The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State

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Nicholas Timmins. The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State

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The Five Giants

NICHOLAS TIMMINS is a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and at the King’s Fund, and a visiting professor in social policy at the London School of Economics and in public management at King’s College, London. He was public policy editor and commentator at the Financial Times from 1996 to 2012. He worked previously for Nature, the Press Association and The Times, and was a founder member of the Independent.

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The Boer War (1899–1902) had provided one part of the stimulus for the great reforming programme of the Liberal Government of 1906 when it was discovered that almost half those volunteering to fight in South Africa were medically unfit. The First World War exposed the same problems even more brutally and on a much larger scale. One survey showed that one conscript in three was not fit enough to join the forces.41 Only a third were judged Grade One. By the time of the Second World War, seven out of ten were put in the top grade.42

The mud and carnage of Flanders and the Somme, the days of ‘lions led by donkeys’, also changed British society for good. The Victorian era and the gilded summers of its Edwardian afterglow, in which hideous poverty had come to exist alongside abundant wealth, were to be swept away for ever. Lloyd George, in language Beveridge would have recognised, declared in 1917:

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