Now back to Britain and the experience of the Britons in the delivery of security of resources. British democracy displayed a burst of energy in the aftermath of the Second World War. The British people had fought through the war together. An idea of social justice had emerged which came to be seen, at least in part, to be what the war was fought for. This idea was articulated in particular in the Beveridge Report on social security. It was an idea of universal social protection, and idea about extending to everyone the protection it is the purpose of democracy to deliver. This idea was put into effect in the great reforms of the late 1940s: family allowance, social security, income support and above all the National Health Service. Here was a democracy performing at its best. In the NHS, that was displayed magnificently. Health care in Britain pre-NHS was a shambles. There were areas where it was excellent: good, free and universally available. But about half of the population did not have access to a family doctor and the poor mostly had to pay for health care.
With the NHS the government cut through the rot, nationalised the whole system of hospitals, brought all General Practitioners into the national service, and abolished inequality by giving everyone the access the privileged had had previously. In hindsight, this was an astonishing achievement, and an astonishingly democratic one.
However, if we look more carefully at those reforms and how they evolved, we find that British democracy was not able to sustain that once-in-a-lifetime democratic burst.
First, the NHS was never able to deliver what was promised. It immediately ran into deep financial problems and has ever since been cash strapped. By the end of the century, the effects of accumulated underinvestments were visible in poor standards, inefficiency, low morale within the service and low confidence in the population. British democracy proved unable to maintain its own creation. It is possible that the NHS is presently being revitalised with new investments, but the jury is still out on this and I for one remain sceptical.
Unit I. UK: from Empire to Democracy
Unit I. UK: from Empire to Democracy
Second, no similar effort materialised in that other great area of British inequality: education. The situation here was the same as in health care, or worse. A minority of children, here a small minority, the children of the rich, had access to excellent schooling in private schools behind a wall of high fees, while the majority of children languished in second-rate, underfunded and underperforming public schools. It is conspicuous that British democracy, at the time when the need to follow through from rights to resources was so well understood in health care, was unable to mobilise the same understanding and resolve in education. As a result, the British school system remains to this day deeply undemocratic and school policy limited to perpetual tinkering with the public sector with no inclination or ability to break down the inequality of the private-public division.
