It is more than a century since the first jobless benefits were paid in Britain, when David Lloyd George’s Liberal government introduced unemployment insurance through the National Insurance Act of 1911.
There were vast numbers of private sector – often mutual – unemployment insurance schemes.
So the UK shouldn’t be allowing all these illegals to flood in and go on the dole, is that it?
It wasn’t LG’s government; he was only Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Yeah, and a few of the Friendly Societies, for instance, linger on even today.
Lloyd George was copying the long-established Friendly Societies.
It is more than *two* centuries since they started paying relief to members suffering unemployment.
I’ve got my great-great-great-grandma’s pension book from the 1880s. Stamped weekly at the local Post Office and Insurance Agency. She was also voting then as well. Local government household franchise, she was the householder.
Her daughter and her husband were a bit sneaky. He had the business vote for the shop, she had the household vote.
And in my town the Fishermen’s Societies supported destitute fishermen’s families, because naturally the fates of the sea could decide that you too could be one.
And any form of “put something aside while working” is unemployment insurance. Surely anybody who works in an job that doesn’t occur all year round would know that – such as freelance journalists.
“There were vast numbers of private sector – often mutual – unemployment insurance schemes.”
And health insurance too – around 75% of the population had private health insurance. The 1911 National Insurance Act – that nobody outside politics, the medical profession and for-profit insurance companies – wanted, killed all the private insurance off.
@jgh..
Surely anybody who works in an job that doesn’t occur all year round would know that – such as freelance journalists.
Probably not the upper-middle-class children who pass as journalists nowadays. “Friendly Societies”? “What’s that, some form of chalet-sharing at St Moritz?”
Takes me back to history lessons in the era of the Callaghan premiership to a very parochial/whiggish syllabus. Our teacher read from a contemporary source: The benefits included: sickness, unemployment…, giving rise to the exchange: “Those were the benefits, Sir?”, “Oh be quiet, Jonathon, you know very well what’s meant!”.
The much missed Devil’s Kitchen could talk and write eloquently on the history and benefits of Friendly Societies and how Lloyd George and Labour’s subsequent welfare reforms killed the self-reliance and pride of the working class.
@ BiND
Lloyd George didn’t completely kill self-reliance and pride in the working class. The town where I grew up after WWII was solidly working-class; there were a small number of middle-class families but so few that the class divide was between the upper- and lower-working class. The upper-working class had self-reliance and self-respect.