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Welfare Of The Welfare State

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The welfare state in Britain as we know it today did not exist, looking back through the 18th and 19th Centuries many of the social welfare benefits that are available to Britain’s today were not even imaginable to the people at that time. Today much of the help that is available to those in the margins of society is seen as an obligation for the state to correct. However in the Elizabethan Era the attitudes towards welfare and the poor were very negative and unsympathetic. In this essay I will be discussing welfare before the ‘classic welfare state’, the provisions for poor, the key features of the welfare state and why it was developed.
The key features of the welfare state are very linked to the 1942 report on Social Insurance and Allied Services or also known as the Beveridge Report. The key features I have identified of the classic welfare state is the National Health Service (NHS), Social insurance, Housing, Education and Full employment. Asa Briggs a British historian defined the welfare state as a state which “...organised power is deliberately used in order to play of the market in 3 direction; by guaranteeing an individuals a minimum income, narrowing extent of insecurity by enabling people to meet certain ‘social contingencies’ which lead to family or individual crisis and thirdly by ensuring that all citizens without distinction of status or class are offered the best standards available to a certain agreed range of social services’. Kauffman and DeSwaan also

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