Eighty years ago the blueprint for the Welfare State is published

 

 

One of the objectives of the Germans invasion of the previously unoccupied zone of France was to seize the powerful fleet at anchor in Toulon in Operation Lila. This was explicitly forbidden by the terms of the armistice, but the French Navy was not naif and still made plans to scuttle the fleet if the Germans attempted to seize it. The commander Admiral Laborde could not, though, be persuaded to sail the ships to join the shadow Vichy authorities in North Africa so the scuttling plan was put into operation when the Germans assaulted the dockyards. It succeeded and three battleships, seven cruisers, fifteen destroyers and numerous smaller vessels went to the bottom. The Vichy government lost thereby its final shred of bargaining power.

The only ever significant, but still tiny, battle was fought between forces of de Gaulle's Free French and Vichy French units over the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean. The destroyer Leopard landed a company of marines and the island was taken without significant casualties on either side.

The Liberal economist William Beveridge had been commissioned to write a report into Britain's social services and provision. It was published as a government White Paper, and, thus an expression of broad government intent,  after a certain amount of internal debate. The report focused on principles rather than detailed recommendations. Crucially benefits were to be universal and not subject to a 'means test', the object of popular loathing between the wars. It set out a vision in which 'five giants', opponents on the road to reconstruction were to be overcome: 'Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.' It was received with almost unanimous public approval and can be seen as the manifesto of the 'welfare state'. In particular it was the first precursor of the National Health Service and other social reforms brought in by the Labour government of 1945.

A high-profile exercise in Whitehall/Westminster score-settling went awry for the government. In 1940 Churchill had been persuaded not to dismiss Sir Horace Wilson, head of the Civil Service whom he hated as one of his most dedicated opponents in the days of appeasement. Removing Wilson would have been too great a concession to Labour, who had a similarly low opinion of him, so he was allowed to serve out his time until normal retirement age. Churchill's first shot was to appoint a successor to Wilson who was actually older than him, as a pointed way of  showing that it was not Wilson's age  that drove his retirement. Less happily a debate in the House of Lords on the headship of the Civil Service, an office of which Churchill disapproved, which should have provided a forum for attacking Wilson's time in office, turned into a orgy of complaints against Wilson's predecessor, Sir Warren Fisher, who had made many more enemies in his twenty years in the job than Wilson.