The Enabling State? Welfare and Industrial Society

Was Britain's 'welfare state' in the 1940s the logical culmination of more than a century of ever-growing state intervention? Was increasing state intervention necessitated because the 'pressure of facts' about industrial society crowding in upon politicians and professionals from the early years of the nineteenth century necessitated a legislative response? The title of the most extensively used book on the subject, Derek Fraser's Evolution of the British Welfare State, (first published in 1973) itself suggests a gradual but inexorable growth of welfare provision. Readers of that book, and of others which cover similar ground, can easily pick out what appear to be the key points on the road to welfarism.