Beveridge’splan

Congratulations to Martyn Mclaughlin for his thoughtprovoking discussion of Beveridge and his report in the current unsettling context (Scotsman, 30 November).

Briefly a Liberal MP, Beveridge continued to support his 1942 Plan although many claimed he had moved away from it in favour of voluntary action. Iain Duncan Smith, for example, said that Beveridge's 1948 Voluntary Action was better than his 1942 report, but I doubt he had read it carefully enough. Beveridge began the last chapter, First Things First, writing that his 1942 report had the goal of "bread and health for all at all times before cake and circuses for anyone at any time”.

That is very different to current government thinking. Beveridge attacked “the evil of inequality” and argued for the prevention of poverty, much more in line with Harold Macmillan, later a Tory Prime Minister, in his 1938 The Middle Way: “Freedom and poverty cannot live together. It is only in so far as poverty is diminished that freedom is increased.”

ADRIAN SINFIELD

Edinburgh