Speech delivered at Sands Films Studio event for THE MAN WITH THE PLAN on 12th and 13th April 2025.
A Campaign film produced by Sands Films studio in London.
The Man With The Plan is a new film about William Beveridge, written and directed by Christine Edzard and starring Simon Callow. Contact: ostockman@sandsfilms.co.uk
A Campaign film produced by Sands Films studio in London.
The Man With The Plan is a new film about William Beveridge, written and directed by Christine Edzard and starring Simon Callow. Contact: ostockman@sandsfilms.co.uk
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:00We have got a speaker now who's going to come up, some of you might know him.
00:04He is Danny Dorlin, he is an academic, he is a geographer, and he's a comrade.
00:10Please welcome Danny Dorlin.
00:20What you may not know about me is my first job was working in playgroups.
00:25So, I'm not going to make you sing it, but there it is.
00:31I was a playworker, worked in playgroups, I now work in a kind of big playgroup with people who wear strange cloaks in the city of Oxford.
00:39What I want to talk to you about is what beverage and the people around beverage achieved,
00:44and then partly what went wrong very quickly, because we forget just what an achievement it was,
00:51and how long it lasted, but also how it wasn't completely implemented.
00:58We forget beverage was middle of the road, he was an establishment figure,
01:02he was a master of university college Oxford, he was a liberal, he was a eugenicist, he was a misogynist,
01:07he was not a radical, and yet, and yet, he produced a plan which transformed this country,
01:17and a plan which, if it had been taken as far as it was meant to have gone, would have done even more than that.
01:24But just take what it did.
01:27Think about housing, and security of housing.
01:30And we know, if we take all the children born in a week in 1946,
01:35the majority of the children in this country born in 1946 spent some of their childhood in a council house.
01:44Right, council housing was the norm.
01:47That's what you got.
01:49When I was a child, I'm a whippersnapper compared to Mark, obviously, right younger.
01:55When I was a child, almost all children had security of tenure.
02:01Right, now a third of children in England, their parents can receive and do receive a letter telling them they're out in two months.
02:09There were almost no children in private renting when I was a child.
02:14Right, you knew you were going to stay in your home, whether your mum and dad had a mortgage or it was a council house.
02:21You were going to stay, you weren't going to have to leave school, you weren't going to lose all your friends.
02:25That was all achieved because of the ethos that was fostered in the 1940s and then defended.
02:32We had a housing system which was the envy of the world and was copied around the world
02:38because we were world-leading for the security of people.
02:43We developed a health system which was the envy of the world.
02:48By the early 1950s, bar six very small countries, we had the highest life expectancy in the world.
02:55I was born in a city where infant mortality was the lowest on the planet because we had baby incubators in the NHS hospital.
03:02All these achievements wouldn't have happened without this plan having been enacted.
03:11Education.
03:11We were world-leading again.
03:13We were beginning to say that it was okay for children to be educated and to mix for each other.
03:19It took until the 1960s before we actually said, actually it's really okay for them all just to go to the same school.
03:25But we did that before many, many other countries did it and other countries copied us and they now have the best education systems in the world which are comprehensive where you all go to the same school.
03:38So these achievements were enormous but they were not all achieved.
03:45Not everything in the plan was achieved.
03:46In particular, the promise that parents should receive enough money to be able to look after their children, inflation-proof, irrespective of the circumstances they find themselves in, that that was not enacted.
04:03It came in gradually later, you got child allowances later, but we never fully enacted that.
04:10Had we enacted that for children, we would be a different country today.
04:17Because when children grow up out of poverty, when they grow up together, when they go to the same schools together, when they see what is possible, they do not allow what has occurred in this country to occur.
04:29So what has occurred in this country? It is depressing. Somebody has to be in this situation.
04:36Of all the nations that the United Nations measure when it looks at how child poverty is changing, and in most of them, by the way, child poverty is falling worldwide, but in the minority it is rising, and of all those countries, the country in which it is rising fastest is the United Kingdom.
04:55The tragedy is, following the Berridge report, we were world-leading in health, in education, in housing, in security, in caring for each other, and we are now world-leading in terms of rising child poverty, rising infant mortality, in the heights of our children falling.
05:15It is remarkable that we have done this, that we have gone from a country which was incredibly unequal in the 1930s to become the second most equal large country in Europe after Sweden by the late 1960s, 1970s,
05:36and then you turned again to become the poster child for the far right in Europe, so that all our political parties moved towards thinking that free markets and profit were the solution.
05:49And assistance was something you gave people when they were not good enough, and you criticised them about that.
05:59It has failed. It is greed, it is ignorance. All those giants came up, and they came up in our leaders.
06:09I'm going to read you one thing that William Beveridge said, because many people don't realise how common it was to be decent in the past.
06:18Here are the words.
06:20Here are the words. What do we need to do? It means making up our minds to be a community in which profit, as the guide to production, disappears over a wide field of economic activity.
06:36That over a wide field of economic activity. And don't believe this is impossible now.
06:43We're talking, we're meeting on the day after the government have instructed the workers of a steelworks to ignore any instruction from management, not to keep the steelworks going.
06:56Right.
06:57Well, in effect, it's half nationalised. And it's really interesting times. I mean, who is going to buy a privatised utility now if they know that the British Parliament may instruct the workers to act in a certain way and promise to pay them, by the way?
07:20So we're halfway towards nationalising. At least the one still works.
07:26Here's the second part of what William said in this.
07:29In attacking the giant evils, we shall also reduce the evil of inequality where it is most harmful.
07:38And then it will be desirable to take measures towards a more equitable distribution of material resources and a more equitable distribution of leisure so that leisure can replace unemployment.
07:52The dreams that people had in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s and 1960s, we've forgotten just how much they were determined to create a better world for their grandchildren.
08:07And we need to work out earnestly and quickly how to reverse the decades of misinformation that will be given to people that tell them it is not possible for the state to provide housing to a level where nobody needs fear to be homeless.
08:25We're told that, despite the fact that there are countries in Europe where almost nobody is homeless and where the state is providing that.
08:32We're told it is not possible for the state to look after the education of our children as it must be privatised that we have to have academy chains where people who send their own children to private schools are governing the schools that our children go to.
08:48Yeah, it's shameful.
08:49Yeah, it's shameful, embarrassing, and anybody, anybody who's running an academy chain like that should be ashamed of themselves.
08:56We're told it's not possible to fund a health service anymore.
09:01We're told all these things are not possible until the moment, until the moment when it appears that the coking cold isn't going to go in the furnaces anymore.
09:11And then suddenly something completely different is entirely possible.
09:17I think it's all going to change and it's all going to get better and it can get better very, very quickly.
09:21But it won't get better without people calling out those who are greedy, who are profiteering, who are just trying to feather their own nests, including government ministers who think that if they just carry on behaving as they behave now, J.P. Morgan will give them a nice job afterwards.
09:44Right?
09:45That gravy train is over.
09:48Anybody working in the Treasury, anybody working in the ministers, any of those current cabinet members who think that they're going to have a comfortable life for themselves and their families, working for the private sector in future because they've been in government, that is over.
10:06It's come to an end.
10:08And they need to know as well.
10:09They need to know as well that it's the end of the road for this.
10:13But you cannot, you cannot be the state which fails more on the United Nations measures of poverty in terms of the change that's occurred.
10:25You cannot do that and tell the population, don't worry your little heads about this.
10:31We'll carry on.
10:32You can trust us.
10:33There comes a point when it breaks and we're at that point now.
10:35Thank you very much.
10:36Thank you very much.
10:37Thank you very much.
10:38Thank you very much.