IN 1904 a group of worthies met in the East End of London to discuss the plight of schoolchildren too hungry to follow their lessons. Let each receive a free breakfast of porridge, milk and treacle, proposed a young social reformer, William Beveridge. Charity bosses were appalled: state-sponsored food would undermine family independence and responsibility, they fretted. By way of reassurance, Beveridge proposed coercion, namely “severely punishing” parents who did not feed their young.

Some four decades later, Beveridge was a Whitehall mandarin, charged with designing Britain's first comprehensive welfare state. As world war raged outside, he found himself debating fresh milk, and whether it could be afforded by working-class households headed by a man in employment. The aim of his committee's discussions—which also looked at housing rents, and why working-class women spent more than men on clothing—was to set benefits at “subsistence” level: preventing squalor without promoting idleness. Once more, coercion loomed. Beveridge wanted compulsory “training camps” for malingerers. As his biographer Jose Harris records, he was unconvinced by talk of a British work ethic, declaring the idealisation of “useful toil” a trick of the upper classes to promote industry among the lower classes. The poor had no moral duty to work, he argued: it was for officials to design a system that demonstrably rewarded work.

Jump to 2010 and Beveridge would be astonished at what became of his welfare state. Millions of Britons are entangled in means-tested tax credits, housing benefits and entitlements for the jobless that can make it unprofitable to work. The past decade saw massive job creation. But almost 1.4m people spent nine of the past ten years on out-of-work benefits, as Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservative work and pensions secretary, noted earlier this month. Mr Duncan Smith—a man of unusually public religious faith by British standards—declared it a “sin” that millions of jobs had been taken by foreigners under the previous Labour government, because Britons were not “capable or able” to do so. He unveiled plans to roll some existing welfare payments into a single, simplified “Universal Credit”. By fiddling with the rates at which benefits are withdrawn from those who find work, Mr Duncan Smith hopes it will always pay to take a job.

If the complexity of the modern welfare system would be alien to its founders, the political context of today's reforms would be familiar. Last month George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, unveiled a cap on the benefits that any one family can receive, tied to the median net income of a working household. The British sense of “fair play” would not tolerate people opting for welfare as a “lifestyle choice”, Mr Osborne said. Mr Duncan Smith has vowed tougher sanctions for benefit claimants who refuse work, up to and including the loss of some benefits for three years. Even school breakfasts are back as a cause of contention. The Labour-led administration in Wales—a devolved region which, like Scotland, offers its inhabitants publicly funded goodies not provided in England—vowed on November 17th to preserve free breakfasts in primary schools from cuts. Welsh Tories grumble that breakfast is the responsibility of parents.

Lots of developed countries fret about the cost of welfare, but—at least in western Europe—Britain is a special case. According to a recent Eurobarometer survey, the British are more likely that anyone in western Europe to think poverty is caused by laziness, and more likely than anyone else in the 27-strong European Union to blame it on immigration: the French prefer to blame the “pursuit of profit”, and the Germans bad policies. The same survey shows the British to be less convinced than any other nation in the European Union that poverty can be tackled with increased social benefits; they prefer to offer the poor work, training and regeneration schemes.

When it comes to rugged individualism, the British can be found—as usual—paddling in the middle of the Atlantic, somewhere between Europe and America. The latest Pew Global Attitudes survey of Europe asked whether success in life is determined by “forces outside our control”. In France, Germany, Italy and Spain, most respondents fatalistically answered “yes”. In Britain, 55% said “no”, though that was trumped by the response from America, where 68% said “no”.

Don't take yourself too seriously

Yet when it comes to the issue of a British work ethic, the picture is murkier. When asked whether they are satisfied with their jobs, the British are on the EU average. A different question is posed every few years by the International Social Survey Programme: whether a job is just a way of earning money, and whether respondents would enjoy working even if they did not need the income. Among the 13 countries polled, the British (especially British men) consistently express the lowest commitment to work for its own sake.

It would be easy to come away with a rather chilly image of Britain: hostile to the work-shy, yet jaundiced about work. That would help to explain the rather punitive tones in which the coalition government has unveiled its welfare reforms. But where does that leave David Cameron's voluntarist “Big Society”? After all, that rests on what Jesse Norman, a Tory MP and Cameroon theorist, has called the “bold conjecture” that Britons are a people fizzing with latent, untapped energy, ready to roll back the state and bid to run public services better.

The answer, perhaps, is that the British are complicated. They are individualists who build strong communities and pull together in a crunch. They have a national allergy to earnestness. Which Britain will win out is one of the many unknowables of this age of austerity.





Economist.com/blogs/bagehot