| 9 mins read
'Misery generates hate' ran the epigraph of William Beveridge’s 1944 report Full Employment in a Free Society. It is a quote from Charlotte Brontë’s 1849 novel Shirley, set against the backdrop of the Luddite movement, evoking the suffering endured by the handloom weavers whose jobs were lost through mechanisation. Beveridge’s full employment report—the follow-up to his more famous 1942 report on social welfare—was in many respects a dry and technocratic document, but he stated at the outset that Brontë’s words were ‘my main text. The greatest evil of unemployment is not physical but moral, not the want which it may bring but the hatred and fear which it breeds'. As Beveridge elaborated, he believed that material scarcity—particularly mass unemployment—created competition between workers that in turn generated ‘still uglier growths—hatred of foreigners, hatred of Jews, enmity between the sexes.’ Beveridge argued that an expansionist economic policy was therefore the best way to ensure that every citizen felt included and valued by the state. The labour market, he maintained, should be ‘a seller’s rather than a buyer’s market’, entailing the state actively ensuring that there were more available jobs than citizens unemployed. ‘If full employment is not won and kept’, Beveridge concluded, ‘no liberties are secure, for to many they will not seem worthwhile.’
In making this case, Beveridge exposed a fundamental wager that was implicit within mid-twentieth-century liberal and social democratic thought: the rise of authoritarian politics was caused by the material hardships generated by unregulated capitalism and could be thwarted by a state-sponsored amelioration of unemployment, poverty and inequality. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it, ‘the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.’ This relationship between democratic freedoms and material distribution has recently returned to the fronts of minds of centre-left politicians and policy makers, particularly in the United States. It formed a core part of the electoral-strategic rationale of the Biden administration which sought to ensure a transition out of the Covid pandemic that boosted employment, tilted distributional outcomes towards earners on lower incomes and rolled out new public investment in infrastructure and clean energy technologies. There were many reasons to embark on this course, but an important one was a bet that a government investing in popular economic programmes could win over those electorally decisive voters who felt alienated by mainstream politics and had voted for Donald Trump previously.
The Democrats lost that wager. The 2024 presidential election results showed scant evidence that the Biden administration received political credit for its adventurous pro-worker economic policies. The reasons for that are now rightly the subject of animated debate in the United States and around the world. It seems clear, for example, that the post-Covid inflationary spike in the cost of living was more consequential in shaping voters’ views of the Biden economic record than any of the administration’s initiatives. Equally, the form that the Biden economic agenda finally took after congressional haggling was more productivist and focussed on industrial strategy than initially intended. It did not contain any of the mooted new universal social policy initiatives on childcare or income redistribution that had the potential to touch a greater number of voters compared to public investment programmes that, by their nature, reach a limited set of workers employed in specific industries. A final, bleaker suggestion is that substantive policy achievements simply don’t have much electoral resonance, since a significant chunk of voters base their assessment of government performance on the style of leadership performed for a fractured and superficial online media.
While this is an important discussion for the United States, it also provides a discomfiting premonition of what might be ahead for the new Labour government in Britain. The policy community around Labour’s leadership has been inspired by the direction of travel set by the Biden administration. Insofar as Starmer’s Labour has charted a distinctive course from the one previously set by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, it is embracing a new role for the UK state in generating economic growth through public investment in the green energy transition, a more interventionist industrial strategy and strengthened workers’ rights. The electoral rationale for these policies is essentially Biden’s: a hope that the political cleavages revealed by the Brexit referendum can be healed by a Labour government delivering economic benefits to workers.
Are there reasons to think that Labour’s version of this statecraft will be any more successful than the Democrats’? One reason might be that Labour has inherited a low inflation economy and will not experience the cost-of-living shock coming out of Covid that the Democrats did. Another is that the Starmer-Reeves version of this agenda will not be as productivist as Biden’s. Labour has at its disposal a more extensive centralised welfare state than the Democrats had, and which can be more easily used to build popular support. It is clear that classic universalist themes of revitalising the NHS, state education and childcare will all play a role in Labour’s next electoral pitch alongside an ‘owning things and building things’ agenda for the green transition, public transport and housing.
But what if the difficult truth revealed by the Democrats’ failure is that key voters simply do not attribute any improvements in their economic prospects—or even experience of public services—to government initiative? What if electoral victory depends more on a skilful projection of leadership qualities through rhetoric and visual presentation? There remains in the Labour Party—and many other centre-left parties around the world—an old-fashioned view that a serious, substantive, good faith effort at competent government will generate its own electoral reward (as distinct from the noisy populism offered by Johnson, Truss and Farage). It would certainly be a relief if that turns out to be the case, but it is a slender reed on which to base a re-election strategy. The salient division among British voters—like the electorate in the United States—is that a majority are uninterested in political debate and—because of the fragmentation of media consumption—receive only minimal information about it. Any news they do receive is filtered through an heterogenous set of online sources. There is abundant evidence that stylistically distinctive political characters can break through to the electorate in this environment, making the political weather with striking, attention-grabbing statements. A sober reading of the American presidential results is that even very good policy will not get Labour re-elected in 2028/29 if it is unaccompanied by strong public performance of leadership.
The ‘information space’, the electorate and the political elite were all very different in Beveridge’s time. In the 1940s, a quintessential member of the great and the good like Beveridge could sally forth from the Masters’ lodgings at University College, Oxford to capture the public imagination with a detailed report on social welfare provision. His substantive findings were widely—and respectfully—discussed on the radio, in the newspapers and even in workplaces and homes across the land. But Beveridge’s success in driving debate was not only the product of a more deferential and hierarchical political culture, or even of the peculiarly receptive social circumstances of wartime Britain. It also rested on his gift for memorable phrases that still resonate across the years, notably his electrifying metaphor of the ‘five giants’—want, ignorance, squalor, disease and idleness—that must be defeated on ‘the road of reconstruction’. Within the parameters of 1940s political debate, Beveridge was a gifted publicist who presented himself as an outsider to existing party alignments. Labour is not wrong to repurpose from Beveridge’s era the wager that democratic freedoms may be protected by an active state. But that will not be enough unless the party and the left more broadly thinks afresh about how to capture the electorate’s attention.
