Will Covid-19 change attitudes towards the welfare state?

Abstract

Britain’s welfare state has suddenly been presented with a new challenge – to keep the country afloat during the Covid‐19 pandemic. The most immediate pressure is on the health service, whose ability to cope with the numbers needing hospital care is now imposing a constraint on the country’s economic activity. But, after successive years of reining back the scale of welfare provision to those of working age, the government is now also providing – via the social security system – increased levels of support to those who have lost their incomes, as well as subsidising on an unprecedented scale the salaries of those in work.

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© 2020 The Authors. IPPR Progressive Review published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1111/newe.12185

Repository URI

https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/72961/