Scotland had a Poor Law from 1579 onward. It had no magical effect. In the 1690's, some 5 to 15 percent of the population started to death during the 'seven ill years'. In Aberdeenshire, a quarter of the population died. But the Scots worked hard and rose up by their own efforts. So did the English.
Simon Szreter is a Professor of History. Does this mean he is bound to tell stupid lies? Yes. He write in 'the Conversation' in an article titled In Elizabethan England, a law that made it illegal to let anybody starve led to economic gains. Yet, there was a famine in North England in 1623.
Murder is illegal. This does not mean nobody gets killed. The Crown passed laws against begging and vagabondage. But those things did not disappear.
The Crown transferred responsibility for famine relief to the property owners of each individual parish. This gave them an incentive to misrepresent starvation death as 'intestinal ailments' etc. However, the dearth of 1647-51, during which there were starvation deaths in plenty though nobody knows exactly how many. This was not alleviated by the Poor Law. An agricultural shock reduces everyone's income and affects trade. You can't get blood from a stone. Instead magistrates returned to traditional price controls in response to growing anarchy- poor people seizing grain etc. . Monarchs or Lord Protectors may not be concerned with 'welfare'. They fear rebellion. Perhaps a contributing factor to England's distress was the financial and food demands of Cromwell's army in Ireland. But this gives a clue as to why England could get rid of starvation. It conquered other countries which had to export food to England even if they starved themselves. Warfare can capture wealth. Welfare can spend that wealth but if there is no wealth then it can do nothing.
Once internal peace was achieved- i.e. revolutionary activity of 'Levellers' and the like were suppressed- the system developed in a predictable way. Rich parishes would throw out anybody who applied for relief unless they could prove they were born there. Workhouses were set up. Paupers were incarcerated and separated by sex. 'Outdoor relief'- i.e. a wage subsidy- forced property owners of the middling sort to subsidize the big employers in the parish because the big landlords held power. Subsidizing the Rich led to economic gains- for the Rich. Karl Polanyi may not have understood this. He was a foreigner. What is Szreter's excuse?
In the closing years of Elizabeth I’s reign, England saw the emergence of arguably the world’s first effective welfare state.
Fuck off. Elizabeth was a Protestant. She forced Catholics and others to pay for a vast increase in the power of the established Church. The Poor became a subject population for the Vicar and the Parish board. The English had no love for the Poor Law. They preferred the charity of the Catholic Church which was not geared towards forcing them to work. Houses of 'correction' for the work-shy represented a Stalinist type of Gulag.
Laws were established that successfully protected people from rises in food prices.
In which case there couldn't have been a famine in 1623-24. Yet there was. No law can successfully protect people from food availability deficit. There is a law against murder, yet people get murdered all the time.
More than 400 years later, in the closing years of Elizabeth II’s reign, the United Kingdom once again faces perilous spikes in living costs. Perhaps today’s government could learn something from its legislative ancestors.
Sentence homeless peeps to houses of correction. Pressgang them into the Navy. Enclose common land. Hang, draw and quarter seditionists. Won't that be cool?
Until the end of the 16th century, it was a given throughout medieval Europe that when food prices rose there would be a consequent surge in mortality rates, as people starved to death and diseases spread among the malnourished.
No it wasn't. The Catholic Church did a lot for the poor. Popes and Cardinals would wash the feet of lepers. Helping the helpless was your ticket to Paradise. The Tudors had a different agenda. England was less populous than its rivals on the Continent. They wanted to increase the population and make it more productive. This meant more profits for the big landowners. The guys who had grabbed the lands which had belonged to the Monasteries where transferring the obligation to help the poor onto the middling sort of rate-payer.
The Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601 turned the situation in England on its head.
Not really. They built on what went before and increased the power of the Established Church and big landowners. What decreased famine in England was improved transport and maritime commerce. Under the control of big landowners, land was devoted to the most profitable use- e.g. sheep taking over arable land- and more and more rural folk emigrated or went to the Cities.
Now when food became too expensive, local parishes were obliged to give cash or food to those who could not afford to eat.
Or they could tell them to fuck off back to their own parish.
For the first time in history, it became illegal to let anybody starve.
Though you could chuck them out. Poverty is created by poor people having babies or poor people immigrating. Separate poor men from poor women in Workhouses and chuck out poor immigrants. Throw beggars and vagabonds in jail or send them to the galleys.
China has risen because it ruthless enforces an internal passport system such that the rich areas don't have to pay for the welfare of poor migrants. They are welcome to work for low wages and fuck off and die back home when they can longer do so.
The laws were clear and simple and required each of over 10,000 English parishes to set up a continuous relief fund to support the vulnerable. This included the lame, the ill and the old, as well as orphans, widows, single mothers and their children, and those unable to find work. Occupiers of land (landowners or their tenants) had to pay a tax towards the fund in proportion to the value of their holding.
So this was good for those in commerce or manufacturing industry. Obviously, the big property owners could band together to use the Poor Rate to subsidize their own wage bill.
Overseen by local magistrates, the system’s transparency provided no loopholes for avoiding the tax. In fact, it encouraged a flourishing culture of charitable giving which provided almshouses, apprenticeships and hospitals for the parish poor to alleviate destitution.
Cool! The British Government should get rid of Social Security. Let's shift the responsibility to Local Authorities who, in turn, will shift if to the wealthy folk who do a bit of 'charity' in exchange for enclosing land or getting hold of valuable local resources. Imprison beggars and separate the sexes in workhouses. Send kids down coal-mines or up chimneys.
With this proliferation of localised mini-welfare states, England became the first country in Europe by more than 150 years to effectively put an end to widespread famine.
Only because sea transport improved and the country is an island with no point more than 70 miles from the sea.
And it also enabled England subsequently to enjoy by far the fastest rate of urbanisation in Europe.
Because the poor were chased out of their own parishes. The rate payers made sure of that.
Between 1600 and 1800, huge numbers of young people left rural parishes to find work in cities, safe in the knowledge that their parents would be supported by the parish in times of need – and that they themselves would receive help if things did not work out.
No. They'd have to return home if they couldn't make a go of things. Japan was surprisingly urbanized- by some measures, more so, than England, in 1700. But it had famine.
Long before the first steam engines arrived, the Poor Laws had created an urban workforce which enabled the industrial revolution to take off.
But Japan had an urban workforce too. Indeed, it had a much larger city than any England could boast of.
State of affairs
Then in 1834,
after the franchise had been widened and the middle class gained power
everything changed. The cost of this level of welfare support was deemed too high, and replaced with a deliberately harsh new system in which the poorest men and women were separated from each other and their children and provided only with gruel in return for tedious chores in degrading workhouses.
The first workhouse in England was built in 1631. By the end of the century, there were harsh settlement laws and workhouses were being established. They aimed to ensure that conditions inside were worse than they were outside. The Workhouse Test Act was passed by Parliament in 1723 In 1824, a model workhouse was built which still stands. Nothing greatly changed in 1834. It was just that a wage subsidy was disallowed because the rate payers were middle class whereas it was one or two big landlords or industrialists who gained from it. Soon, the 'Corn Laws' which protected landed magnates too were abolished.
The fear of the workhouse was designed to force the poor to prefer work – for whatever abysmal wages the market offered.
This had always been the case. What changed was that no wage subsidy was available. Tories may pretend that England was Merrie when Lords and Ladies Bountiful ruled the land. Catholics may pretend that things were even better when Bishops and Abbots held power.
It is this version of the Poor Laws which tends to stick in the popular memory, familiar from the books of Charles Dickens and obscuring the achievements of the Elizabethan original. But extensive recent research has started to highlight how Elizabethan law changed British history – and provides us with urgent lessons for today’s welfare system and the pressures of the cost-of-living crisis.
This is nonsense. Once the working class got the vote and the Trade Unions gained power, we moved to a much kinder system. The stigma of receiving public assistance was removed. It is foolish to suggest that we can learn anything by looking back to times when Lords and Bishops help power.
Today's welfare system depends on whether tax-payers feel it is value for money. Will it help them if the worst happens? If not, the thing will be pruned back. Immigrants with large families will lose entitlements even if this means some local people too are affected. On the other hand, if the country becomes insolvent, there may be a 'haircut' or entitlements collapse of the sort we saw in Greece. It may be that the 'income effect' of higher food and energy prices will be compensated to some extent through tax credits and transfers. However, there will be no wage subsidies. The 'substitution effect' of relative price changes has to do its job of re-allocating resources. We can't freeze the economy in time because if we do the nation will be a shithole within a decade.
Just as the old Poor Laws supported an extraordinary period of economic prosperity, so too did the UK’s welfare state after the second world war.
Thanks to Marshall Aid, sure. But this prosperity occurred under the Tories who dismantled Labour's rationing system. Free market policies lifted up the country. There was 'over-full' employment and increasing female participation. Tories saw that the upper working class wanted foreign holidays and indoor toilets. Soon they were tucking into prawn cocktails and drinking Sangria. They would vote Tory provided the Conservatives had charismatic leaders as opposed to ghastly cadavers of an inbred aristocratic type.
Tax-funded investment in education (secondary and higher), and the newly-created National Health Service saw widened opportunities and living standards take off, as the UK enjoyed over two decades of the fastest productivity growth in its history (1951-’73).
But the Unions fucked up productivity gains. In the 70's, wage subsidies were back. The tax payer turned against loss making Nationalized industries. To restore prosperity, Britain had to deindustrialize, privatize and give up on redistribution as a goal of fiscal policy. Under Blair, Labour embraced this Thatcherite creed. Babbling about the Elizabethan Poor Law aint going to reverse that outcome. The only cunts who will fall for it are crazy anti-Semites whom the working class wont vote for.
Today, people regularly speak of being forced to choose between eating and heating as food and energy prices surge. Yet there is no corresponding compensation for those whose wages and benefits do not stretch far enough. A one-off handout when millions of households are facing both fuel and food poverty is but a temporary sticking plaster.
If global trade does not rebound, real incomes will fall. People will have to change their life-style. The dream of living in a house and driving to work may be over for many people. We may have to share a room and take the bus.
Until there is a permanent increase in safety net payments to those on universal credit, food banks will continue to proliferate and children will continue to go to school hungry.
That's the other thing. The school leaving age may fall. Higher Education is shite subjects like History may no longer be subsidized. Emigration may increase. Immigration controls will become more stringent. There may be 'stagflation' which would erode the wealth of savers and retirees without offering any lifted horizon for youth. Ultimately, you can't do 'welfare' if you don't have a pot to piss in.
The link between wealth and taxation was effectively used by the Elizabethans to start to tackle inequality.
Fuck off! The Elizabethans wanted the Established Church to have more power. If you go to Church regularly and tug your forelock at the Vicar and the Squire then, maybe, the Parish will look after you if become disabled. But not otherwise.
But today’s globalised economy facilitates offshore profits and ever-rising inequality.
So fuck off back to the Elizabethan age. But be careful. You may be burnt at the stake as a warlock. Why is this silly man writing this nonsense? The answer is that he has a book to sell. Sadly it does not feature shape shifting lizards who control the global economy. So it won't make much money.
In my new book, After the Virus: Lessons from the Past for a Better Future I explore changes in the sense of moral duty and the carefully legislated collective endeavour that formed the foundation of the UK’s past – and most recent – periods of prosperity.
The virus didn't kill enough people to make much of a difference. By contrast, the Black Death enabled this country to rise out of feudalism. Greece had plenty of 'carefully legislated collective endeavour'. Then it went off the fiscal cliff and there was an entitlements collapse.
The Poor Laws were far from a perfect system of welfare.
They weren't about 'welfare' but social control of the poor. England prevented a Malthusian disaster involving a large class of vagrants and subsistence farmers chopping down forests.
But the fact that protecting the poorest in society has previously led to widespread economic growth is a history lesson that should not be ignored by any government during a cost-of-living crisis.
No. Forcing the poorest to work and then extracting 'surplus value' is the key to rising wealth. If there is a big successful war, then Labor may rise up and this may lead to a redistribution of wealth thanks to a pre-existing, War-economy, administrative machinery. But this would involve things like 'exchange control' and Industrial Policy and Manpower Policy and so forth. The war-time habit of obedience can permit this. But, currently, we have enjoyed a very long period of peace and laissez faire. State Capacity simply does not exist to implement any Utopian scheme.
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