Eighty years after the Beveridge report, time to ask again what are the essentials that allow us to thrive
‘Out of intermittent labour spring our gravest woes. It produces in the labourer intermittent energy; the off-days become habitual; with indolence comes intemperance; with uncertainty of employment comes recklessness about the future; from these result pauperism and the whole series of mental and physical infirmities that are the creatures of pauperism.”
So wrote Charles Stewart Loch, professor of economic science and statistics at King’s College, London, and secretary of the Charity Organisation Society, in his 1883 book How to Help Cases of Distress. A great believer in the distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, Loch saw “intermittent labour” – casual work – as the curse of the late Victorian economy, the consequence of which was the “demoralisation” of the worker, his disengagement from a moral framework and a regression to his innate tendency to “indolence”, “intemperance” and “recklessness” and eventually to pauperism.
