The Five Giants

The Buddha laid out the Nobel Eightfold Path as a set of principles by which to live a good life: Right Speech; Right Livelihood; Right Conduct etc. When the United Kingdom was back to the wall fighting the Nazis in WWII, several years before victory seemed probable, the coalition government started to plan for a Better Britain. However hard you imagine it is to be poor and/or homeless and/or troubled in mind and body now; life was much shittier in 1938. One of the shameful discoveries is that Joe Median was in general better fed and healthier under a war-footing with rationing [it's the brown bread] and wholesale destruction of the housing stock during the blitz. 

William Beveridge (1879-1963) was tasked to draft a report on "Social Insurance and Allied Services" which was published in 1942. That same month the fortunes of the Allies were decisively turning for the better in North Africa and at Stalingrad.  Looking for a snappy slogan to focus the attention of mandarins and policy wonks Beveridge came came up with Giant Disease, Giant Idleness, Giant Ignorance, Giant Squalor and Giant Want . . . The Five Giants which is the title of Nicholas Timmins' Biography of the Welfare State. I found the 700 page 2017 3rd edition on open shelves in the local village library about 200km West of the nearest bit of the UK. I can't imagine it flies off the shelves to be read in farm kitchens hereabouts. Reviewed at LSE - Timmins piece to camera [1 hour]

This is a brick of a book but readable and occasionally funny in a throw-away ironic sort of way. Timmins is also prone to run-on sentences for which my grad school mentor castigated me 40 years ago. Bafflexample on p.645 "There was a recognition here that if the Labour government had been right to insist since 1997 that poverty and disadvantage were no longer permitted as an excuse for poor results, it remained the case that disadvantaged children needed committed to them more effectively the many services which existed for them - many of which Labour had enhanced or indeed created" aka Blair's people talked large about children's entitlements but failed to deliver.

What I've learned from the book is that Government is Hard. I've had my sofa-bound say about homelessness and UBI and paying for drugs. We have a phrase in Ireland about hurlers on the ditch who know far better how to win than the actual players on the pitch. I suspect that too many people in politics in the UK [and in Ireland] find it easy to trot out a slogan [go back where you came from; welfare scroungers; privatise telecoms; nationalise railways] but couldn't actually run the coal-face of a government department. It's also apparent that politics was a) nicer b) arguably more effective when political parties were less monolithic and less polarized.

But the key question addressed [on and on; again and again; in the evolving circumstances of history] is how do governments apportion money and services (and taxes) among its citizens in a way that is fair given the vastly different starting points from which neonates begin their journey. If you think you know, you're wrong so bad you don't even know you're wrong! [calling Dunning-Kruger]. And can we please have a bit more evidence-based, rather than ideology-driven, policy everywhere in politics?

As a kid who came to sentience in England during the late 60s and early 70s of the last century, it was odd to have then household names [Macmillan, Wilson, Heath], skitter across my eyeballs for the first time in decades. In 1966 I was at boarding school near Southampton. Time was allocated every Sunday for "writing letters". I brought away a stack of these letters home after my mother died in 2020 but haven't yet got the bottle to read them. One week, I discovered that outgoing mail was subject to censorship by The Man. Ringing the changes on writing home, 12 y.o. me addressed an envelope to George Brown MP esq. | Houses of Parliament | Westminster. This was opened up before posting to reveal, not a bomb threat from a disgruntled Young Tory, but a rather pathetic "Dear Mr Brown, how is it being Foreign Secretary? Can I have your signiture? Yours faithfully Bobby Scientist". The Censor informed me that the letter had been resealed and popped in the post . . . also "signiture is spelled wrong and it's better to use autograph". Which all, fair enough. A week later I got a 15cm x 20cm glossy photo of George Brown, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, with his name scrawled across the pale background near his left ear. 

Note: Brown was a famous boozer but the mainstream press of those days were too deferential to mention it. Private Eye coined the euphemism "tired and emotional" to describe Brown (and subsequently many other public figures) when he was blotto in public.