Labour, not the Conservatives, delivered the first welfare-state cuts

Evidence

It was Labour, not the Conservatives, which applied the surgical cut to the welfare state. And there was Mr. Healey’s not wholly unexpected conversion to orthodox monetarism and fiscal restraint—tutored by the IMF and the oil price. In this climate of austerity, Keynes has been decently buried; the Right has re-established its monopoly over “good ideas”; “capitalism” and “the free market” have come back into common usage as terms of positive approval. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1090 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The welfare state was always a compromised social formation—corporate profits and the public good, privatized “affluence” and collective social provision pulling in opposite directions. It depended on the continuing growth of private capital to create the wealth that the state then redistributed. However, the redistributive impact of the welfare state cannot be underestimated: it proved one of the most successful peaceful social transformations of modern times. For this reason, it was seen by its conservative opponents as an unwarranted intrusion by the state into the prerogatives of capital, private property, and the “free” individual and as an attempt fundamentally to shift the balance of social forces toward the working classes and the poor. They determined to reverse this damaging initiative and to destroy the consensus that developed around it. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1060 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Labour itself applied harsh welfare cuts under IMF tutelage (similarity 0.91)
• Labour itself advanced austerity and monetarism before the Conservatives. (similarity 0.87)
• Osborne’s austerity cuts aimed to make the welfare state’s return impossible (similarity 0.83)
• British austerity cuts aimed to permanently foreclose any future welfare state (similarity 0.82)
• Austerity cuts aimed to permanently prevent welfare-state restoration in Britain (similarity 0.81)
• The welfare state’s success provoked conservative opposition to reverse it (similarity 0.79)
• Defeated Labour adopted Thatcherite economics before Thatcher governed (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Labour itself applied harsh welfare cuts under IMF tutelage #corroborates (0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1090
• The welfare state’s success provoked conservative opposition to reverse it #complicates (0.40) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1060