The British government’s recent commitment to raising defence spending as a proportion of the budget, alongside plans to cut spending on welfare, has led to considerable debate over the shift in state priorities from welfare to warfare. Whether supportive or critical, both sides have tended to consider the question as a zero-sum game, overlooking the long history of entanglement between war and welfare. The ways in which wars have served as the context for the development of the welfare state in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century welfare policy show how welfare has become an essential component for a successful defence strategy in the modern world.
The expansion of the armed forces calls for volunteers during the South African War (1899-1902) brought into focus the need for state intervention to into the health of its citizens. The discovery that many of the men who responded to appeals for volunteers in 1899 to serve in South Africa were, upon medical inspection, malnourished and undersized led to acute public anxiety. In a series of articles published in The Contemporary Review between 1902 and 1903, Major General Sir John Frederick Maurice asserted that 60% of potential volunteers had been rejected for service. In response, the Director-General of the Army Medical Services, Surgeon-General Sir William Taylor issued a memorandum in which he noted ‘that there is an alarming proportion of young men in this country, more especially among the urban population, who are unfit for military service on account of defective physique.’ The consequent Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration (1904) made a series of recommendations for the improvement of child health, such as the provision of health visitors and sterilized milk, with the aim of ensuring the health of the armed forces of the future.
These recommendations did not directly address the root causes of poor health among the poor, which included inadequate housing and low wages, although they did acknowledge a need for state intervention in child welfare, an acknowledgment that persisted over the following decade. When the First World War broke out, separation allowances were rapidly introduced to provide for the welfare of volunteers’ dependents, particularly children, while they were serving in the military. These allowances were both financial inducement to encourage men to enlist and a way of maintaining morale on the home front by protecting working-class living standards. The allowance was a universal benefit, paid to the wives of all recruits, and the rate was repeatedly raised over the course of the war to meet subsistence needs. By 1918, 1.5 million wives and 7 million children were in receipt of state support at a cost of over £100 million per year. Administrative responsibility, which had initially lain with the charity the Soldiers and Sailor’s Family Association (SSFA), was moved to the newly created Ministry of Pensions in 1917 in response to political concerns that allowances were being perceived as ‘charity’ rather than a ‘soldier’s right’.
Children and dependents were not the only groups whose welfare needs were made visible by war. Mass mobilisation combined with improvements in medical care to dramatically increase the number of disabled ex-servicemen visible in British society during and after the First World War: ‘Every town and city in the inter-war years had its partly disabled men, drifting in and out of employment according the trade cycle’. (Stevenson 1984, 267). The social and moral imperative for the state to support men who had sacrificed bodily health and earing capacity in its defence led to the creation of statutory war disability pensions, administered by the Ministry of Pensions. Unlike separation allowances, these pensions were not universal. Instead they were awarded on the basis of both military service and an official assessment of the degree of impairment. This was judged in relation to a theoretically physically perfect male body rather than earning capacity. Psychological impairments were mapped on to the physical criteria, often in ambiguous ways, sparking public debate and the creation of the legal category of ‘Service Patient’ in mental health institutions, as distinct from ‘Pauper Lunatics’. This and similar policies, such as the requirement that a disability had to be shown to be attributable to war service, undercut the universality of First World War pensions.
It was this universality of welfare provision that defined the welfare state as it was founded after the Second World War. As sociologist Richard Titmuss argued in the 1950s, the mobilisation of ‘virtually the effort of all citizens’ created post-war demands for social justice ‘centred on the primary needs of the whole population irrespective of class, creed or military category’. (Titmuss, 2018 (1958), 19) The welfare state was supposed to ensure sufficient medical care, nutrition, education and housing for all. However, the demand for universality emerged from the expansion of mobilisation across all three major conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century, and the form that the welfare state took built on the visibility of particular vulnerable groups that emerged from the South African and First World Wars.
This longer history of military welfare suggests, even as the focus of funding shifts, welfare will need to form part of defence policy. The government’s stated aspiration of providing peace keepers to ensure Ukraine’s security means that the armed forces will have to expand from their historically low numbers. Successful recruitment will require a healthy population to recruit from, which in turn requires investment in children’s health and welfare. Policies which ensure the living standards of service families and provide care for those disabled through military service will help support both service morale and bolster recruitment. A shift of emphasis towards warfare in state funding priorities may challenge the aspiration to universality but, as the history of the previous century shows, welfare provision will remain necessary for the successful administration of such a policy.
