The Welfare State is perhaps the biggest social policy success of the post-war generation. 

The ARK Ageing Programme invited Dr. Eve Worth (University of Exeter), author of The Welfare State Generation: Women, Agency and Class in Britain since 1945 to present evidence of the impact of the welfare state on the progress of women as individual agents and important workers in public sector jobs. Her work sheds light on many of the challenges facing today’s generation of students – debt, precarity and the absence of strong ties to reliable institutions of the state.

In this event, we discussed whether the welfare state is worth saving, and what role each generation can play in maintaining social cohesion in a time of insecurity and hyper-individualisation.