The new movement politics – the lessons from Obama and the potential of the internet for progressive campaigning, which new spaces such as Liberal Conspiracy seek to realise
– is both the idea of the moment and quite an old idea too.

If politics is the art of the possible, progressive change has depended on the arguments and campaigns which can change the possibilities of politics. One of the best descriptions of why this matters was offered a century ago, as Beatrice Webb recorded in her diary the reaction of Winston Churchill, then a New Liberal member of the Asquith cabinet, to her campaign for the abolition of the poor law.

That campaign arose from the publication – one hundred years ago tomorrow – of the Minority Report to the Royal Commission on the Poor Law.

October 3rd 1909 – Winston and his wife dined here the other night to meet a party of young Fabians. He is taking on the look of the mature statesman – bon vivant and orator, somewhat in love with his own phrases. He did not altogether like the news of our successful agitation. ‘You should leave the work of converting the country to us, Mrs Webb, you ought to convert the Cabinet’. ‘That would be all right if we wanted merely a change in the law, but we want’, I added, ‘to really change the minds of the people with regard to the facts of destitution, to make the feel the infamy of it and the possibility of avoiding it. That won’t be done by converting the Cabinet, even if we could convert the Cabinet – which I doubt. We will leave that task to a converted country’

Beatrice Webb will strike many as an unlikely source of such an argument. The Webbs have become deeply unfashionable. If they are remembered today, it is usually to bemoan their dominant influence on the 20th century left. That argument, most recently a central theme of David Marquand’s new history of ideas in British politics, has been made as often from within the Fabian left – by GDH Cole, Tawney, Crosland – as outside it. (I write more about the reputation of the Webbs here).

The 1909 Minority Report began a deeply ideological argument in British politics and society about the nature of poverty. (A useful bluffer’s guide to the Poor Law and Minority Report is provided by my colleague Tim Horton). The Minority Report did not just argue for the abolition of the workhouse, but made the first case for a comprehensive welfare provision as part of our common citizenship. Many then innovative, even heretical, ideas which later came to pass began with the 1909 minority report: labour exchanges, a national health service, a minimum wage. So did others – a citizen’s income – which remain ideas, perhaps to be realised yet.

Indeed William Beveridge, a young researcher for the Webbs in 1909, wrote of his landmark report of 1942, that ‘the Beveridge Report stemmed from what all of us had imbibed from the Webbs’. Another personal connection on the road from 1909 to 1945 came with Clement Attlee, employed in 1909 as a part-time organiser of the Campaign to Abolish the Poor Law.

Jose Harris, biographer of Beveridge, writes of how the Minority Report has often been seen as a seminal moment in Britain’s welfare history.

In historical accounts of modern social policy, the Royal Commission of 1905-09 – and in particular its famous Minority Report – has often been closely twinned with the Beveridge Plan of 1942, as one of the two most seminal public inquiries into the workings of British social policy over the past hundred years. Together they are seen as having progressively demolished the institutions and practices of the old, stigmatising, semi-feudal Poor Law and replacing it, first in 1908-11 with the lower storey and then after 1942 with the complete edifice of the modern, universalist, citizen-based welfare state.

Needless to say there has been a good deal of myth-making and wishful thinking about the perceptions of both these episodes. But – as with Magna Carta – neither of these ‘myths’ is so useless or so wholly untrue

But the problem today is hardly of too much mythologizing, but too little. The story of the 1909 Minority Report is perhaps now known mostly to researchers and specialists. As politics, it has too largely been forgotten. But we should draw on moments like this if we are to make our ‘better history’ in campaigns for change today. What is most striking about returning to the debates about poverty in 1909 was how much resonates today. There were Daily Mail campaigns and scares about the palatial conditions inside the Workhouse too.

In interrogating that history, and asking what progressives can learn from it today, our new collection finds a good case for restoring this mythology as well while also, at times, debunking some of it.

So, in fair minded Fabian fashion, we publish Nick Bosanquet making the now unfashionable case for the majority report, drawing on his family connection to Helen Bosanquet: Beatrice Webb’s chief antagonist on the Royal Commission and the public champion of charity-led welfare provision. Helen Bosanquet was not, he argues, ‘the fearsome anachronism of social policy myth’, as Nick Bosanquet connects the debate of 1909 to his personal journey away from Fabian optimism about the benefits of state activity into the low tax advocacy of Reform.
(Another remarkable feature of the debates of 1909 was that the ideological argument which dominated much of 20th century domestic politics was contested primarily between the two women on the Royal Commission, in a political society which could not decide whether to grant women the vote).

The failure of the Minority Report in 1909 had important institutional consequences, as well as at the level of ideas. The Fabians shifted from ‘permeation’ of all of the parties to building up the fledgling Labour Party from a trade union pressure group in Parliament to a distinctive party competing for government. The anti-poor law campaign newsletter The Crusade led to the birth of the New Statesman in 1913. The Webbs had also just created the LSE, believing that dispassionate academic study of the social facts would lead to collectivist solutions.

This awareness of the value of parallel institutions to shift arguments and ideas in society was a central lesson which the New Right – in Britain and America – learned when seeking to counter the advances of the 20th century left. (This has been well documented by Richard Cockett for Britain, and John Micklethwait for the US).

But perhaps the left, because it had learnt the value of the state, forgot that its politics needed to persuade society, and not simply make arguments to government. The Webbs may often be blamed for this but, in fairness, it was not their left which forgot the need to educate, agitate and organise.

Perhaps 1909 should be recovered as one moment in progressive history when radical ideas were allied to movement politics.

We might ask too how and why the left which got us Beveridge was different to that which has lived off it since.

* The Fabian Society publishes ‘From Workhouse to Welfare: A Centenary Celebration’ to mark the centenary of the 1909 Minority Report on the Poor Law, with contributions from Nick Bosanquet, Jose Harris, Roy Hattersley, Dianne Hayter, Tim Horton, Sunder Katwala, Seema Malhotra, Peter Townsend, Jon Trickett MP and Sarah Wise. The a centenary conference takes place at LSE on Saturday: full programme.

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   [...] Liberal Conspiracy » Movement politics: a century ago | creating a new liberal-left alliance Beatrice Webb will strike many as an unlikely source of such an argument. The Webbs have become deeply unfashionable. If they are remembered today, it is usually to bemoan their dominant influence on the 20th century left…The Minority Report did not just argue for the abolition of the workhouse, but made the first case for a comprehensive welfare provision as part of our common citizenship. Many then innovative, even heretical, ideas which later came to pass began with the 1909 minority report: labour exchanges, a national health service, a minimum wage. So did others – a citizen’s income – which remain ideas, perhaps to be realised yet. (tags: uk poverty history class socialservices welfare) [...]

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