of in Labour’s creation of the Welfare State. An alliance of social democrats and socialists worked together to transform Britain. But we need more than nostalgia. We need to rebuild the same working-class strength that forced concessions from a reluctant ruling class in the past, so that we can do so again. The battle continues, as long as there are folk left to fight for it.
- Jon Trickett is the Member of Parliament for Hemsworth: you can follow him on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram and TikTok.
- This article is from CLPD’s annual briefing, which you can read here.
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