British Welfare State Analysis

The British Welfare state has become an important part of the British state politics since its establishment and development. Factors contributing to the establishment of the Welfare State includes population increase, unemployment, poverty and limited of resources (Clark,2007). The rapid and demographic changes after the World War II have seriously affected the Social policy system of Britain. Over the years, there has been reduction of costs and spending in response to economic difficulty causing the government to restructure the welfare state system particularly after the conservative welfare state reforms of the 1980.
The origin of the welfare state has evolved over the years starting from the16th century ((McAuley, 2003). Many have argued

It was called the Elizabeth Poor law and it had begun since 1601.The Poor Law was a mandated government system to provide aid in a form of money, food, clothing, shelter, pension and employment to the undeserving poor and the able-bodied ((Botelho, 2012)). “Poor children were to be apprenticed; the labouring poor or able bodied were to be given work and the idle to be punished and forcefully employed.” (Botelho, 2012). Parishes were put in charge of this system but with time, the poor law became expensive to run making parish officers find themselves with increasing poor relief obligations. As a result of this, they developed a network of national institution called the workhouse. Though this method increased the number of jobs available, it also decreased wages as well as poor rates.(Nationalarchives.gov.uk, 2018). There was a poor rate in wages by which employers were encouraged to employ individuals for less than the living wage. The poor rates were meant to help mostly two groups of people. One was the impotent poor or undeserving poor’ who were unable to support themselves as it wasn’t their fault they were poor such as the old and sick and the able-bodied (deserving poor) who were idle and mostly judged because they were reluctant to work (Longmate, 2003). Children who worked in the workhouse received harsh treatment making the poor hate working

Up until the mid-19th century, attitudes towards poverty was dominated by elitist views. Just like the elitist themselves, people in poverty were expected to solely take care of themselves. Social or economic factors were not seen as one of the issues that caused poverty; however, it was rather seen as something people were born with- like a defect they were birth with. They believed poverty was caused by the bad habits of the poor; for instance, their preference for gambling and drinking or through their own simple laziness (The British Library, 2018). This is because many Victorians didn’t understand poverty entirely. This implies that the Victorian society had created views which made the poor look irresponsible and therefore poor at their own expenses. They had their assumptions of poorness being caused by the poor themselves so this made it hard for them to understand why the poor would need any aid in raising their standards of living. According to Bowley(2016), the reason people were poor was the lack of work rather than low