Idleness is the strangest of Beveridge’s five Giants, an amorphous shapeshifter in comparison with the terrible lumbering colossus Want. It appears last in Beveridge’s sequence, a place usually reserved for the most baleful of adversaries — Death upon its pale …
The birth of the biostate
While each of Beveridge’s “Five Giants” — want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness — remains unslain, one in particular retains the power to cripple entire nations with the stroke of a pen. The past three years have revealed many things, …
The betrayal of Britain’s seaside towns
It was the first night of Blackpool’s Illuminations, when seven miles of promenade are transformed into a parade of glitter set against the ink-black Irish Sea. The traffic had poured in from across Lancashire to crawl, bumper to bumper, beneath …
Britain’s squalid housing crisis
The Conservatives are doomed. But it won’t be Brexit that destroys the party in its current form. That’s ultimately a symptom of a far larger problem: a slow but inexorable collision between voters’ desire for ongoing growth, and voters’ desire …
The workers were never ignorant
Sixteen years before the Beveridge Report was published, the working people of Britain showed that, whatever problems might afflict them, ignorance wasn’t one of them. The General Strike of 1926 broke out when the mine owners tried to impose lower …
