STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Friday, 11 July 2014

[Demeter]

1. The Beveridge report revisited: where now for the welfare state? UK

http://www.theguardian.com/society-professionals/2014/jul/07/-sp-beveridge-report-revisited-where-now-for-the-welfare-state

INTERESTING HISTORY AND DISCUSSION OF EVENTS IN THE UK, APPLICABLE TO US PROBLEMS.

After unprecedented public spending cuts, we revisit Sir William Beveridge’s welfare state 70 years on and explore the modern evils that society professionals must battle and defeat...

Seventy years ago, as the allies were driving Nazi forces back across Europe, Britain was preparing for eventual peace and reconstruction. The nation was gripped not only by dispatches from the front but also by the Beveridge report, the blueprint for what was to become known as the welfare state.

In proposing a system of cradle-to-grave social security, improved education and a national health service, the report lacked nothing in ambition. Its author, Sir William Beveridge, declared that “a revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not patching”. Overnight, he became a national hero.

As we claw our way out of the wreckage of a global economic crash that has had a warlike impact, triggering spending cuts unprecedented in modern times, there is a sense in which the UK faces another revolutionary moment. The battered remains of Beveridge’s welfare state need rebuilding and redesigning for the 21st century, for the digital era and for a society that expects a very different relationship with government.

Beveridge, however, was on to something in basing his report on the need to tackle five “giant evils”: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. His list has stood the test of time so well that when the IPPR thinktank published recently its Condition of Britain analysis, it revisited the five topics for an update. Verdict: work still in progress...