For 80 years, the sentinel figure of what I knew as the “lunch lady” has patrolled school halls, dolloped mash, circumcised Frubes, and stood watch over dining rituals. This totemic British presence has long been a shorthand for pastoral care, hygiene, behavior management and nutrition. Yet today, school lunches are often outsourced and ultra-processed, and diminishing teams of lunchtime supervisors now have more on their plates than ever. Indeed, their current plight maps onto a deeper story of social neglect, institutional atrophy and cultural inequality within Britain’s education system.

Mrs Phipps tells me she was cared for by that first generation of lunch ladies back in the Fifties, and she’s been one herself for over 40 years. When she first tied her apron, in the Eighties, the number of households with children in poverty had rapidly increased and school lunches were crucial to filling bellies and nutritional gaps. “When I started, the food was much better,” Mrs Phipps attests. “We cooked fresh roasts, sausage and mash, stews, pies and fish and chips. Proper food, properly cooked.”

While this might sound like a menu from Weston-super-Mare pier, she assures me it was far more nutritious than the food provided today. “I wouldn’t give that to the dog,” Mrs Phipps says, showing me a conglomerate of pasta which would be easier to carve than ladle. It is small wonder, then, that in her school a vanishing number of children are opting for provided lunches.

And as Labour announces a “down payment” on its child poverty strategy — free school meals for every child in a family receiving Universal Credit — it still hasn’t realized that children don’t want to eat what it’s serving up. That’s partly thanks to the Government’s own regulations. With concerns about obesity rising, the strict emphasis on restricting salt, sugar and fat has severely limited school menu options. Mrs Phipps looks me in the eye: “Healthy eating is over the top in schools, and it’s having the opposite effect on kiddies’ relationships with their food.” Her school only allows ketchup once a week, and the jacket potatoes are served without butter, salt or pepper. Understandably, children often refuse to eat lunch, “then go home [after school] to fill up on treats”.

But Mrs Phipps doesn’t blame the government: she blames a celebrity chef. In 2004, obesity rates in children aged between two and 15 had ballooned from 12% in 1995 to 19%. Combined with — or perhaps caused by — the availability and affordability of highly processed foods and the higher costs associated with preparing fresh fruit and vegetables, the diet of British children was in dire need of reform. Enter Jamie Oliver who, despite admitting in 2014 that his kids “go to posh private schools”, decided he was the man for the job.

Oliver’s school lunches campaign was a landmark political and cultural moment, dominating headlines and attracting both compliments and condemnation from both sides of the school fence. He was transformed from an inoffensive “lovely-jubbly” Mockney chef to a divisive pseudo-Robin Hood. But instead of stealing from the rich to give to the poor, he sought taxpayer funding and lectured the working classes about quinoa.

Infrastructural overhaul is a hard nut to crack and Jamie’s campaign might have fared better had he not been so out of touch with the working classes. For him, after all, sourcing free food means a bucolic woodland stroll for wild garlic; for many of those he presumes to educate, it’s plucking a can of beans from a church food bank. His clumsy attempts to reform working-class food habits were painfully misguided: individualizing blame, and framing poor diets as a failure of personal responsibility rather than policy and resources.

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Feeding schoolchildren has not always been such a Sisyphean task. As far back as 1879, Manchester introduced free school lunches to the poorest children following the introduction of mandatory education. The logic was simple and undeniable: hungry children cannot learn. In the aftermath of the Second World War, meanwhile, school lunches became compulsory. This formed part of a larger nation-building project by Clement Attlee’s Labour government, which was committed to narrowing the class divide via the expansion of the welfare state. Better access to healthcare, housing and social security aimed to directly address increasing poverty and inequality. Ensuring children were well-fed was an integral part of Attlee’s strategy to rebuild Britain.

A cohort of women were recruited to oversee the new program. The colloquial “school dinners” were cooked on site, with pies crimped, vegetables locally-sourced and miles of jam roly-poly coiled by hand. Parents who opted their children in paid a shilling per day (equivalent to just over £1 today) with free meals available to the poorest. Today, though, Attlee’s vision of healthy, filling nutrition for growing bodies and brains has been all but scraped into the bin.

Mrs Phipps and her colleagues are not to blame for disgorging meals blander than anything that could have been scraped together with a ration book. Beyond that flurry of anti-food regulation, only 20% of UK schools have in-house catering. And despite Mrs Phipps’s having a full kitchen designed to serve hundreds, her school outsources 100% of its food which comes in pre-cooked and heated up on site. She suggests that the ready meals don’t live up to the initial promises from slick salespeople: “When we changed to private suppliers to save money, they brought examples and they were beautiful, but aren’t what we’re now given.”

There are many for-profit national caterers for both state and private schools, one of which is Chartwell’s. It is owned by Compass Group, which in September 2025 recorded £2.5 billion in operating profit, and has six peers in the House of Lords as shareholders. According to analysts Tussell, since 2012, Compass Group has been awarded public sector catering contracts amounting to over £856 million.

Chartwell’s boasts of connecting “thousands of pupils and students to nutritious, ethically sourced food through exceptional school catering services”. Its glossy marketing photographs show ethnically diverse children tucking into restaurant-quality meals — but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. In March 2024, headteacher of Redbridge Community Secondary School, Jason Ashley, went viral for publicizing the lackluster food Chartwell’s provided. In a letter to parents, the headteacher lamented: “We have concluded with our photo evidence that Chartwell’s do seem to be unable to ‘bake a potato’ correctly.”

If the role of lunchtime supervisors is now unrecognizable even from my own schooldays, the behavior of kids is too. Increasing numbers of children come to school without knowing how to use a knife and fork, hold a pen, or wash their hands. A survey by the early-years charity Kindred Squared of 1,000 primary school staff reveals that 37% of children can’t dress themselves, 29% can’t eat or drink without assistance, and one in four arrive at school not yet toilet trained. Mrs Phipps can’t blame Jamie Oliver for that, but she is quick to name another culprit: modern parenting. In her day, “if you were going to get a job, you were a full-time mum and a part-time worker, not the other way around.”

The real recipe for this growing disaster is perhaps more complicated. Studies show that the root causes of low “school readiness” are rising poverty, parental learning difficulties, illness and a lack of access to childcare. But the overall result is that school staff are left to (often literally) mop up the consequences of this shortfall. Parents do have to shoulder some blame. The Kindred Squared study shows that nearly half of parents believe that preparing a child to be “school ready” before reception is not their responsibility. Extrinsic factors aside, this epidemic of parental neglect forces all school staff to be drafted in to teach skills once considered rudimentary and default.

Poverty is not novel, of course, so why have these new gaps in child development emerged?

Such gaps were once successfully plugged with schemes like Sure Start, a 1998 initiative to support the health, childcare, and early learning — particularly in deprived areas — of families with children under five. But in the past two decades, over 1,000 Sure Start centres have been closed, and short-sighted governments have claimed that it’s not cost-effective to support children and families facing circumstantial hardship.

When Mrs Phipps first tied on her apron, lunchtime supervisors were mostly local mums who enjoyed cooking. Yet she and her colleagues now have to attend training courses on everything from positive behavior management, spotting signs of self-harm and GDPR. The expansion of lunchtime supervisors’ roles has led camaraderie among her colleagues to thin — everyone is stretched too far. And Mrs Phipps predicts that the greatest change is still to come: “There will soon be a time without dinner ladies.”

At one primary school in Northamptonshire, that moment has arrived. Outside, the playground is a frenzied blur of squawking children monitored by two teaching assistants. Inside, a ravenous jamboree is descending on the school hall where two cooks are plating up. The caretaker beckons me into a cupboard lined with shelves sagging under catering-sized containers. A coven of teachers are already there. He reaches behind a sealed vat of cereal and retrieves a nondescript tub. He glances back at the door, then pours a white powder into each of our palms. “You can have that,” he murmurs. “Don’t show the kids.” I dip my finger in it and put it in my mouth. It’s the good stuff: salt. The contraband is to season our otherwise bland food. I consider bagging some up to distribute to the kids.

In this school, the teachers have been handed the role of lunchtime supervisor alongside their adults-only seasoning. They are encouraged to eat alongside the children, earning a free meal while building community, monitoring behavior and modeling how to engage with the ritual of dining. Mrs Phipps’ minimum wage job has effectively been outsourced in exchange for a £2.60 plate of Friday’s fish fingers.

Observing from my long table, this system feels more like a Benidorm all-inclusive than a village primary. Each morning, children are issued colored wristbands denoting their pre-selected lunch — hot meal, salad bar, or the popular DIY sandwich option. The food is of a standard most state schools fail to reach. The 10- and 11-year-olds are then enlisted to help the younger ones assemble their meals, coaxed into service with the irresistible bribe of extra food which they actually enjoy eating. As lunch quietens down, and the salad bar begins to resemble a Pollock, I watch children line up to scrape their leftovers into the compost bins. They are unnervingly calm and I wonder what exactly was in the coleslaw. The tranquility shatters the moment I ask the hive mind what they’d change about their lunch: “Pudding!”, they chorus.

Although it might appear like a well olive-oiled machine, the reality is far more complicated. The school employs a business manager who oversees the administrative and operational functions of the school, once the domain of the head teacher. Half of all primary schools now have someone in this role, which hypothetically frees up other staff to focus on learning or, in this school at least, to supervise lunchtime.

The business manager explains that the quality and diversity of choice to adequately feed the children places the school on a financial knife-edge. Government funding provides universal infant school meals for all children up to Year 2 (ages six to seven) and meals for children whose parents receive Universal Credit — more than 40 pupils in this school. Everyone else has to pay. However, the allocation is just £2.53 per meal — 7p less than they’re sold for. “Once you factor in staffing, food, utilities, and water,” the business manager adds, “our budget simply doesn’t stretch far enough.”

This is in stark contrast to private schools, where students can eat their cake and have it. In these institutions, children are treated to carefully prepared meals, served by a dutiful division of lunchtime supervisors. One such school, Coopersale Hall School in Essex, which costs over £5,000 a term, boasts on their website that they “provide an extremely high [food] budget per pupil — around four times as much per day as in most state schools”. They describe how this includes sourcing food from local farmers, greengrocers and butchers.

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Private school kitchens that outsource to third parties like Chartwell’s are afforded a wholly different experience: reiterating the importance of funding to food. At St Faith’s School in Cambridge, where the fees can be as much as £25,000 a year, Chartwell’s reportedly installed an in-house smoker. Meanwhile, state school pupils are left wondering if the carrot sticks on their £2.53 plate count as local if they come from the nearest Costco.

The schools that educate the country’s elite know just how vital nutrition is, not just to physical health but to brain development and focus. A good, healthy meal is a conduit to developing social, behavioral and educational standards that have ramifications for children’s entire lives. The 2006 Wider Benefits of Learning Research Report found that nutritional deficiency in children had an impact on brain performance and that maintaining adequate glucose levels throughout the day (by not consuming ultra-processed or sugar-heavy foods) optimizes cognition. This can have knock-on behavioral consequences, which in turn impacts school performance and interaction with peers — not to mention how poor nutrition results in greater susceptibility to disease.

It’s hard, here, not to return to the question of money. Back in 1968, Labour eliminated free school milk for secondary school children on grounds of cost, before objecting strongly when Margaret Thatcher sponsored the proposal to remove free milk for seven-to-11 year olds in 1971. Thatcher, for her part, scrapped the minimum nutritional standards for school meals that had been in place for decades, along with the legal requirement for Local Education Authorities to provide a school meal service. The results were devastating. By 1999, according to a Cambridge study, children’s diets were worse than the Fifties. The Iron Lady had replaced iron, calcium and vitamin-rich foods with fizzy drinks and baked beans. As schools were no longer obligated to fill the nutritional gap, standards hit rock bottom.

It’s unfortunate, meanwhile, that a more radical opportunity for change than what Labour has suggested has been squandered. Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of the Leon restaurant chain, was appointed non-executive director of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in 2018. He oversaw the 2021 National Food Strategy, a comprehensive government review proposing major changes for healthier, sustainable food. Its recommendations include a sugar and salt reformulation tax (using some of the revenue to help get fresh fruit to low-income families) — an idea based on the success of the Soft Drinks Industry Levy, which led to reductions in sugar consumption and raised hundreds of millions of pounds for schools. The proposal additionally called for the extension of the eligibility criteria for free school meals — something Dimbleby had repeatedly called for since he and John Vincent wrote the School Food Plan in 2013. The proposal aimed to disrupt what Dimbleby dubs the “junk food cycle” — the snowballing of large companies making increasingly processed and cheaper foods. The Government failed to act and Dimbleby resigned in 2023.

The dinner lady may be next down the drain. Since 1944, she has been more than a hair-netted ladler of gravy. She’s an emblem, a keeper of the peace and a guiding presence in the time breaking up the day. Yet austerity, unaddressed shifts in gender roles, and overstretched budgets are quietly melting this long standing institution — just when children, teachers, and parents may need them most. Thanks to austerity, changing demographics, and overstretched budgets, lunchtime supervisors are now too busy, too few, and are lumbered with too many responsibilities that exceed their original purpose. “I’m coming up on 80,” Mrs Phipps tells me. “I’ll do it as long as I can. When I’ve had enough, I’ll leave. And they won’t replace me — it’ll just be another one down.”

I say goodbye to Mrs Phipps as the school bell tolls. She wipes the tables, slowly lowers the kitchen shutter, and hangs her tabard on the back of a door. She represents the routines and nutritional standards that once unified children across class and culture. Whoever serves it, it’s clear that in 2025 Britain is starving for a renewed moral economy of care.

But the real question for the Treasury is which other property-owners should be hit with additional taxes, all to help plug the gaps in Britain’s depressingly leaky budget. Unfortunately, based on history anyway, we’re not likely to get an answer. The truth is that, over decades, this country has become reliant on a powerful legion of amateur private landlords. And whether we like it or not, no government can meet the country’s basic housing needs without them — even as they make life harder for everyone else. 

With over 2.8 million across the country, Britain boasts roughly double the number of landlords as it does NHS staff, the country’s largest employer, while also outnumbering teachers four to one. Yet this isn’t a singular class, but rather a motley bunch of part-timers. Their main gigs vary from dentists to solicitors, from retired expats to Chancellor of the Exchequer. Their rental properties are there to afford them some additional income on the side. 

This makes them a hard bunch to control or predict. How do you get them to keep their rents at least roughly in line with wages? How do you ensure they won’t sell up when you pursue decent policy objectives like tackling energy-inefficient home boilers? How can you make sure they will license their properties when the local authority says they have to? Such a situation makes our market dysfunctional, especially as these part-time landlords have become the primary providers of homes to those in most desperate need. As social housing growth has essentially flatlined, and house prices have soared out of reach, tenants now include low-income families, poorer pensioners and the homeless. 

This tension between small-time investors trying to maximize their income, and a societal need for affordable housing, is at the heart of our housing problem — and which a braver Chancellor would tackle head-on. 

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Take housing benefit expenditure. This financial year, the Government is projected to spend £35 billion on housing benefit support, largely through Universal Credit. This is up by more than £10 billion from a decade ago, and has doubled in real terms since the Nineties. In addition to this, local authority expenditure on emergency homelessness accommodation has ballooned out of control. The figure, paid mostly out of local authority budgets, has now hit £2.8 billion — having been less than half that figure as recently as 2018. In London, the bill to councils is more than £5 million a day. This has caused catastrophic financial crises for the worst-hit town halls.

Vast sums of both of these budgets go directly into the pockets of private landlords. The New Economics Foundation estimates that £73 billion in housing benefit will be paid to private landlords between 2024 and 2029, while many of the most expensive “temporary accommodation” sites used by town halls are nightly let homes rented out privately. Through deals like this, individual landlords with no registered company can receive millions in state cash in just a few years.

This is terrible fiscal policy. Spending housing benefit in social housing is cheaper on a per-home basis, and keeps the money in the system (the councils and housing associations who provide social housing recycle any “surplus” from their rents into maintenance and new build). Spending state money building social housing is better still, since it creates an asset which the state will own for generations, meaning building costs can also be recovered over time.

And yet, Reeves, like all of her recent predecessors, has neglected to think about the bigger picture. At the last fiscal event, she grabbed as much money as she could find for new social housing developments, settling on £39 billion over 10 years. This was a welcome funding boost to the social housing sector, and a big rise on anything offered under the recent Conservative governments. But it is still only just over half the sum we will hand over to private landlords over the next five years.   

This is a continuation of the same flawed policy that created the homelessness crisis in the first place, which only truly emerged over the last 15 years. Figures now show 131,140 households in temporary accommodation — up from 50,000 in 2010. This is a direct consequence of relying on private landlords to meet the needs of those on lower incomes. As private rents have risen, while housing benefits have been capped, councils have run out of homes to offer to people whose wages no longer cover the rent. 

For most of the 20th century, private renting was a very different beast. Rent controls were introduced into the market in 1915, after landlords in Glasgow attempted to hike rates by 25% and, with most of the men fighting in war, the city’s women went on rent strike. This led to emergency war-time rental protections, which survived in some form until the Eighties. Moreover, private tenants had access to long-term security of tenure. 

Back then, landlords saw themselves as part of a particular community. Old-school businesses and occasionally paternalistic organizations became involved: the Sutton family, former dockers who had been investing in property since the 19th century, dominated the area of East London I grew up in. But others were sharks, who did their best to operate outside the legal structures. Associated with organized crime, they sought the most vulnerable tenants, often new immigrants. Peter Rachman, who owned more than 100 properties in West London, gained such a strong reputation for bullying and intimidating tenants that “Rachmanism” now describes this form of semi-legal landlord exploitation. Conditions in these homes were a living disaster: whole families in single rooms, outside toilets, rat infestations. 

But by the Seventies, all types of private landlords were dying out. Property prices were low enough that many working families could afford to buy — and decades of major building programs meant those who couldn’t were still able to get a council house.

Indeed, even Right-wing commentators at the time believed the decline of private landlords was “quite irreversible” and that within a generation they would be “as extinct as the dinosaur”. Instead, we took a different path. In 1976, the UK got itself into financial trouble and had to go to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. The terms of the loan demanded brutal spending cuts: and specifically targeted expenditure on new council housing. The IMF wanted the state out and the private sector in.

This was followed, three years later, by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. A leader who enthusiastically embraced the IMF’s philosophy, she cut spending on new council housing almost to nil, and introduced the Right to Buy policy, which saw millions of homes in the existing stock rapidly sold off. In 1988, Thatcher liberalized the rental market, axing rental control and introducing short-term tenancies with “no-fault” evictions. The idea was that private landlords would replace the state: people who couldn’t afford to buy would no longer get council housing. Instead, they would rent privately and claim housing benefit to meet the higher costs. As one of Thatcher’s housing ministers, George Young, said in 1991: “If people cannot afford to pay that market rent, housing benefit will take the strain.” 

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Then, in the Nineties, as global interest rates fell and banks made it easier to get mortgages for investment property, a tidal wave of money suddenly began to flow into landlordism. The money, though, did not come from large institutional investors as Thatcher had hoped: but rather from regular people who had a bit of spare cash and little prospect for a lucrative retirement through their pension. A survey from 2001 showed 65% of privately rented dwellings were owned by individuals, with less than one in ten owned by property companies. Altogether, just 9% of landlords saw their job as a full-time occupation. The era of the side-hustler had begun. 

Today, Labour and Reeves continue to grapple with the consequences of these choices. There have been some steps in the right direction, what with the ending of no-fault evictions, and the imposition of major new obligations on landlords to cover repairs. Yet the single biggest problem remains: side-hustlers can always walk away. As our national demand for rental homes continues to rise, ministers are left in a bind, worrying about the ramifications of rocking the boat too sharply. House prices have risen to such an extent that we need a large amount of housing to rent. The state no longer provides enough, and so an absence of rental housing soon implies homelessness. Ministers and local authorities are terrified — rightly or wrongly — of private landlords selling up.

Reeves and her colleagues hope that big investors will step up, if small-timers step out. But this is wishful thinking: investors are more interested in the top of the market than the bottom; the gritty rooms in HMOs are of little interest to international money. These sort of properties look destined to remain in the hands of modern day Rachmans. Remember the 41-year-old man who was killed in a fire in a former Tower Hamlets council flat in March 2023. It later emerged that he shared a two-bedroom flat with up to 20 other adults; with no cooking facilities they had to rely on the landlord to provide food. 

The Chancellor herself will likely get away with her own side-hustle misdemeanors, but it’s her fiscal rules that will make solving the wider crisis difficult to achieve. To make a start on a sustainable solution, we need to use our housing expenditure to build up low-cost social housing stock, rather than blowing it on benefits — and that isn’t something her current economic principles will allow. 

So instead, we will continue to tap wealthy homeowners for taxes which we then hand to wealthy landlords, who provide housing which is all too often substandard. A housing strategy for the country would mean plotting a way out of this cycle of doom, and imagining a future where we no longer treat housing as a route to quick profits and instead as essential social infrastructure which we cannot do without.  

Back then, in the early Seventies, both the school and Briggs himself comfily inhabited parallel worlds. The school bussed suburban kids from semis in Finchley or Edgware to its rolling acres (much used for TV shoots) not far from the Elstree Studios. As for Briggs, the great popular historian and tireless educational entrepreneur trailed a discreetly glorious military past as a backroom war winner. A code-breaker in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park, he had become the youngest warrant officer in the British army and once held (improbably enough) the rank of Regimental Sergeant Major (RSM). When, in 1945, the fellows of Worcester College, Oxford learned that their incoming young colleague was an RSM, some feared a roaring moustachioed martinet. What they got was a short, rather tubby and affable Yorkshireman.

Briggs, and a handful of other figures of his kind, loomed over my youth like secular divinities. Thanks to him and his influence, in the sixth form I scrutinized the prospectus for Sussex as if studying a tourist guide to Shangri-La. Although other, equally glamorous, citadels of the “plateglass” sector that Briggs championed appealed almost as much (York! Kent! East Anglia!), my teachers put an end to such fancies and sent me briskly down the “ancient university” track. I still have twinges of regret about missing Sussex and its boundary busting, interdisciplinary studies in its almost-prime — although, with 20 applicants then vying for each arts place, it might well have found me wanting. Those pangs hint at the charismatic spell that Briggs and his ideas, for a while, could cast.

At that time, Asa Briggs from Keighley, via Bletchley Park, Oxford and Leeds Universities, embodied the postwar Great and Good with a bumptious confidence and charm. Historian David Cannadine called him “the Macaulay of the Welfare State” and Tristram Hunt (now director of the V&A) “the last great Victorian improver”. Around the time that he descended on my school to bless a parade of boy soldiers, he was not just running Sussex and juggling (as usual) half a dozen books. He had recently chaired the Briggs Committee on nursing and midwifery. Enacted from 1979, its proposals transformed nursing education more thoroughly than any changes since the age of Florence Nightingale.

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Committed to Sussex, he was batting away juicily prestigious job offers — Oxbridge college headships, an assistant directorship at UNESCO in Paris (Richard Hoggart, fêted author of The Uses of Literacy, got that), the inaugural direction of the European University Institute in Florence — as lesser mortals swot flies. Meanwhile, the BBC not only paid him a hefty annual stipend to trudge through his multi-volume History of Broadcasting in Britain (five parts, 1961-1995) but funded an entire research unit to support it. He wielded, it seemed, an almost-occult power not only to refresh the past — in widely-read and enjoyed books such as The Age of Improvement, Victorian Cities and Victorian People — but to reform the present. No wonder the slightly rotund scholarship boy from the West Riding inspired not simply respect but a kind of awe. Even Iris Murdoch had once fallen in love with Briggs. “You rational romantic,” the novelist purred. “Without your cool head nearby, how can I see the world properly?”

An entire generation, or two, came to feel that way. Adam Sisman’s new biography, The Indefatigable Asa Briggs, has a title that makes him sound like a Victorian battleship (how apt!) but otherwise supplies a full, fair, if kind, account of life and work. Sisman, whose past subjects include John le Carré and AJP Taylor, rightly dubs him a “progressive modernizer”. Ennobled in 1976 (along with his friend Benjamin Britten), he sat as a crossbencher; it was thought that the avid firstclass seminar goer and lecture giver should have taken the title “Lord Briggs of Heathrow”. In a confidential testimonial, an Oxford friend once wrote that “He is not at all a dottily radical figure but he does believe in a fair society”. But his moderately left-of-center stance never stopped him from fronting a cross-party post-1945 program of educational and cultural expansion built on the solid rocks of full employment and the welfare state. Those rocks began to erode in the Seventies, and with it the world that Asa and his bustling fellow improvers made. In a 1985 assessment, written in the heyday of Thatcherism, Cannadine noted that “the march of events has transformed Briggs from being a conformist into being a dissenter”.

In the Eighties, after he had returned to Worcester as Provost (he retired in 1991), Briggs had added to his bulging portfolio of trusteeships a post as chair of the Church of England’s Advisory Committee on Redundant Churches. By that point, he looked in danger of becoming a Redundant Church himself: his congregation dwindling, his monuments in disrepair. The meritocratic liberal mandarin class he embodied had run out of road, and of puff. The consensus they had nurtured — a conviction that high tax revenues should fund both robust public services and ever wider opportunities for the next generation — frayed or crumbled. Their national story of social and cultural uplift for the many (but not that many, by 21st-century standards) now faced challenge by critics who saw it as a sentimental fable to mask long-term economic stasis. Noel Annan — a far more patrician figure than Briggs, but one who shared the Yorkshireman’s institutional values and skills — rounds off his terrific 1990 elegy for this generation, Our Age, with a plaintive chapter entitled “Our vision of life rejected”. A whole generation further on, Sisman’s life of Briggs lets us see whether that rejection actually happened — and whether it would have been correct.

I had expected Sisman to confirm a familiar narrative: that the more-or-less centrist, “Butskellite”, overlords of the postwar welfare-and-education state found themselves humbled by Thatcherites and free-marketeers, red in tooth and claw. To a degree, that did occur. By 1992, even ever-supportive Auntie BBC — with John Birt its cost-cutting director-general — had shut down Briggs’s research office. When he had published a digested single-volume history of the Corporation, alpha columnist Peter Jay mocked its author in The Times as “the Venerable Briggs”, “meticulous, uncritical, unilluminating, shy of issues, and immensely boring”. The times, and The Times, had changed. But Sisman shows as well that Briggs and his critics in the final decades of the 20th century had more in common than they often suspected. In 1990, Annan could see only rupture and rejection. In 2025, the “liberal elite” of the time and their conservative detractors look more like fractious cousins than warring tribes.

Nothing illuminates this kinship better than the extraordinary history of Briggs’s six decades of association with Rupert Murdoch. With Briggs a junior history don at Worcester, and Murdoch the low achieving undergraduate son of an Australian newspaper boss, the pair and other friends drove around Turkey in 1951 in Murdoch’s new Ford Zephyr. Briggs then coached Murdoch so that the Australian scraped a Third, after his father’s sudden death had wrenched him from his studies. Thus a “permanent bond” formed. After all, the lad from Keighley Trades and Grammar School had no more time for upper-crust “snobbery and condescension” than the upstart Antipodean.

The pair kept loyally in touch: Murdoch came to Briggs’s landmark parties, and flew in for his memorial service in 2016. Amazingly, for those who like to picture British society in comforting binary diagrams, Murdoch actually negotiated his purchase of the News of the World — his crucial breakthrough into UK newspaper ownership — while staying with Asa and Susan Briggs in Lewes. The current proprietor lived nearby. Briggs’s daughter, Katharine, started to worry about the phone bill the wannabe tycoon was running up. Within months, Murdoch had added The Sun to his nascent empire. Historians with a taste for hyperbole might argue that the foremost intellectual advocate of the postwar progressive state had nurtured its principal mass-media gravedigger.

But then Briggs, like many of his coevals, pursued reform more as a spirit than a doctrine. That spirit certainly never ruled out commercial ambition. His erudite interest in Victorian entrepreneurship — above all, in relatively egalitarian Birmingham — made him the house historian of choice for companies who sought a scholarly but sympathetic record of their past. Marks & Spencer, Longmans publishers, Lewis’s department stores, Victoria Wines: Briggs picked up generous fees for these projects (up to £200,000 each, in 2025 values) even if he missed the deadlines for years on end. He had himself grown up a grocer’s son who served behind the counter, although Willie Briggs’s Keighley store went bust and ruined the family’s finances. And when another grocer’s child took power, in 1979, his political distance from her was modified by a kind of temperamental affinity.

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By Joseph Williams

In 1985, when Oxford dons rejected the award of an honorary degree to Margaret Thatcher, the Provost of Worcester privately called the vote a “terrible mistake”. Each may have defined “Victorian values” in different ways; for Briggs, they mandated a proud public sector and social solidarity. Still, four decades later, their generational bonds make the political opponents of this cohort look increasingly alike. The admirers who gathered at Briggs’s retirement parties in 1991 included not only Rupert Murdoch but Isaiah Berlin, Richard Attenborough, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Roger Bannister and John Sainsbury — the grandest grocer of all, and a close friend since undergraduate days.

It could be that Murdoch and his fellow-disrupters of the Thatcher and post-Thatcher period needed the world that Briggs and his peers had built; just as young Rupert needed Asa to steer him through exams to a degree. They kicked against the institutions the Briggsians had labored to edify, from Sussex University itself to the BBC, the NHS, and every cultural pillar of the age. Yet their critique tacitly assumed that the walls would hold against the onslaught. Thatcher herself never “dismantled” the post-1945 welfare state; as a journalist who covered the public sector in the Eighties, I can testify that economic de-industrialization made it busier than ever. As for The Sun, and even The Times, without the resilience of the Venerable Briggs and his kind, they would have shot their barbs of scorn into thin air. It is a moot point whether the supposedly radical conservatives of the pre-millennial decades really wished to wreck the system Briggs did so much to create, or whether their heirs want to do so now. If so, they would have to own the consequences. When universities of the sort that Briggs fostered start to close, we’ll begin to know.

For now, much of his legacy endures. If Sussex has lost its luster (although even in the Sixties he had to defend controversial speakers against “deplatforming”), the Open University — which he helped plan, and served as Chancellor for 16 years — faces few calls for abolition. At the BBC, the entirely Briggsian figure of David Attenborough (brother of Asa’s good mate Dickie) commands oceans-deep public esteem. Briggs aimed to fling open the doors of knowledge, and he did. Forever in transit, perpetually overcommitted, the “Galloping Professor” sometimes emerges as a figure of fun in Sisman’s able hands. “What is the difference between the Lord and Lord Briggs?” Trevor-Roper quipped at Oxford. “The Lord is always with us.” Malcolm Bradbury guyed him as the trendy trimmer Millington Harsent, vice-chancellor of the “University of Watermouth”, in his campus satire The History Man. But he helped huge numbers to travel further, and reach higher, than ever before. If that model of “improvement” is kaputt, Briggs and his crew did not smash it.

*The Indefatigable Asa Briggs by Adam Sisman (William Collins, £30)

We were promised “a 1945 moment”. This isn’t it. The welfare fiasco tells a broader story, of the failures of nearly half a century of political economy that decimated industrial Britain, and the inability of all politicians to go beyond managed decline and build a new economic model. Starmer is just the latest bit-part player.

The year 1945 is Year Zero in the Labour imaginary: the foundation of the modern, social-democratic nation-state, before which life was nasty, brutish and short. Its mythic status has only grown as the pillars of the post-war settlement have eroded. The nationalised utilities are now owned by foreign governments and hedge funds. The NHS buckles under the pressures of demographics, PFI bills, and squeezed capital spending. The state-owned industrial behemoths have been replaced by strip-lit private office blocks. And the trade unions’ tacit alliance with the government — cosy meetings and “beer and sandwiches” at No. 10 — has been replaced by a default pose of mutual hostility.

But what remains of Clement Attlee’s dream? The British state, withered, maintains a vast, bureaucratic infrastructure for redistributive cash transfers; a complex sorting-house for the conversion of tax revenues into welfare benefits. Indeed, the two phenomena are interlinked. Full employment is no longer a primary aim of public policy. Instead, the manufacturing industries and broad armies of manual labor have declined in inverse proportion to the number of people reliant on incapacity payments. It’s no coincidence that the places most dependent on DWP largesse are synonymous with economic decline: Port Talbot, Inverclyde and Hartlepool all make the top 10.

The promise of Blairism was to make peace with the Thatcherite model, a Faustian pact with the City and with growth driven by household debt and consumer credit. But welfare would be strengthened. New Labour’s Third Way would function by allowing the neoliberal revolution to continue unabated — privatisations, deregulation, globalisation, marketisation — while Gordon Brown’s fiscal transfers would expand the pool of winners from the social contract.

Pit closures towards the end of the last century were immediately followed by localized spikes in unemployment in the former coalfield. Those lingering for too long in the dole queues were quietly shifted to incapacity benefits, disguising the true picture of joblessness. And this journey from unemployment to disability is now a long-established pathway. It was the unspoken deal for the downwardly mobile citizens of deindustrialised Britain: mass redundancies would be clumsily compensated for with a more-or-less permanent welfare offer, from salt of the earth and the dignity of labor, to Benefits Street. We’ve medicalised and pathologised the effects of structural and economic shifts, of deindustrialisation, and the rise of a service economy geared exclusively towards the skillsets of urbanised graduates.

It’s small wonder, then, that a disability benefits raid would provoke a very modern Labour rebellion among the PLP. Blairism only worked when buoyed by strong global growth, and Starmer doesn’t have that. Having abandoned any project for the creation of a new model, or for reforming capitalism (let alone transcending it), welfarism and cash transfers remain one of social democracy’s only remaining raison d’etre. For the contemporary Labour MP, think less class fighter, more social worker. Most of them, for all their professional-managerial, corporate and third sector backgrounds, think of themselves as the stalwart defenders, if not of your normie, average worker, then certainly as an advocate for the very poor, the near-destitute, and, crucially, the benefit-dependent. To remove income from such people reeks of the dark days of Osbornite ascendancy, of the language of “shirkers and strivers”

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But there’s a problem. The past half decade has seen an explosion in incapacity claims driven, in large part, by mental ill health. The average age of claimants is trending downward, as the young increasingly report anxiety, depression, ADHD and other mental disorders. The extent to which this represents a health phenomenon or a cultural shift is a matter of interpretation. The British stiff upper lip came with its own destructive tendencies. But in the new, Americanized world, any and all pushback on an individuals’ subjectivity, “their truth”, is frowned upon. The result is a very modern “epidemic”, driven, in essence, by diagnostic self-ID involving a set of self-reported symptoms, and a growing cohort of jobless young adults, coming with a large price tag. While underlying population health has barely shifted, the pre-pandemic peak of £16 billion annual government spending on incapacity benefit is projected to balloon to £100 billion by the end of the decade. Something has to give.

And yet the Government chose the bluntest of instruments to try to reduce the welfare bill by a mere £5 billion. Instead of reassessing the more spurious claims, or initiating a jobs and training guarantee, benefits would be cut for a broad range of recipients, including physically disabled people, in wheelchairs, incapable of work. This wasn’t welfare reform, it was a Treasury and OBR grab. It wasn’t a Bill for creating secure, well-paid work through investment-led growth, but for punitive measures targeted against people who cannot wash and bath themselves unaided, and all to satisfy the tea-leaf fiscal and growth predictions of a faceless public body.

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But the row signals something bigger than welfare inequities. It is the beginning of the end of the nonentity of Starmerism. As a result of No. 10’s blank intellectual hinterland, we see an administration at the mercy of events, without a clear project, without a domestic vision, and unable to meet the ubiquitous challenges facing contemporary Britain. Nothing works and nothing is possible. Starmer promised “Change”, but the public is giving up on the possibility of deliverance, on the ability of the state to actually do things. The country is becoming ungovernable. In these conditions, instead of signalling a desire for change, the next election will only result in a cry of hopeless rage. Starmer has nothing in his locker that will alter the dynamic. He knows it, hence his retreat to the international stage, where the bone-dry language of diplomacy suits his neutral tones. There, at the summits, this apolitical Prime Minister can appear above the fray of mere politics.

The only consistent hallmark of his project is the bifurcation between its analysis of our malaise, and the solutions it proposes. Failed welfare reform efforts are only the latest example: a hollowed-out industrial base, stagnant real wages and a culture of chronic economic inactivity is met by a set of puny cuts to personal independence payments. Now these tweaks to the minutiae are undeliverable. National renewal is unthinkable. Backbenchers have eyes on their slender majorities — they’ve seen Starmer flip-flopping, disavowing his own past 12 months in The Observer, and they know he has no plan. They are now emboldened, smelling blood, perhaps Morgan McSweeney’s, or perhaps Rachel Reeves’s.

Tony Benn used to talk about weathervane politicians, but our current Prime Minister is more akin to a plastic bag blowing in the wind. The void at the top allows factional actors to transpose any number of worldviews onto the blank canvas of Downing Street’s vision. There’s Blue Labour Starmer, progressive Starmer, and technocratic Starmer, who bristles at the mention of any superfluous “isms”. We once had Corbynite Starmer.

After the welfare vote, we have zombie Starmer, in office but not in power. Reforming welfare treats the symptom, not the cause. It’s palliative care, relatively straightforward compared with the real task of building a new economic paradigm that provides secure, well-paid employment across the country. That would be a real 1945 moment — but it would require a solid ideological grounding, bound up in intensely political struggles, contested notions of the common good, and a new political economy. Starmerism can’t even do tinkering. Its time is up.

Except that Britain is already the historic home of Christian nationalism. We have, after all, had a nationally established Christian church since 1534. Since then, this body has (as the name “Church of England” suggests) sought to hold in homeostasis England’s spiritual and political bodies, as both Christian, and a nation.

Can it last, though? Last week’s Commons vote in favour of a bill permitting state-licensed suicide points toward England now being more post-Christian than not. And if the UK is now post-Christian, so too our current ruling uniparty seems increasingly post-national; the enthusiasm shown by the current lot for handing away national possessions such as the Chagos Islands and — just this week — the Elgin Marbles are only the two most recent cases in point.

We got from the historic version of Christian nationalism to our contemporary post-Christian, post-national state ideology via a secular pseudo-church. This emerged within the Anglican Church, spread via its social structures, and then replaced Anglicanism as England’s established faith: the welfare state, and centrally, the NHS. Its unwitting midwives were the welfare state’s 19^th-century precursor: England’s church ladies.

This bourgeois group, metonymically referred to at the time as “Mrs Grundy”, represented the public moral conscience of the country. Tireless institution-builders, the Mrs Grundies of the 19^th century were often largely content to leave industry, formal politics, and military and imperial matters to men, believing women’s “sphere” instead encompassed family, education, and moral leadership: a figurative as well as literal maternalism that paired satisfyingly with guardianship of the nation’s moral character.

To this end, Mrs Grundy founded charities, schools, and poor relief initiatives. She published improving literature. She campaigned for women’s education. Supported by bodies such as the Girls’ Friendly Society, the Mothers’ Union, and the National Union of Women Workers, a vast network of social reform initiatives flourished across the country.

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In most cases, these were profoundly shaped by Mrs Grundy’s Christian faith: the Girls’ Friendly Society (GFS), for example, was founded in 1875 with the support of the Anglican Church, and aimed to support young working-class women who left their homes in the country to take up work in England’s rapidly growing and industrialising cities. The explicit aim was to provide “for every working girl of unblemished character a friend in a class above her own”. Similarly, the Mothers’ Union, founded 1876 (again with the blessing of the Anglican Church) shared with the GFS an aspiration to moral reform of the nation, and to strengthening the Empire through womanly influence. It aimed, according to its own mission statement, “To uphold the sanctity of marriage and to awaken in mothers of all classes a sense of their great responsibility as mothers in the training of their boys and girls (the future fathers and mothers of the Empire)”. Thousands of Mothers’ Union groups, publicised by their popular periodicals, formed the backbone of the now-mocked “Jam and Jerusalem” version of Anglican piety.

Patriotic, pious, maternalist, and energetically pro-Empire, Mrs Grundy represented Victorian Britain’s moral mainstream: the real, historic Christian nationalists. Largely framed by the Church of England, Mrs Grundy worked to improve her nation’s moral fibre from the family level upwards, all for the greater glory of God and the British Empire. Over the same period, though, other intellectual currents sought to channel the same broadly Christian impulse toward social reform in less overtly religious directions.

Positivism, for example, developed by the French thinker Auguste Comte, recognised only what could be scientifically verified. Positivists opposed empire, and decried Christianity as a superstitious remnant of an earlier age, while (long before Fukuyama) celebrating the industrial era as the endpoint of human development. Positivism heavily influenced women such as the Women’s Guild organiser Ethel Harrison, who embraced Comte’s vision of women’s distinct social role as moral improver amid a new “religion of Social Service” that would replace the old explicitly theological type.

In this sense, Harrison typified the Positivist efforts to square their philosophy with a still heavily Christian-flavoured moral framework, that emphasised principles such as public service, concern for the weak, and universal equality. And they were hardly the only Victorians keen to salvage Christian moral intuitions while ditching the Christian story. The Fellowship of the New Life, a forebear of Britain’s Ethical and Humanist movements, promoted pacifism, unselfish communitarianism and material simplicity with unmistakably Christian overtones — just without the Christian eschatology. Its most noted spin-off was the Fabian Society, which would go on to shape the intellectual outlook of the Labour Party all the way to its present-day avatar, Keir Starmer.

Such unconventional thinkers often socialised and collaborated with more conventional church ladies. For example, despite Positivism’s opposition to Christianity and imperialism, Ethel Harrison was close friends with several much more conventionally Christian and patriotic social reformers. But if these ladies collaborated in public life, their underlying worldviews were in conflict. And from today’s vantage-point, it’s evident that the secularisers won.

But Mrs Grundy wasn’t so much abolished, as nationalised. By the early 20th century many of the institutions founded by church ladies had grown so indispensable to the social fabric they were eventually absorbed into national welfare infrastructure: schools and hospitals were absorbed into state education, for example, while the patrician home-visiting once performed by Mothers’ Union ladies became social work under the eye of local authorities. In the process, the “Jam and Jerusalem” piety and overt Christian ethos that inspired them were progressively sanded away. In its place, the worldview represented in Mrs Grundy’s heyday by groups such as the Positivists and Fellowship of the New Life came into its own: a version of the Christian public service ethos featureless, ductile and “neutral” enough to be delivered by impersonal bureaucracy, rather than officious matrons.

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In this way, imperceptibly, the version of the established Church of England that dominated the high Victorian era gave way to a new established Church: one in which God and Caesar converge in a bureaucratic, state-managed nationwide project of moral reform and poor relief, with “tithes” or “fundraising” now formalised as general taxation. Perhaps its most obviously religious manifestation today is the devotion inspired by the NHS, as when, during Covid, we closed churches, schools, pubs, and much else besides in the name of our all-important collective duty to “save the NHS”.

The clarity of national moral focus, in a crisis, was underlined by the one in-person collective action we were still allowed: the “Clap for Carers” coordinated five-minute exeat from our homes to join in ritual applause, for the NHS workers’ holy preservation of our bodily safety and wellbeing. The only reason this partially escapes being seen as a religious practice is that its values are the post-Christian, secular ones that spun out of the collision between Victorian Christianity and scientific materialism.

Meanwhile, too, if this new established church preserved a thinned-out, neutralised version of Christianity, so it also preserved a dilute “civic” form of the nationalism — as an enabling mechanism for the welfare state. For, very reductively, National Insurance presupposes a nation. More subtly, too, willingness to pay the taxes that fund requires high levels of social solidarity in turn presupposes an “imagined community”. And in the popular understanding, this tends to comprise some mix of genetic, historic, cultural and/or geographic commonalities — a phenomenon that, again, maps closely to the modernist political entity “nation”.

That, in broad outline, is the version of “Christian nationalism” that’s held in England for roughly the last century. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of its establishment, the older overtly Christian Church of England has grown ever more etiolated, as practical ministry increasingly devolved to the state and the spiritual kind came to feel optional or simply irrelevant.

Does this matter? It should, perhaps, to those who remain Christian in terms that would have made sense to Mrs Grundy. For it’s one thing for an established church to shrug as formerly church-based charity work is nationalised in name of secular “compassion”. It’s another altogether to go on shrugging, as actively anti-Christian activities such as state-licenced suicide — a cause supported by Fellowship of the New Life member and Fabians including Havelock Ellis and Starmer — are added under the same rationale. It is, of course, more than possible to adhere to Christian beliefs while living in a state that professes a different or even hostile creed; this remains true, today, for many Christians worldwide. But last week’s vote in Parliament ought perhaps to invite devout Anglicans to consider whether the nominal position of their own faith as England’s national church has left them unduly complacent about the actual established Church, and the actual standing of Christianity in England.

Meanwhile, too, even those unsentimental about the older Church might eye the evolution of its successor, and wonder about the prognosis for the “imagined community” of England in which it remains nominally established. This is not just due to the post-national sensibility of Keir Starmer and those of his ilk, but also a paradox at the heart of England’s religion of state welfare.

For this relies for sustainability on an ever-growing population and economy. And as Britain’s birth rate has declined and its economy stagnated, politicians have turned with increasing desperation to migration, to fund and staff the welfare our state religion demands. Then, as they do so, the resulting demographic change has progressively undermined the cohesion of the “imagined community” that legitimised it to begin with.

A century and a half on from Mrs Grundy’s heyday, then, it’s clear that Mrs Grundy won, in the sense that her Christian nationalism entrenched itself in the architecture of the British state. But she lost, too, as it subsequently evolved into something actively solvent both to Christian doctrine, and to national identity as such.

As this progresses, both Church and nation (in the sense Mrs Grundy would have understood them) are now sliding ever closer to extinction, under a regime that sees in both only a threat to its utopian universalism. And whatever you think of the welfare state, I would not bet on its survival much beyond the Christian nationalism that birthed it. Mrs Grundy would be appalled by the fruits of her own triumph.

Such headline-catching measures are attractive to an embattled administration because they are relatively easy to legislate for, cost very little, and create a fleeting sense of forward momentum which temporarily cloaks a distinct absence of big ideas. Over the years, the topics of discussion have tended to change according to fashion, but one has remained constant in every election year: the crackdown on benefit scroungers.

The UK spends 12.9% of GDP on social benefits, according to the latest data, which puts us in fifth place in the G7. Between 2023 and 2024, the Government is forecast to spend £276.8 billion on the social security system, with 55% of that figure going to pensioners. And yet, while the number of people on out-of-work benefits has risen, particularly after the pandemic, the scale of public irritation doesn’t seem to correlate with the actual significance of the problem: the net loss to the DWP for benefit fraud or error was £7.3 billion in 2023. By contrast, the Government’s own figures show that money laundering costs the UK £100 billion a year, while wider financial fraud has been estimated to sit at around £219 billion a year.

Strangely, though, few politicians are banging on about the hundreds of billions lost every year to tax avoidance, evasion and highly organised financial crime. Instead, both Jeremy Hunt and Rachel Reeves are desperate to reassure us all that they are getting tough on the work-shy and the idle. They are going after low-level scammers and old people who can’t fill out forms properly. This highly successful political tactic never seems to get old, regardless of how untethered from reality it is. This is as true of the “shirkers and skivers” rhetoric as it is of the welfare reforms we’ve seen over the past three decades, whereby ill-placed public resentments about social security have been deliberately stoked.

In 1996, with a general election looming, then-Tory prime minister John Major pioneered the benefit-scrounger dog whistle when he announced new “stiffer penalties” for the work-shy and vowed that “those who don’t want to work are exposed”. Labour pushed back against the language, but, as they did with almost everything Major’s Conservative Party stood for at the time, went on to adopt similar reforms after their landslide victory in 1997. Not only that, but they ratcheted up the scrounger rhetoric to levels Margaret Thatcher could only dream of.

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Benefit cuts to single mothers and refugees, “name and shame” orders designed to deter anti-social behaviour, and bizarre plans to kick council tenants out of their homes for being unemployed are not often associated with New Labour. Nor are claims that certain ethnic groups “lacked discipline”, clampdowns targeting “foreigners who come to this country illegitimately and steal our benefits”, or fantastical claims that translating basic public service information for those arriving in the country from abroad meant they would “not have the incentive to learn English”. These things are not associated with Blair in the popular memory — but that doesn’t change the fact they happened during his tenure.

In order to advance the rather thorny issue of welfare reform, the general public had to be conditioned to believe that the enemy in their midst was not exploitative employers, careerist politicians, or an economic model that guaranteed all prosperity was absorbed by those at the top. No, the great fear was the lazy stoner through the wall, and the single mother across the street, getting pregnant for an easy life on the dole.

This narrative may suit the politician, but the root of today’s problem lies in the UK’s sluggish growth pattern, which resulted in a low-wage labour market and threadbare public services. In these conditions of precarity, following a pandemic and during a cost-of-living crisis, more people become ill and, in the absence of a functioning health service, stay ill for longer. And the longer they are out of work, the harder it is to get back in the game. Meanwhile, for those who are able to find a job, the sort of work people now tend to move into is part-time, poorly paid and with no career progression — requiring in-work benefits to supplement. That’s why brags from the Government about record levels of employment ring hollow; full employment means nothing when you have to stop by a food bank on the way home from work.

A responsible and honest political class might set out to correct such misplaced assumptions, perhaps by pointing out that there are billions saved in unclaimed benefits every year. Yet instead, they become the basis upon which subsequent rafts of ill-judged, short-sighted and meanspirited reforms are progressed. This is all the more galling when you consider that this war is waged by largely middle-class, university-educated careerists. Indeed, the class disparity at the heart of British democracy, where working-class voices are largely absent, means there are fewer people to present a counterpoint to the nasty consensus. Today, just 8% of Labour MPs hail from working-class backgrounds.

One might naturally assume this trend is a by-product of 10 years of Tory government — but in truth, it began with a party that exists, supposedly, to protect the working class. “Before Tony Blair came to power there was only a modest difference in working-class and careerists positions on welfare reform”, wrote Tom O’Grady in Comparative Political Studies in 2018. “But our research finds that during his premiership, the influence of working-class MPs dropped while there was a rise in the influence of careerist politicians.” O’Grady found that MPs from working-class backgrounds had “a stronger ideological attachment to welfare provision because it benefits working-class voters”, whereas among their middle-class counterparts, “greater concerns for electoral success and career advancement meant they were more likely to support welfare reforms”. The findings suggest that the large shift from working-class MPs to career politicians in the British Labour Party led to an erosion of representation of working-class voters’ interests. “Put bluntly,” he said, “careerist MPs are much more likely to blow with the political winds.”

Chancellor-in-waiting Rachel Reeves — the latest proponent of blood-curdling rhetoric on shirkers and skivers — was born the year Thatcher came to power. She’s one of a generation of rising stars with no political memory of a time when working-class people had more than a tokenistic role to play in the democratic process. And she parrots the tired Blairite rhetoric about scroungers, while cosplaying as the Iron Lady 2.0 for middle-England voters. It’s worth noting that Reeves has, since 10 December 2019, declared donations, earnings, gifts and other benefits worth more than £650,000. Indeed, the value of Reeves’s registered interests puts her in the top 2% of all MPs. Since the start of the current parliament, only 11 MPs have taken in more than money her. Fancy that.

So, after all these years of reform, where are the results? Well, here’s the thing: they have had almost no positive impact. Indeed, all the evidence shows that poverty has only worsened, and that excess deaths have increased.

The rise in food poverty, in particular, is significant. Figures from the Trussell Trust show that between March 2017 and March 2018, 1,332,952 emergency food supplies were distributed to people across the UK. Nationally, low income was the main reason for referral and accounted for nearly 30% of food bank use. The role of welfare reform was crucial here, with benefit delays accounting for 24% of referrals while benefit changes were cited by 18% — 42% in total. The correlation between Universal Credit and food bank use becomes more pronounced when you map its roll-out, between 2013 and 2018, directly onto the areas which experienced the sharpest rises in food poverty. This reveals an average increase of 52% in food bank usage in the 12 months following the roll-out in each area, compared to 13% outside of those zones.

Food poverty is just one facet of the social crisis driven by welfare reform. A spate of related suicides has been reported in recent years, including some people even leaving suicide notes referring to the DWP. In 2020, the National Audit Office noted that the DWP had investigated 69 suicides related to benefits claims in the previous six years, while disability campaigners claim the true figure is far higher. Meanwhile, despite the fact that cuts in benefits have hit women disproportionately, the DWP’s brutal compliance regime compounds the suffering of the most vulnerable women in a manner which could charitably be described as sinister. The techniques often deployed — coercion, aggression, overbearing surveillance, gaslighting and financial intimidation — either deliberately or through sheer incompetence often mirror those of present or former abusers.

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And in return? The sad truth is that welfare reform in the UK is driven by ideology and has never had any evidential basis. There’s even less evidence for the effectiveness of welfare reforms at getting people back to work. The Welfare Conditionality project, running from 2013–2018, conducted analysis on both the impact of welfare reforms as well as the practices that underpin them. Concerning the lifestyle-choice homeless, the report found that benefit sanctions caused “considerable distress and push some extremely vulnerable people out of the social security safety net altogether”. For those disabled people living the high life, the report found that the Work Capability Assessment — in which people with disabilities must prove they are unfit for certain types of employment — is “intrusive, insensitively administered and regularly leads to inappropriate outcomes in respect of disabled people’s capabilities to undertake, or prepare for, paid employment”.

Where job seekers are concerned, welfare conditionality “did not prompt behaviour change” and claimants felt there was “a lack of clarity or warning that their behaviour was sanctionable, that work coaches were too quick to resort to the use of a sanction, and that sanctions were disproportionate to the alleged transgression”. For the lone parents, it found that “insufficient account is taken of caring responsibilities when claimant commitments are devised”, and that many were sanctioned as a result of “unreasonable expectations, DWP administrative errors, or failures of comprehension rather than deliberate non-compliance”. Across the board, the persistent threat of sanctions caused “extreme anxiety, even when not enacted”.

Here we can see how the UK’s favoured economic model of neoliberalism demands that those who cannot succeed in an economy rigged against them must be held personally responsible for their failure — or commanded to blame someone less fortunate than them to account for their predicament. In the UK, this cultural mechanism is expressed in electoral rhetoric which evokes images of “shirkers”, “skivers” and “scroungers” who luxuriate in mould-ridden council homes filled with extravagant items such as televisions, phones and refrigerators, all day long, on the good honest taxpayer’s dime.

While it is certainly true that any system open to enough people will be abused to some extent, and that benefit fraud does occur, the fact remains that the “benefit scrounger” narrative so readily spouted by politicians is a rhetorical device designed, in the case of the Tories, to cynically stoke irrational resentment about welfare dependency — or in the case of Labour, to cravenly placate it for an electoral advantage.

Yet there is another achievement that Lenin was inadvertently, indeed perversely, responsible for: the Western welfare state. That we rarely recognise this owes to a common misperception. Very many of us regrettably buy that Labour conceit, hawked by spin doctors and court historians, that celebrates Clement Attlee and William Beveridge as the co-fathers of our welfare state. But as the historian David Edgerton reminds us, it is in fact the Liberal-Tory coalition of David Lloyd George in the immediate aftermath of the First World War that we ought to be thanking. These were the years when the major strides in education, healthcare, and insurance were made. Post-war, all that was left for Labour to do was to extend it to one and all. Already covering some 80% of the population, welfare was brought to the remaining one-fifth of Britain by Beveridge.

More importantly, it was neither paternalism nor prodigality that prompted these early stirrings of dirigisme. Rather it was red contagion. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, a concatenation of revolts detonated across the globe. Bolshevism spread westwards, from Vienna through Budapest and Sofia to Kiel. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was briefly established in April 1919, before the far-Right Freikorps did it in. Britain wasn’t immune to the ferment. Between the February and October Revolutions, the Leeds Soviet did indeed appear to be the beginning of something. That nothing came of it was down to Lloyd George’s unsentimental pragmatism. Many of the workers’ demands were duly conceded, taking the sting out of union radicalism, even as many leaders were put behind bars.

Two years later, Lloyd George’s Bolshevik bugbear was to return with a vengeance, when shipbuilders stormed the Glasgow City Chambers. With hindsight, it is obvious that “Red Clydeside” was never, in any meaningful sense, a harbinger of “Red Britain”: the radicalism of Glaswegian trade unions on either side of the River Clyde was never going to spread to the rest of the country. Yet at the time, the red threat was all too real. “This country was nearer to Bolshevism that day than at any time since,” Lloyd George would later recall of the police and prison officers’ strike. London and Birmingham were spared, but Merseyside had rocked to the sound of rioting and looting. Violence was brought to a halt only when the army was brought in.

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By Branko Milanović

It is difficult for us to conceive what the “peace” after the armistice actually looked like. Yet Simon Webb’s 1919: Britain’s Year of Revolutions reconstructs a society teetering on the brink of collapse: soldiers roughing up workers; martial law in Luton; tanks cruising the streets of Liverpool. The Italians call the two years immediately following the war the biennio rosso, and it seems fair to speak of a red biennium in Britain as well. For one thing, it would be impossible to understand British domestic and foreign policy without reference to that singular neurosis of the interwar ruling class. While cavorting with the antisemitic Whites to crush the Reds in Russia, Westminster and Whitehall were at the same time crushing the unruly bolshies back at home. Churchill, then minister for war, put forward the government line with characteristic crassness: “kill the Bolshie, kiss the Hun.”

As it must in democracies, with the stick also came the carrot. Yes, the workers were brutally put down. But they hadn’t protested in vain. Gone were the Gladstonian days of cheese-paring Liberalism. Lloyd George’s Liberals were an altogether different beast: by turns technocratic, interventionist and ambitious. They were, no doubt, building on pre-war precedent, in particular the health and insurance schemes of 1911, and making good on wartime promises, but they were above all trying to make peace with the bad, mad and dangerous Brits on the streets.

To begin with, they gave a great many people a greater share in government, shepherding them from the barricades into polling stations. Universal male suffrage in 1918 enfranchised unpropertied men — that is, two in five men — as well as propertied women over 30. The same year, the Education Act, lobbied by Lancashire unionists, raised the school-leaving age from 12 to 14 to forestall cotton bosses from battening on benighted boys. And in 1919, the Housing and Town Planning Act put in motion the construction of what became that instantly recognisable feature of the British urban landscape: the council estate.

Bettered by Attlee and Harold Wilson, battered by Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron, the early interwar consensus around the welfare state survives to this day. Both under Labour and the Tories, truculent workers with ideas above their station have been shown their place: from Ramsay MacDonald’s disciplining of the “communistic” trade unions in 1924 through Thatcher’s thwarting of the miners in 1984 to Keir Starmer’s disavowal of organised labour in 2024. Likewise, since 1945, both parties have shown a general commitment to public spending around the 40% of GDP mark. Creaking, underfunded, “our NHS” continues nevertheless to be spoken of only in hallowed whispers.

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Time and again, our rulers have let slip the real reason why welfare matters. Here’s Attlee in Margate in 1950: “our policy of democratic socialism is the only dynamic alternative to totalitarian communism.” Is it any surprise that two of the most robust welfare states across La Manche were created in societies that boasted a formidable communist presence? The Parti Communiste Français in 1946 counted some 800,000 members, and the Partito Comunista Italiano nearly two million. It is true that the Communist Party of Great Britain never had much to recommend it, but the strength of the post-war British Left — independent of Labour — is undeniable. It was the miners who brought down Edward Heath in 1974.

As with the British welfare state, so with British intellectual life. Our republic of letters would have been a dreary landscape of conformity were it not for the Russian Revolution, which fired three generations of Anglo-Marxists. The interwar years were a time when communists could rise to the very top of the cultural establishment. E.H. Carr, for example, became a leader writer and deputy editor of The Times, a perch from which he preached the gospel of collectivist planning and conciliation with Stalin. His monumental History of Soviet Russia — running to 7,000 pages and 14 volumes — remains the best account of the early years of the revolutionary regime.

Even such a sceptic of the state as George Bernard Shaw was swept away by Russomania. By 1931, with Britain reeling from the Depression, he was singing Stalin’s praises. Fabian gradualism, his old creed, wasn’t going to cut it in the 20th century. MacDonald’s Labour had evidently failed, he reflected in a new preface to Fabian Essays in Socialism. What was needed was “swift effectiveness” — Soviet-style. A trip to Moscow was written up in glowing terms in The Rationalisation of Russia.

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In a manner of speaking, the remoter reaches of the ivory tower, too, succumbed to the Soviets. G.E.M. de Ste. Croix inaugurated what was by far the most arresting development in classical studies. A child of empire born in Macau, “Croicks” turned his back on his “thoroughly Right-wing upbringing” on the “lunatic fringe of Christianity” — as he later put it — in the Twenties. A romp across the Soviet Union in 1937 with Intourist, the Soviet travel agency, left him critical of Stalinism but committed to Marxism, on the strength of observing the peasants of the Caucasus. Thereafter, he became a “thoroughgoing Marxist”, tutoring a generation of students at New College, Oxford, who, in their own writings, were to remain alert to class in the classics. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World appeared in 1981.

Such profiles can be indefinitely multiplied. Suffice it to say that most of the smartest minds of the interwar period were on the Left. This would soon change with the emigration of Eastern and Mitteleuropean conservatives to Britain — Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Lewis Namier, Ernest Gellner — producing a more balanced intellectual division of labour. But before that, Left hegemony was unrivalled. John Strachey was undoubtedly among the most important political commentators of the Thirties. His father was the editor of The Spectator for nearly 40 years, and Strachey’s best man was Oswald Mosley, then still on the Left. When Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists, Strachey led some of the largest demonstrations against him.

As it was, the Marxist Strachey lost the battle of ideas to the Liberal John Maynard Keynes, who famously had no truck with communism: “How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and intelligentsia who, with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?” Yet Keynes could do little to prevent one of his Cambridge protégés, Maurice Dobb, from taking up the cudgels for the boorish proletariat.

Communism gained a bridgehead in Cambridge thanks to Dobb, who edited The Plebs, a Marxist magazine, in the Twenties. He extolled Lenin as a “stern realist” blessed “with all the Jesuit’s sincerity and idealism”. By contrast, “non-Marxists” were “as silly as pre-Darwinian biologists”. He helped found the Communist Party Historians Group, and set up Kim Philby — of the Cambridge Five ring of spies — with the NKVD. Later students included Amartya Sen and Eric Hobsbawm, whose own Oxbridge appointments were blocked by Tory dons.

Paradoxically, then, Soviet communism unwittingly fortified British capitalism. The unintended upshot of Anglo-Marxism was to make the Establishment more heedful of working-class interests. The same went for the welfare state. Peace was preserved between the classes. Redistribution took the edge off class conflict. What’s more, an educated and healthy workforce proved good for business. Moderately progressive taxation was a tiny insurance premium to keep the workers in working condition and the barbarians at bay. These days, barring a few libertarian crackpots, Tory radicals, Bridesheady (Saltburny?) nostalgics, and campus Marxists, nearly everyone is united in confirming the wisdom of this arrangement. The simple fact is that most Brits like their politics dull.

The announcement spoke to a general mood. After a 20-year detour in the Third World in the Nineties and 2000s, travelling from South Africa to India to Mexico to Kenya, cash transfers had made a spectacular comeback to the United States. The uptake of the proposal in the 2010s was impressively ecumenical: even a notoriously conservative World Economic Forum came round to the idea of grants. By 2021, with Biden’s rescue package, cash transfers such as family allowance were joined by large-scale plans for an infrastructure stimulus, expanded unemployment benefits, and school funding. Through the backdoor, support for universal basic income (UBI) was back in vogue, from Rio’s favelas to think thanks in California’s Palo Alto.

In the American tech sector, Dorsey and Hughes were far from alone in their enthusiasm. Over the preceding decade, financiers and entrepreneurs from across the industry — including Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg — had steadily come out in favour of UBI and cash transfers as the solution to social ills.

California served as the proposal’s natural home. With its legacy of frontier boosterism and settler colonialism, the state was known for its populist activity in the late 19th century and its early adoption of antitrust laws. It also counted some of the first experiments in direct democracy, with Progressive reformers introducing provisions for referenda in the early 1900s. By the Nineties, a tech literature storming out from the Bay Area reworked the modernist themes of Left-wing radicals and hippy modernists that came before, from magazines such as Wired and Forbes, to an early blog culture for effective altruism.

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Libertarian social scientist Charles Murray also provided sideways inspiration for the tech romance with UBI. Murray drew on the anti-poverty strategies first devised by American welfare reformer and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the late Sixties, when concerns about the black family drove America’s experiments with cash allowances. For Murray, the extension of President Richard Nixon’s tax credits in the Seventies and Eighties offered a useful precedent for a wholesale transformation of the American welfare state. Its set-up would be simplified by tying benefits to stock options and handing out all benefits in money. “Since the American government [was going to] continue to spend a huge amount of money on income transfers,” Murray claimed, it would be preferable to “take all of that money and give it back to the American people in cash grants.”

Murray did tie strong conditions to his grant, hoping to rekindle a desiccated civic landscape: receipt of the grant would be conditional on membership of a voluntary body, which would pay out the grants and impose standards of behaviour on recipients. Coupled with a broader programme of tax cuts, Murray’s transfer state could solve both labour market rigidity and remedy the crisis of the American breadwinner — black and white. In the 2010s, his proposal gained headway across the American tech sector, from the Cato Institute to a new Basic Income Lab in Stanford.

By the early 2010s, however, Murray’s concerns about familial stability were also proving less important to the new American basic income scene. After the dotcom crash of 2001, companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter emerged as the vanguard of a newly “social” internet. When, for instance, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes retired from his company in 2007, it took him only a few years to embrace a deceptively simple yet also radical idea: giving cash directly to the poor. By August 2012, Hughes had joined the board of GiveDirectly an organisation promoting direct cash transfers to tackle poverty worldwide.

As Hughes saw, the new platform economy could no longer presuppose the stable unit of the male breadwinner model. The automation apocalypse had also failed to materialise and, rather than be displaced by robots, labour in the American service economy became ever more supervised and mediated by digital platforms, barely increasing productivity. This new economy was not one of pointless drudgery, however. Just like labour, social interaction had become more informal and fleeting in the post-industrial era. In contrast to traditional media, civic organisations and social media allowed for a more open and non-hierarchical engagement between citizens. Cash welfare was a natural complement to this openness.

For Hughes, American history also offered ample alternatives for “over-engineering” approaches to welfare. “The United States already runs the biggest cash transfer programme in the world,” Hughes noted in his autobiography Fair Shot, “giving tens of billions of dollars, no strings attached, to struggling poor families to help boost their incomes and stabilise their financial lives.” Citing Nixon as a precedent, Hughes drew a straight line from the Sixties to the 2010s: just like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, Nixon’s Earned Income Tax Credit scheme relied on the idea that state-driven public services were inferior to putting money in the hands of wage earners. Online and offline, individuals could now determine their own needs and preferences. By 2016, the start-up incubator Y Combinator, which funds companies such as AirBnb, Dropbox and Twitch, decided to launch its own basic income pilot in Oakland. While its first programme was quite modest and involved less than 10 individuals receiving $1,500 a month, the experiment would soon be expanded in 2018 and then in 2020, after the pandemic took in substantial funding from tech hubs. Today, former Reddit CEO Sam Altman still hopes to use Y Combinator’s resources to stave off his (supposedly self-created) job apocalypse through machine learning. In 2021, Altman’s OpenAI gave away one third of its resources to UBI Charitable, a non-profit which was to fund further pilots across the states.

Its economic drivers were evident. In a society with fewer permanent jobs, more precarious work and higher rates of self-employment, a corporatist welfare state built on trade unions and insurance funds seemed more and more obsolete. Instead, direct cash payments could furnish security for the new platform “precariat”, no longer embedded in the political parties, development coalitions or family units presupposed by an older welfarist tradition.

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These shifts epitomised a unique “techno-populist” front for basic income. In her memoir of the 2016 presidential contest What Happened, for instance, Hillary Clinton recounted how the proposal of a universal basic income “fascinated” her, looking forward to an “Alaska for America” plan. Inspired by the self-described “entrepreneur” Peter Barnes, whose bestseller With Liberty and Dividends For All argued for a “everyone-gets-a-share capitalism”, Clinton almost included the proposal in her bid to the presidency. In the same period, the “anti-party” parties of the Five Star Movement, Pirate movements or Spain’s Podemos pioneered a populist retake of the proposal, while financial analyst Jim O’Neill pleaded for a “QE for the people” — a curious alliance between populists and technocrats.

The resulting hybrid has sometimes been dubbed “technopopulist”. More than just a vision of representation, technopopulism also began to cohere around a distinct vision of social policy in the 2010s. The enthusiasm for a “transfer state” exhibited a curious blend of “populism” and “technocracy”, fusing a focus on digital solutions with an aversion to narrow interest bargaining. As Chris Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi noted, technocrats and populists overlapped in their opposition to the transactional politics of the post-war period, leaving intermediary bodies out of government and exhibiting a more abstract view of human needs.

This also tied in with a changing political culture. With the weakening of representative mechanisms, society seemed increasingly unable to articulate concrete needs and thereby had to consider its welfare requirements in the abstract. The New Left had first proposed uncoupling work from income in the inflationary Seventies, using it as a wedge to move a stagnant capitalism beyond the antiquated work ethic. Inspired by the anti-authoritarian potential of cybernetics, they began not just to think of basic income as a tool to deconstruct social policy, but to rethink socialism beyond the worker and the social itself. In the late Nineties, the Left-wing radical Antonio Negri declared that “flexibility and mobility of [the] labor force . . . were irreversible”.

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Yet the New Left could hardly anticipate the “disintermediated” environment in which their cash transfers would come to truly thrive. As citizens left the lively post-war network of institutions — unions, parties, and other civil society associations — which had translated local needs into concrete, collective demands which the state could then attempt to meet, statesmen increasingly turned to public relations experts to win office. The link between politicians and the public also shifted: instead of attending to an organised civil society, they began to project “opinions” onto an atomised public. This revolution also implied a drastically different view of human needs. Rather than being constituted through a democratic process and transactional politics, needs could now simply be revealed as consumer choices on a market or in our new virtual ecosystems. In the Zuckerberg welfare state, citizens would be able to receive monetary “dividends” directly on their phones via ApplePay, Twitter or Facebook.

The increasing popularity of Alaska’s dividend model remains one of the best illustrations of this shifting conception of welfare — from a concrete notion of poverty as a lack of access to socially constituted needs (housing, unemployment, education, health care) to an abstract definition of poverty as a lack of money. The Alaska Permanent Fund (APF) itself was created in 1976 as an amendment to the state constitution. The initial impulse was for the state to invest a share of the revenue into an alternative source of revenue for when the state’s oil fields would be depleted. Under this framework, it seemed clear that the state had to use the money in strategic sectors to prepare an energetic transition. While this strategy never really materialised, by 1982, the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) was created and what was meant as a state fund became a source of individual dividends. Rather than a source of income for the state and government programmes, the fund became a cash transfer programme for the direct benefit of the residents. This shift put the state in an increasingly difficult budgetary situation, as Alaska has no income or sales tax. In September 1999, the state submitted an advisory question to decide whether it could use a portion of the Alaska Permanent Fund to fund government programmes. In a significant vote, the proposal was rejected with 83.25% for No.

This rejection of public goods in favour of direct transfers would become increasingly salient in the following decades. When, in July 2019, the governor of Alaska announced drastic cutbacks at the state’s public university system, he thus implicitly chose between two visions of social policy. As part of a general austerity drive, half of expenditure was to be scrapped, buildings sold off, and staff members fired. The justifications for the cuts were specific: Alaska wanted to maintain its citizen dividend and could not do so in a falling oil market. Alaskan conservatives defended their grant with a variant of Hughes’s argument: Who needed a public university if every book had become available on Amazon?

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Behind the rise of UBI thus stood a deeper shift in modern political culture. More than a system of economic organisation, “markets” have become an indispensable anthropological tool for thinkers on the Left and Right. As the French philosopher Marcel Gauchet noted in 1998, the late-century revival of the idea of “the market” had “very little to do… with considerations of economic efficiency”. Rather, it followed “a reconsideration of the political status of the actor” itself. As a policy, then, UBI presupposed a new anthropology: no longer that of the “animal laborans” into a community of citizens, but that of the “sovereign consumer” inscribed into a network of users. This new model of “market sovereignty”, as British historian Eric Hobsbawm noticed in 2001, appeared to offer “an alternative to any kind of politics” as such. And as Hobsbawm indicated to an Italian journalist two years before: “If consumers are able to achieve their aims by exercising their power of choice every day through the purchase of goods or the indication of their opinions to the mechanisms of media consultation, what exactly remains of citizenship? Is there still any need to mobilize groups of people for political objectives?”

As Gauchet and Hobsbawm insisted, the success story of cash transfer will never be the exclusive province of policy makers, economists, politicians, social scientists, or activists. Instead, it hints at a more profound break at the heart of modern political culture: the occurrence of a “second capitalist revolution” somewhere in the second half of the 20th century. After “the end of labour, the end of production, and the end of political economy”, as Jean Baudrillard saw it in the late Nineties, money had now “found its proper place… an orbit which rises and sets like some artificial sun”.

On Left and Right, the growing enthusiasm for cash transfers in the last 10 years signals not just a crisis of the old welfare state, but a crisis of politics as a type of human activity. Even in the tumultuous 2020s, it remains an open question how and when it will end.

Elsie’s tragic tale cut through to the public in a way that statistics could not, despite some of the numbers pointing to a resurgence of almost-Victorian aspects of want. Rough sleeping, for example, has shot up by a quarter in a single year. There has been a “significant decrease” in the average age of death in deprived neighbourhoods. The government’s annual poverty figures have just recorded a million more sinking below the breadline and in the same data, released within 24 hours of the fastest food inflation since 1977, officials for the first time ever deemed it important to tally foodbank use.

And yet even the best-intentioned people can simply glaze over at figure-heavy headlines about Britain’s cost-of-living crisis. But if numbers are prone to being ignored, anecdotes can be unrepresentative. To paint a credible portrait of Britain’s new penury, therefore, we need to grapple with statistical tables and personal stories alike — with the quantity and the quality of poverty. I’ve dedicated the last few months to that, working with reporters who are lending an ear to the communities that many politicians would rather ignore.

They have heard tales of bitter hardship that wouldn’t be out of place in a Charles Dickens novel, or in the reporting of George Orwell and J.B. Priestley. In many ways, Britain’s new poverty is much like the old. The street urchins in Dickens’s London and the impoverished mill workers in Engels’s Manchester would be familiar with many of the experiences described by the testimony collated in Broke. The brute privation some describe — the bite of the cold, the gnawing of hunger, the terror of ending up without a roof over their head — would have been shared by many Victorian Londoners. The shock is to find such conditions resurgent in a post-industrial society incomparably richer than that chronicled by Dickens.

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Our society may have grown too wealthy to fear mass undernourishment on a 19th-century scale, but our decade could still, like the 1840s and 1930s, earn the unhappy moniker “the hungry” Twenties. A hundred and fifty years after George Eliot likened poverty to leprosy in Middlemarch, on the basis that “it divides us from what we most care for”, a trip to a Tottenham foodbank reveals how poverty can alienate people from those dearest to them. Yvonne, a 63-year-old former social worker with a degenerative spinal condition, still refuses to let her four adult children know that she is struggling, and so cuts herself off from what should be her support network.

Such hardship gets under an individual’s skin and sometimes breaks the spirit. Staff at a GP practice in a run-down part of Glasgow which features in the book affirm how often such thoughts turn into deeds in their part of the world: overdoses and suicides routinely cut grotesquely short the lives lodged in their books.

Despite continuity with the past in the nature of poverty, a lot of the numbers concerning Britain’s current poverty crisis today are decidedly novel. From the Victorian “poor house” through to the Beveridge report, the problem of poverty in the past was — overwhelmingly — a problem of old age. No longer. Pick a pensioner at random and they are markedly less likely to be in poverty than someone plucked from the general population. In her hardship, Elsie has become the exception, not the rule.

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The flipside of ameliorating conditions for older Britons has been tanking fortunes for others. The total number of children growing up under the poverty line, which was falling around the turn of the century after Tony Blair and Gordon Brown vowed to eradicate the problem, is rocketing back to its Nineties peaks. The official tally is now just 100,000 short of the 4.3 million record, and once the rear-view-mirror data catches up with the energy crunch, it could scale shameful new heights. The link to specific cuts is getting starker, too. Take the “two-child policy”, a crude attempt to discourage cash-strapped parents from having kids, driven through soon after the Conservatives won single-party power in 2015, which ends up punishing third and fourth children by denying them support. Sure enough, according to Whitehall’s latest numbers, families with three or more children are now twice as likely to have resorted to foodbanks as their smaller counterparts.

Children aren’t the only ones affected. Disabled people, thanks to cross-party reforms from the Seventies, were rarely doomed to destitution. That is, until recently. Following a series of restrictions and freezes, a colleague and I calculated that single disabled people were roughly four times more likely than the non-disabled to be falling behind with their bills, six times more likely to be growing cold, and nine times more likely to be going hungry.

Given the drift of Britain’s demographics, the “new poverty” is inevitably somewhat more diverse than the old — but it is, perhaps, surprising to learn quite how far it skews. A lot of the political discussion, and a lot of very good reporting, has concentrated on England’s “left behind” coastal towns and ageing industrial towns, both of which tend to be white. But if we just concentrate on the hard finances, rather than a vaguer sense of malaise, all of the country’s main ethnic minority groups still suffer from consistently higher poverty rates than the white majority. For some, like British Indians, the gap is these days small; for others — like Bangladeshis and Black Caribbeans — the excess risk of poverty remains double or more. Meanwhile, for a large and growing band of migrants, the “no recourse to public funds” rule frequently spells automatic destitution.

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Another break from the past concerns work. There is a particular irony here, given the way the austerity assault on the welfare state was sold as necessary to safeguard the toiling taxpayer. But the rhetorical binaries between “grafters” and “grifters” are ever-less plausible. Over the 2010s, there was a remorseless rise in the relative weight of working poverty: setting pensioners aside, less than half of poor adults lived in a “working household” back in the mid-Nineties; that same proportion steadily rose to 68% by 2019-20.

Can the poverty tide be reversed? We could learn from past success. Pulling the elderly out of poverty did not happen by accident: the change was the result of both successful social policy choices (including controversial means-tested support) and supportive private institutions (notably workplace pensions). There are questions about how sustainable the settlement is, and indeed pensioner poverty is just starting to creep back up. It’s also true that special political factors — a large and growing electorate of pensioners who reliably turn out to vote — helped unlock higher public spending in this field after the Turner Commission reported in 2005.

But these caveats should not distract us from remains an almighty, historic triumph. We should pore over the progress on pensioner poverty, and figure out how to replicate it. Many activists exhibit a weakness: the “despondency problem” sharply defined by the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond as being “fluent in the language of grievance and bumbling in the language of repair”. To shrug off the ancient belief that poverty is inevitable, and build faith in change, we must shout about success where we can point to it.

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At the same time, the average voter needs to care about poverty. This isn’t always a given. The uncomfortable truth, as Desmond heavily underlines, is that it flows from a system which in some respects serves the majority’s self-interests: the flipside of gnawing insecurity for gig economy workers is, for example, convenience for the consumers.

But one feature of 21st-century hardship may help the cause: namely, a disturbing sense of the boundary between the supporters and the supplicants of life getting blurred as the big squeeze goes up the income ladder.

UnHerd’s own polling underlines this point, with 62% of Brits now agreeing with the statement: “I worry about affording the necessities, such as food and energy.” When those findings are projected across the political map, every constituency across the land registers at least a modest majority in this position. This is the backdrop to the stories of two women we uncovered in Manchester: Phoebe, an increasingly indebted debt advice worker, who admits she’s too scared to commit her own finances to paper; and Sophie, a foodbank volunteer, who one day found she had no choice but to become a foodbank user.

Such tales are palpably disturbing. But they could also provide a chance to reset the debate. The missing ingredient in Britain’s conversation about poverty has been empathy — the poor are talked of as a different species, away on Benefits Street. As ever-more voters feel the pinch, the mood could change. Newly exposed, the majority might be persuaded to repair the holes that austerity has cut in the safety net. Then perhaps we might make progress towards fixing what is currently broke.

That’s not to say elitism wasn’t a problem back then. Working-class people, if they appeared at all in books, films or plays in the early fifties, were — as Listener magazine said in its review of Honey — “comic or loyal, or more frequently both”. But by 1958 that situation had slowly started to change. John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, staged at London’s Royal Court in 1956, was the ripple that quickly turned into a “new wave” of stories about a restless generation of young working-class upstarts.

In the era of the post-war welfare state, journalists were also giving working-class life more attention. In 1957, Michael Young and Peter Wilmott published a study of life in the modern East End, Family and Kinship in East London. Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, issued the same year, was based on his own working-class upbringing in Hunslet, Leeds. Both books became surprise bestsellers. Their authors were driven by a belief that working-class people possessed a rich culture, and by their concern that the communities from which that culture sprang were threatened by the well-meant intentions of post-war politicians — in particular the replacement of inner-city streets with out-of-town council estates.

But on the whole working-class people’s prospects were looking up. This was the era of a brand-new welfare state and near-full employment. Free secondary education meant Shelagh, who died exactly ten years ago, was the first person in her family to remain at school beyond the age of 14. In 1957, the Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, claimed that the British people “had never had it so good”. There were more (though still very few) chances for working-class people to have their voices heard.

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A modicum of economic security and the political rhetoric of opportunity were the foundations on which Shelagh constructed her youthful dreams for a life different from her mother’s. She wanted fame and fortune — but failing that, she wanted and believed she could create a life focused on creative endeavour. She had no deference, no sense that the arts were not for the likes of her; the state told her she was worthy of education and investment.

Still, she was unsentimental about the welfare state, and even more so about the working-class community that Richard Hoggart lovingly described. Her debut focuses on Jo, a working-class teenager who lives in Salford with her single mother, Helen, and who becomes a single mother herself after a brief affair with a black sailor. As the pair barged onstage, carrying suitcases as they “flitted” from one rented room to another, they ripped through any romanticism about working-class life.

“What’s wrong with this place?” asks Helen ironically, as she and Jo survey their new home, a bare flat in a Manchester lodging house. She answers her own question: “Everything in it is falling apart, it’s true, and we’ve no heating — but there’s a lovely view of the gasworks, we share a bathroom with the community and this wallpaper’s contemporary. What more do you want?” In the fifties — a “selfish decade,” argued the Labour politician and architect of the NHS, Nye Bevan — “community” was too often a euphemism for overcrowded homes and enduring poverty.

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Shelagh knew that women in Salford were lucky if they got modern décor and good neighbours; that wasn’t, she suggested, enough. She was the first post-war playwright to suggest that women had minds and desires of their own: a radical proposal in the fifties. The anti-heroes of the so-called “kitchen sink” novels and plays that pre-dated Honey — Joe Lampton in John Braine’s novel Room at the Top (1957), or Arthur Seaton in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) — were all men.

Meanwhile, advertisers, educators, policymakers and psychologists told women that they were luckier than their mothers. Clad in New Look dresses, they could spend their lives making happy homes for their hard-working husbands and their healthy children — the citizens of Britain’s brave new future. But Honey showed that this life was beyond the means of thousands of women who, like Jo and Helen, continued to live in overcrowded slums.

Even more radically, Delaney suggested this was a life that women did not want. In Honey, Jo finds solace in her friendship with Geoff, a gay art student, who is keen to make a home for her and the baby. He voices the standard medical opinion of the time: “Motherhood is supposed to come natural to women.” Pregnancy was meant to render women docile, maternity to fulfil an innate femininity. But Jo rages against her fate. “My usual self is a very unusual self, Geoffrey Ingram, and don’t you forget it,” she says. “I’m an extraordinary person. There’s only one of me like there’s only one of you.”

More than a decade before the Women’s Liberation Movement emerged in Britain, Shelagh suggested that women were unfulfilled by marriage and motherhood. In the novels and plays written by male authors of the 1950s, women hold back ambitious young men. But in Honey, the male characters are keener on marriage and domesticity than Jo or Helen. The woman want love — but they want some freedom too. They know that the comforts men associate with domestic bliss are the result of women’s hard work. They refuse to be compliant; “we enjoy it!” Helen responds scornfully when Geoff tells her off for rowing with Jo. Resentment and anger at their shared dependency, the fallibility of their bodies, and their lack of choices are riven through their relationship; but from that shared experience also springs love.

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Stop pretending to be working class

By Julie Bindel

A Taste of Honey was championed by Joan Littlewood, who, with fellow communist Ewan MacColl, had established Theatre Workshop in Manchester in the 1930s. But Delaney’s assertion that working-class life wasn’t all affluence and happy housewives caused a furore. There was an attempt to suppress Honey before it was even staged. At a time when all plays were subject to censorship, Theatre Workshop was required to submit Delaney’s manuscript to the Lord Chamberlain for inspection. The official charged with reading it called the play “muck” and proposed banning it. “I think it’s revolting, quite apart from the homosexual bits,” he wrote. “To me it has no saving grace whatsoever. If we pass muck like this it does give our critics something to go on.”

“After some misgivings,” his office grudgingly passed Honey, but only “because it depicts such a sad collection of undesirables it will not do the public any harm.”

A Taste of Honey premiered at Theatre Workshop on 27 May 1958. Almost all the press dismissed the play as a flop, its content vulgar and its author untutored. The Spectator declared that Honey’s only redeeming feature was that “it is not scholarly anthropology observed from the outside through pince-nez, but the inside story of a savage culture observed by a genuine cannibal”. Most of the Right-wing press was more damning. “Once, authors wrote good plays set in drawing-rooms. Now, under the Welfare State, they write bad plays set in garrets,” sneered the Daily Mail. The depiction of women incensed many journalists. The Salford Reporter, in Delaney’s hometown, oscillated between denying the existence of single mothers and slums, and asserting that, even if they did exist, this “sordid tale of a prostitute’s daughter” certainly wasn’t suitable theatrical fare.

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But theatregoers from working-class Stratford did not agree. Builders, labourers and office workers told a BBC news crew that Honey was “about people like us, isn’t it? Real life”. And Shelagh’s appeal crossed class boundaries. Carol Dix and her friends were 13-year-old middle-class grammar schoolgirls in the Midlands when Honey was staged. They’d never have been allowed to see the play, but they were preoccupied with its author: “The women’s life-style we noticed, and wanted to copy, were bohemians like Sheelagh [sic] Delaney,’ they later recalled in a collective memoir.

Her youth and notoriety meant Shelagh regularly appeared in the press and on television throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. She liked to dress comfortably, attending interviews wearing, as the Daily Mail told its readers, fisherman’s sweaters and “paint spattered jeans” — very unlike the glamorous Hollywood icons of the cinema, or the lipsticked housewives of women’s magazines. This made her an icon for those girls who wanted more from the world than a wedding dress, but weren’t sure what, or how to get it. Some of them went on to create the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s.

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Meanwhile Honey became a box office hit, transferred to London’s West End in 1959, and enjoyed a Broadway run in 1960. It has been performed across the world ever since. In 2019, the play enjoyed a successful revival as a National Theatre touring production, sadly cut short by Covid. That the performances, including the premier in Salford, were sell-out shows that Honey still resonates today. We’re back in a world where government rhetoric is often at odds with the harsh reality of poverty, and women struggle to care for the vulnerable without proper material support.

But Honey speaks to a wider constituency than even the many who are directly affected by precarity. By placing women centre stage, it asserts both their commonality and diversity. Their commonality, because they are the sex that can reproduce — a fundamental fact that disrupts both Helen’s life and Jo’s, and which even today, in an era of freely available birth control and legal abortions, affects women on a daily basis. But as Shelagh shows, this doesn’t mean they can be reduced to their bodies, “cervix havers” or “chestfeeders”. They have diverse ambitions and dreams, the potential to do much more than the world often allows them by virtue of their sex.

Honey reminded us that those often considered marginal to political debate and artistic endeavour — working-class people, especially women and children — were the majority of the human race, and therefore worth listening to. “I write as people speak,” said Shelagh. Ten years after her death, allowing women to speak and to be heard is a struggle feminists are still waging.