The United Kingdom and Human Rights - College of Social ...

The Situation in 1990 97
economic policy decisions have to continue to determine
affordable outcomes, I do not think that the Treasury is
the right place to take decisions on cutting up the
budgetary cake or to settle competing inter-departmental
claims for resources, let alone being the appropriate
forum for long- or even medium-term substantive policy
thinking. I take this position because, as things now
stand, the Treasury neither has an appropriate general
philosophy nor on-the-ground experience of hardship,
yet upon its decisions depend the whole structure of
governmental institutions and the substance of human
rights. Only when Treasury personnel have their
orientation and philosophy changed, will the United
Kingdom better conform to human rights standards and
achieve better human legal rights in practice.
Notes
1 My main sources are Sir George Nicholls, History of the English Poor
Law in connection with the State of the Country and the Condition of the
People, 2 Vols., (P.S. King & Son, London, 1860), new ed. H.G.
Willink, (1898). Sir George was "the father of the new system of Poor
Law" and one of the first three Poor Law Commissioners appointed
in 1834. See also Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Poor Law History:
Part I: the Old Poor Law, (Longmans, London, 1927), and Part II: the
Last Hundred Years, (1929); B. L. Hutchinson and A. Harrison, A
History of Factory Legislation, (P.S. King and Son, London, 2nd ed.,
1911); and Maurice Bruce, The Coming of the Welfare State, (B.T.
Batsford Ltd., London, 4th ed., 1968), which has a useful
bibliography. More analytical accounts are given in Derek Fraser, The
Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy since the
Industrial Revolution, (Macmillan, London, 1973); and in Pat Thane,
The Foundations of the Welfare State, (Longman, 1982). Trends of
thought in particular fields are described in Law and Opinion in
England in the 20th Century, Morris Ginsberg ed., (Stevens, London,
1959).
There is a comprehensive account of the introduction of social
insurance by Professor A. I. Ogus in "Great Britain" in P. A. Kohler,
M. Partington, and H. F. Zacher, The Evolution of Social Insurance