View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Apollo Beveridge’s rival: Juliet Rhys-Williams and the campaign for basic income, 1942-55 Peter Sloman, New College, Oxford Postal address: New College, Oxford, OX1 3BN Email:
[email protected] Telephone: 07787 114629 Abstract: Historians of Britain’s post-war welfare state have long been aware of the shortcomings of the social insurance model, but the political impact of the Beveridge report has tended to obscure the alternative visions of welfare canvassed in the 1940s and 1950s. This article examines the social activist Juliet Rhys-Williams’ campaign for the integration of the tax and benefit systems and the provision of a universal basic income, which attracted wide interest from economists, journalists, and Liberal and Conservative politicians during and after the Second World War. Though Rhys-Williams’ proposals were not adopted, they helped establish a distinctive ‘social market’ perspective on welfare provision which has become central to British social policy debates since the 1960s and 1970s. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Ben Jackson, Taku Eriguchi, Bill Jordan, Philippe van Parijs, and Malcolm Torry for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I am also grateful for valuable feedback from participants at the Women in British Politics conference at the University of Lincoln in May 2011 and the Modern British History seminar at the University of Oxford in January 2015, and from the anonymous Contemporary British History reviewers. 1 Beveridge’s rival: Juliet Rhys-Williams and the campaign for basic income, 1942-55 Historians of the development of Britain’s post-war welfare state have long been aware that they are dealing with a paradox.