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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 30.4 (2000) 670-672



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Book Review

The Politics of Retirement in Britain, 1878-1948


The Politics of Retirement in Britain, 1878-1948. By John Macnicol (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 425 pp. $74.95.

The 1942 Beveridge Report, promising comprehensive social security for everyone from cradle to grave, has been generally regarded as the blueprint of the postwar British welfare state, but social historians have long queried the extent of its radicalism. In this major reinterpretation, Macnicol provides a detailed study of one aspect of welfare policy--old age pensions--from their initial projection in the late Victorian period to their enactment in gradual stages from 1908 to 1946. In a work that infuses meticulous scholarship with indignation, he pursues two connected themes--the growing clamor for state responsibility to relieve old age poverty and the concerted, ultimately successful, campaign by Treasury officials and mainstream politicians to limit state liability and forestall the redistribution of wealth.

During the late nineteenth century, as technology forced displaced older workers into dependence on public relief, conservative proponents [End Page 670] viewed pensions as a way to remove elderly recipients and thereby enable a deterrent Poor Law system to discipline young, able-bodied, male workers. While such proposals admitted that the working class was incapable of saving for old age out of earnings, their ultimate motive was to marginalize those workers who were perceived as surplus to capitalist needs. Progressive in advocating state responsibility, the preoccupation with aging male workers failed to recognize that the highest incidence of poverty was among women. Yet, only after socialists seized the initiative in the 1890s, demanding pensions as a right of citizenship, was the Liberal government prompted to act. The pensions scheme of David Lloyd George (chancellor of the Exchequer) in 1908, the hallmark of New Liberalism, had a marked effect in blunting old-age destitution. Although subject to means testing and applicable only after age seventy, it was tax-funded, gender-blind, and imposed no retirement condition for benefits.

While the labor movement continued to demand noncontributory pensions, payable from age sixty, the Treasury view, which ultimately prevailed, was that tax-funded, universal pensions would be prohibitively expensive. After 1908, the civil service pursued a strategy of containment, engineering a partial shift to contributory pensions in 1925. Without eliminating state-funded benefits for those over seventy, the Widows', Orphans', and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act, masterminded by Neville Chamberlain (minister of health), instituted contributory pensions for those between sixty-five and seventy and retreated from gender equality, including uninsured women only by virtue of their husbands' contributions--thus reinforcing their economic dependency.

Rather than fulfil its professions of universality and adequacy, the Beveridge Report proposed pension benefits below low wages, introduced a retirement condition for receipt of benefits, offered married couples less than double the single rate, and linked married women's entitlement to their husbands' earnings. Enthusiastically welcomed by a war-weary public with its eyes on reconstruction, the Report could not hide its parsimony with respect to the elderly. Despite some improvement in the legislative proposal, at the insistence of Ernest Bevin (minister of labor), pensions as implemented in 1946 did not even approximate subsistence for recipients. According to Macnicol, the politics of retirement guaranteed that social insurance would become an instrument of the economic and political containment of mass democracy rather than a means of rechanneling wealth to the working class by confiscatory taxes.

In addition to its cogent analysis of a range of committee reports and legislative initiatives, this study addresses the implications for the pension debate of the aging of British society, the obsolescence of older male workers, and the feminization of poverty. Its multidisciplinary approach, linking political and intellectual history with sociological analysis, is a notable feature of this penetrating work, which seems [End Page 671] certain to become the definitive interpretation of old-age pensions in modern Britain.

F. M. Leventhal
Boston University

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