The welfare state and the NHS

In July 1945, weeks after victory in Europe, voters threw out Churchill and elected a Labour government with a landslide. It built the modern welfare state, nationalised coal, rail and other industries, and on 5 July 1948 launched the National Health Service, free to all at the point of use.^•

The blueprint was William Beveridge’s 1942 report, which promised to slay the “five giants” of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness, and became an unexpected bestseller. National insurance, family allowances, council housing and secondary education for all followed. The NHS was the work of the health minister Aneurin Bevan, who overcame fierce opposition from many doctors. He drew on his experience of the Tredegar Medical Aid Society in south Wales, where workers paid a small weekly sum to cover medical care for their families.^•

For a generation the “postwar consensus” between Labour and Conservative governments kept the welfare state broadly intact. Its later reform, under Thatcher and since, became a central battleground of politics. The NHS itself remains, in poll after poll, the institution that makes the British, and the English in particular, proudest.^•

Why it matters today