Useful links Building the welfare state Academic analysis of the welfare state More about Clement Attlee 1945 election manifestos Labour Conservative Liberal Election results The 1945 result The 1950 result The 1951 result Results of all general elections since 1945.
Building a welfare state in any one of them is a bit like creating a single welfare state across the European Union.
Building a welfare state has become an economic priority, as well as a social one.
Building the welfare state after 1945 struck a big blow for centralisation, as the public services that absorbed the bulk of state spending were nationalised.
The Attlee government and its successors continued to fight wars in Korea, Palestine, and various former colonies while building the welfare state.
The political stability wrought by the Cold War and the Western alliance and by the American military umbrella, which permitted western Europeans to devote more resources to building the welfare state, made for unprecedented prosperity.
In the years after the second world war, under successive administrations of either party, we profited from purposeful initiatives, building the welfare state, the housing stock and the NHS.
In the 18th century it was needed for security and economic stability, in the 19th century it was about empire and in the 20th century it was about defeating Hitler and building a welfare state.
As a political party, Fianna Fáil historically built its support by championing the dispossessed through such things as house building and welfare payments; but in the modern era it has been portrayed as a party in the pocket of the bankers, a party that has cruelly betrayed its roots.
All of the great progressive movements of the 20th century in the west - solidarity with republican Spain, the building of welfare states, the civil rights movement in the southern United States, the war against apartheid in South Africa - were led by an alliance between progressive intellectuals and the victims of oppression.
