We have a new government, preparing to climb a slagheap of discarded services and people.

Change and hope were the two key slogans of the Labour Party election campaign, they seem to fit easily, but are of course very different issues and ideas.

Hope is an emotion, and a very laudable one too. We all need to have hope in a wide range of things, including a better life for all, but also hope that appropriate and timely changes can create the opportunities for hope to be realised.

Change happens constantly, with or without planning, and while this new government does plan to make changes through what they say and do; interventions, legislation and so on, we must always be aware of both the intended, and unintended consequences of changes.

We have been through a fourteen-year period of planned austerity, initiated by Osborne in 2010. We, the great mass of tax payers and service users, were handed the bill for the failure and collapse of the banking system in 2008/9.

I grew up in the 1945/51 period, which has often been called ‘the age of austerity’, mainly due to the cost of world war, and the continued shortages and privations from 1939. We had rationing as official policy. But what we also had was the beginnings of the ‘welfare state’, a system of care, services and benefits to key a very wide range of pressing needs. This was the deliberate move by government away from a ‘warfare state’ to a ‘welfare state’, not the least of reasons being to give people hope for a better future through a growing economy and fairer shares of the resultant wealth production. Much like now.

The main guidelines for these welfare reforms were set out in a 1942 report written by the Liberal William Beveridge. He cited five key evils that had to be dealt with; want (poverty), disease, ignorance (education), squalor (housing) and idleness (unemployment). All sounds very familiar in 2024. In order to help pay for the cost of all this new legislation inspired change the government created the national insurance act of 1946, enacted in 1948, where all employed people would pay weekly contributions.

In reality this system was planned around employed (mainly white) men. The assumption was that most people would marry and raise families, and that women would be wives and mothers, paying reduced level of payments. This had a significant effect on many women in their later lives. One of those unintended consequences.

There is no doubt that the overall benefits to most people of the NHS, social care, council housing, free secondary schooling, unemployment benefit and national assistance etc, was considerable, and has often been referred to as ‘the social wage’. This was deliberate change, to create a fairer society where incomes and access to welfare provision to meet needs were accessible to most people, improving both standards of living and quality of life. In the short-ish term most people’s everyday lives matched those ‘1945’ hopes. This was all done, along with the re-organisation of the industrial and economic infrastructure of society, in the public sector. The wealthy tended to continue to buy their ‘welfare’ in the market place, and that has not changed to this day.

However, and this brings us back to change with a bump, we cannot, should not, assume that certain changes and reforms, to welfare for example, will last for ever. If the state of the capitalist economy, and the selfish interests of the rich and powerful, come under pressure to the extent that expected entitlements and privileges are threatened, change follows. And, it did from the late 1970s. In the years since then the private sector has usually been promoted ahead of the public sector, and the change that this brought about has helped to create the situation we have today. Let’s hope that the new government responds appropriately.