Some Recent British White Papers1

The Beveridge, Scott, and Uthwatt reports are all concerned with the widening framework of governmental action within which our free enterprise system operates. None of them is revolutionary. The Scott report has even been called reactionary. The Beveridge and Uthwatt reports are based on a generation of practical experience. In their attempt to infuse a few clear principles into future policy, these two great reports, in their different ways, point towards greater order and system, the smoothing away of anomalies, the filling in of gaps. Procedures which have served certain categories of people or certain localities, they attempt to make universally and equally available to all people or to all localities. They mark a decisive step in the passage from the fragmentariness that is inseparable from experiment to the universality that is characteristic of good government.Sir William Beveridge's plan for social security is nothing less than an attempt to abolish want by redistributing income. He assumes that society has somehow to pay the cost of privation in any case, and therefore might as well do so consciously and deliberately through the instrumentality of government.