The glorious, great and bountiful idea of the welfare state

I had a little bit of a history lesson – in passing – the last time my eldest brother came home. We were having a good-natured chat about current affairs and politics, at the time of the day where it was just too early to light the fire and the light outside was getting dimmer.

He said a great line that I deemed incredibly worthy for basing an article around. We were talking about the amusing rumours of Mr J. Biden being a socialist, a communist, by those who sit on the other side of the table to him. Whenever communism comes up, it always raises a smile or even a chuckle in me with a healthy back-catalogue of study hours, essays and class antics from A Level History (a real treasure trove of glowing memories).

My brother said that ‘when socialism was acceptable, it was more like “let’s get this in because we need it”’. He coined the ‘welfare state’ for Britain, post wartime, as similar to socialism as the government got sorted what people needed. Isn’t that the simplest and loveliest of political notions?

The bones of the various churnings-out of the welfare state are still white and hardened in the national identity today. The NHS, for example, part of the post-war liberal movement to take care of the people. It would be a long, long list if I was to name all the things that we need to ‘get in… because we need it’. And, by far, it isn’t easy to make changes to better all of the things we want as all the things young people want are the big things.

We take opportunities to travel because we are interested, invested in seeing more than what we previously thought we could. We vote to integrate our self-worth in the nation and to bolster our own strength and comfort in individual choices and opinions. We do feel obliged, not from a righteous place but a right place, to call up people of an older generation about casual slurs they use. It’s not always fun to do this, to be the jarring comment in the room, but by creating that fork in the conversation you connect yourself with the dotted lines of other forks that want the same, smooth future as you.

A welfare state of mind. Stripped back of silly fake oddities in their various forms and social ignorances.

If I found myself years in the future of a different, alternative reality, stood upon a stage with a microphone and some indecipherable political flag behind me, I reckon my manifesto would go something like this:

‘Lads, let’s get all of this in because a lot of people need it. Shall we all put a hand in? Level the playing field for all the breathing people and the breathing planet, and then get round to the particulars.’

As much as a rose-tinted past is a beautiful thing and a calming thought, being active and able in the world we’re in now garners a capability of helping reach the rose-tinted future we want. A lot of the time, the ‘good old days’ seem to belong to someone else which is fine. We share in that; we enjoy it second-hand through first-hand appearing entertainment. But how much better is dreaming, being proactive, in getting a really good future?