I have long thought that one of the quietest acts of political vandalism in modern Britain was the change of language that sought to turn social security into welfare. It happened slowly. It sounded harmless. It was anything but that.
There is a good reason for saying that, because once you persuade people that a system of mutual protection is a handout, you make it easy to cut. You make it easy to stigmatise. You make it easy to pretend that those who need help are the problem, and so deny that the reality is that the economy has failed them.
That linguistic shift has shaped decades of policy, and we are living with the consequences.
A system built because markets fail
Social security did not appear by accident. It was created because industrial capitalism exposed risks that individuals could not manage alone.
People get ill. They lose jobs. They age. They care for children or parents. They face disability. They experience economic shocks that have nothing to do with their effort or virtue.
No private insurance market can cover those risks universally at an affordable price. And no family can bear them alone in a complex economy.
So societies did something rational. They pooled risk.
When we are able, we contribute. When we need help, we receive support. Over a lifetime, most people do both. That is not charity. It is collective insurance.
And in macroeconomic terms, it is essential infrastructure because when income collapses in a recession, social security replaces part of that income. Spending continues. Businesses survive. Communities hold together.
Without it, downturns become depressions. The economic jigsaw falls apart because too many pieces vanish at once.
A system that recognises care
Markets measure what is paid. Societies depend on what is not.
Parents raising children, carers supporting elderly relatives, and volunteers sustaining communities: none of these appears in GDP, and yet without them, the economy could not function for a week.
Social security acknowledges that reality. It supports carers. It supports families. It supports those whose contribution is socially essential but not market-priced.
This is what I mean by the politics of care. That is an economy exists to sustain people, not to maximise transactions. To dismiss that as welfare is to deny the value of care itself.
A system we all use
The mythology of welfare depends on the idea that there are two groups: taxpayers who contribute and claimants.
There are not. Firstly, social security is paid by the state, and not with taxpayers' funds. Tax, as always, controls the resulting risk of inflation arising from a payment made by a government with the power to create its own currency. Secondly, most of us use a social security system at some time.
We contribute to balance the economic equation when we are working and healthy. We receive when we are ill, unemployed, caring for someone, or retired.
We benefit when our children go to school, when our parents receive pensions, and when our neighbours are supported through hard times instead of falling into destitution.
Social security smooths income across the life cycle. It redistributes risk from the unlucky to the lucky. It creates stability that markets cannot provide. That is not a moral failing. It is the basis of civilisation.
Why the word “welfare” was chosen
The word welfare was not adopted because it was accurate. It was adopted because it was useful to those who wanted to shrink the state and expand private wealth. It allowed politicians to say:
- Support is a favour, and not a right.
- Claimants are suspects prone to fraud, idleness and doubt.
- Cuts are discipline, and not harm
- Poverty is a chosen behaviour, and not the result of political policy intended to create economic failure.
That rhetoric has justified austerity. It has justified sanctions regimes. It has justified humiliating systems that cost more to administer than they save. And it distracted attention from the real transfers in our economy, whether from labour to capital, or from tenants to landlords, or from the state to tax avoiders.
The politics of language has, in this case, as it has too often, concealed the economics of power.
Social security as capital maintenance
On this blog, I have argued that we need to think in terms of maintaining all forms of capital, not just financial wealth. Capital includes:
Social security maintains the last two.
It keeps people healthy enough to work, learn, and care. It keeps communities intact when shocks hit both individually and collectively. It prevents the destruction of skills, relationships, and hope.
Cutting social security is not about saving money. It is running down the national wealth in the most literal sense.
We would never boast about letting bridges collapse to save steel. Yet we boast about letting people fall into poverty to save pounds.
What follows from this
If we were honest about what social security is, policy would look different.
We would accept that support should be adequate, because underfunded insurance does not insure.
We would remove stigma and complexity, because humiliation is not efficient.
We would fund social security and then address any need to counter inflation by imposing progressive taxation, including tackling the avoidance and evasion that drain public capacity.
We would properly integrate social security with housing, health, and care policies, recognising that insecurity in one domain spreads to others.
And we would stop using a word designed to make people ashamed of needing help.
Conclusion
Language matters. Narrative matters. And economics, as I often say, is full of CRAp, or completely rubbish approximations to the truth when it pretends that markets alone can secure well-being.
Social security is one of the institutions that proves otherwise. It is a recognition that we are interdependent, that risk is shared, and that care is an economic necessity.
Call it welfare if you want to undermine it.
Call it social security if you want an economy that works for people.
This blog post is also being posted as a glossary entry. The main entry will be social security. Welfare will cross-reference to it.
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Words shape minds.
Yes a very good analysis of the system and why support is needed for people. The change in name obviously helped those who want to punish the poor. The problem is that the major parties all support the idea that: 1) benefits are costly; 2) there are a lot of undeserving people claiming; 3) benefits discourage work; 4) they are too high.
The media are also to blame with many of the papers making false assertions. Also get various people on twitter who do the same.
There are also the assertions that people who have ill health are not really that ill and could work if they wanted.
What is the answer? Apart from a dramatic change in government?
The answer is to change the language.
And the obsession with the so called welfare bill rising rarely mentions that this is due to the rising number of pensioners and nothing to do with the demonised disabled or parents who suddenly find themselves struggling due to the loss of a job or relationship breakdown.
We have sadly returned to the Victorian concept of the deserving and undeserving poor.
Agreed
I always thought it was called “welfare” because it is well fair 🙂
I’ll get my coat…
Thank you very much to the power of 10.
‘Social security’ lives!
Woe be to Welfare – send it back to the States.
Can we start the revolution now and ban the word here?
We can try
In the world of private insurance, UNDERinsurance is very stupid.
Yet government does it all the time, with social security, and ALL of us suffer, because the social destruction that causes.
Agreed
Excellent piece. Clear and concise, so eminently quotable!
Thanks.
Laced with a little anger…
I feel it is worth bearing in mind that much of the 20th century social security provisions were established in response to both the great depression, and to the rise of the Soviet Union, and following its fall, the rolling back of those provisions- as entirely predicted at the time of it’s fall.
As pensions they began before WW1
Fair point, they did indeed.
It’s not so much the replacement of “social security” with “welfare”. It’s more about the redefinition of the word itself. Just as “benefits” became a dirty word during the Thatcher era, so too did welfare lose its original connotations of doing good and making things better. None of these changes were accidental: they were part of an agenda. Orwell anticipated the weaponisation of language in his novel 1984. He even got the date right within a year or so.
I agree Peter, but it is quite hard to redefine ‘social security’.
Once social security is relabelled as welfare, the system is no longer collective protection but a moral hierarchy. It creates the familiar narrative: I am the hard-working taxpayer paying for the lazy good-for-nothing scroungers. We have all heard that line often enough. It is politically convenient because it turns structural economic failure into an individual defect.
The same cynicism sits behind the shift from the “sick note” to the “fit note.” The language sounds supportive, but the subtext is disciplinary: how dare you be ill? Why are you not back to work? Why are you not keeping the wheel turning?
Illness becomes a productivity issue rather than a human condition. Care is replaced with suspicion. And once again, language does the quiet work of reshaping public judgment, causing division, blame, and making cuts easier to justify. Frankly, it is sick.
I think this is,alongside the Household Analogy,your most important article.
It’s excellent in it’s thoroughness and clarity in dealing with such a vital and ,sadly,controversial topic that is too often exploited by the main political parties.
Chapeau.
Thanks
Even in the last year the language has morphed further – ‘welfare reform’ could mean changing it or even increasing it – but its now generally understood , thanks to BBC as ‘welfare cuts’. Orwell indeed.
Agreed
Well said
Thanks
Agreed, and it is interesting to see that because of what might happen with AI, and it might happen very quickly, there has been talk of a need for a UBI – Universal Basic Income. Even Elon Musk thinks this is necessary, but given his right wing politics, and support for extreme right wing movements, I do wonder who he thinks would introduce it. Certainly not the free market. It is only something the state could do.
Given how the idea of “welfare” and “hand-outs” is used as a term of abuse by the neoliberals, but especially by those on the right of politics like Farage, I can’t see them ever introducing a UBI. Politically, they have got so much out of blaming all British failure, on immigrants, scroungers, the workshy, single mothers, or those too ill to work, a UBI has no chance of happening in the UK. The extremists like to have somebody to blame.
Even if AI resulted in ten million unemployed, the right wing would still be blaming all the groups above, and talking about getting them back to work, and off “benefits”.
The challenge of AI may be overstated, but Britain is not ready to deal with it if it were to happen. Our minds have been fed cr-p for far too long.
Echoing earlier comments, this is one of your most important and impactful pieces Richard. Thank you.
And it is indeed, eminently quotable. You’ve said many times that we need to tell better stories, this one struck me and I’ll be throwing it into ‘water cooler conversations’ from tomorrow:
“ We would never boast about letting bridges collapse to save steel. Yet we boast about letting people fall into poverty to save pounds.”
Thanks
Personally, I like ‘National Insurance’
I also suggest we need to look at what the ‘Insured Perils’ should be – I suggest expanding them BTW
I think social security is bigger than national insurance, but maybe that is what you are hinting at.
Great article Richard and an important part of a politics of care. I agree that if we were honest about what social security is then the right policy should follow. Of course language is key to creating a positive and truthful narrative. I fear this will be a long and difficult road with attitudes deeply embedded in the British psyche. I couldn’t help but revisit my brief stint at what was then called The Department of Health and Social Security in the early 80’s. As a recent graduate returning to my home town I was determined not to sign on the dole, so took the first job I could find. I encountered in part a nasty racist, sexist culture (and very anti- miners during the time of the strike – in Newcastle Upon Tyne!). This was in addition to an attitude of ‘claimants’ being scroungers, amongst a lot but not all staff. So here we are 40 years later and things are worse than ever. My hope is that so many people are so fed up with the status quo that they may be ready to hear the truth about the necessity of a good social security system, from cradle to grave.
As many here have said, you have excelled yourself Richard – a clear and trenchant analysis of how language shapes thought and how the shift exposes the thoughts of the adopters. Thank you.
I have noticed recently the more nuanced ‘social protection’ in use in discussions of comparitive national collective spending on social security. It quite neatly suggests the question protection from whom?
I thing you have missed something very important the communitive knowledge we have accumulated.
I just felt that I had to add my congratulations on an absolute masterpiece. I must admit too that I read it as if it was spoken by the late Jimmy Reid (he too had that crystal clarity similar to that of Aneurin Bevin). True leaders both.
Like others I really appreciate the clarity of this post. Thank you Richard I will certainly be quoting from it. My highlights include:
When we are able, we contribute. When we need help, we receive support. Over a lifetime, most people do both. That is not charity. It is collective insurance.
Social security smooths income across the life cycle. We receive when we are ill, unemployed, caring for someone, or retired.
It creates stability that markets cannot provide
Like most I have contributed and received help in the form of income support (my preferred term) over time especially when made redundant.
I appreciate that you re-frame the necessity of income support for example in relation to unemployment not as individual failure but as market failure.
I know you have explained how government policies such as austerity and high interest rates increase the need for income support and how these should be reversed but what about direct involvement in the private sector?
The government often makes announcements about “saving jobs” or “creating jobs” by giving tax breaks or direct funding (often large sums) to individual businesses or industries which may not become profitable or even continue to trade.
I wonder if anyone has a view on the justification for and evidence of the effectiveness of these direct interventions as opposed to individual financial support to those who face unemployment or may become unemployed?
Or are these interventions simply the result of lobbying by businesses or industries which no longer meet the needs of customers and therefore will inevitably fail?
How should government decide when to intervene? What would be a deliverable policy in this area in relation to maintaining our five forms of capital? Is this an example of the allocation of resources or who gets what, on what terms, and with what consequences referenced in your excellent glossary entry on Economics?
Your question about governments “saving jobs” in particular firms is a very fair one, and there is no simple rule. Sometimes intervention is justified; often it is not. The key test should be public purpose, not political convenience.
If support to a business protects real capacity such skills, supply chains, regional economies, environmental assets, or essential services, then there may be a case. Governments are stewards of five forms of capital, not just financial capital. Losing an industry that provides critical capability can damage a society for decades.
But too often subsidies are simply transfers to shareholders, justified by lobbying or fear of headlines. If a firm is no longer viable because demand has genuinely disappeared, propping it up rarely works. In those cases, it is usually better to support workers directly through social security and retraining, and invest in new activity, rather than try to preserve failing business models.
So how should government decide? By asking three questions:
– Does the intervention protect essential capability?
– Does it share risk and reward fairly with the public?
– And does it build future capacity rather than delay inevitable decline?
That is really about allocation of resources, or who gets what, on what terms, and with what long-term consequences. Good policy keeps that focus on people, capability and resilience, not just on company profits.
In the early/mid 1970s I worked in a local office of the then Dept of Health and Social Security. Not ” Health and Welfare”. And noteworthy that social security was regarded as as important as healthcare. As you say, the framing has been weaponised by the language.
And, we didn’t need security guards in social security offices in those days.
Thanks. And so true.
Thank you, Richard. One of your outstanding blogs; wide perspective, carefully and clearly explained, and so accurate — and humane. I’m glad it is now a glossary entry. I’m going to link it for others to read.
Thanks
The bizarre thing is that this was not, initially, written. I dictated it. The style is more like my spoken than written word, even after editing. But I am glad you liked it.
That’s exactly what I often think about the word “benefits”. It sounds like a gift, or a handout. (Companies offer you “benefits” for subscribing to their schemes.)
The proper English word is “relief”.
We should be proud that, if you lose your job, you become ill whether that is because of something physical or mental, whether you are neurodivergent and need support, whether you are elderly and need support the state will ensure you have a decent standard living. That is something to celebrate and beat our chests about.
Yet, it is seen by some as scrounging and they vilify those in receipt of it. I will never understand that attitude.
Craig