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

58 Human Rights, Values and Choice
Treasury principles rejected this as too expensive.
Eventually a Conservative-appointed Royal Commission
of 1905 led to Lloyd George's and Winston Churchill's
Acts introducing national labour exchanges, minimum
wages in sweated industry, compulsory national and
sickness insurance for workers and non-contributory old
age pensions in 1911. It is generally asserted that interparty
consensus was only reached post-World War II
and that this was the cause of real advances. That
ignores the long tradition of agreement after 1911 by all
major parties on expanding social welfare rights: advances
were made in the 1920s and 1930s with pensions,
expansion of the scope of national insurance, noncontributory
national assistance, slum clearance and
planning for housing. Harold MacMillan's influential
1933 plea for a national policy on reconstruction and his
The Middle Way (1938), arguing the necessity for abolition
of poverty, need remembering. The Atlantic Charter
reference to social security, the joint work of Churchill,
Attlee and Bevin, was relied on by Beveridge in his
Report, the main thrust of which was accepted by both
parties and which would have been implemented in
broadly similar fashion by Churchill, had he won the
1944 election, instead of a Labour administration coming
into office under Attlee and Bevin. I remind readers of
these contributions, because improvement of social
welfare standards has been a non-party tradition, even
though the Parliamentary system is such that criticism of
Government performance is the duty of any opposition,
something that obscures broad underlying agreement,
with differences being on detail and method. Churchill's
1906 remark that "we want to draw a line below which
we will not allow persons to live and labour" reflects the
policy of all United Kingdom parties. 8
Germany, Austria and England led the world with
development of private insurance arrangements, but