True progress with welfare non-existent

THE welfare state used to be seen as a bulwark of our civilisation, protecting the vulnerable and promoting social solidarity.

- Leo McKinstry

But in recent decades, it has become a vast juggernaut of destruction: unaffordable, unwieldy in its bureaucracy and corrosive in its impact. Most left-wingers refuse to acknowledge this.

Instead, they pretend that lavish spending on social security is a badge of compassion and a weapon against poverty. That is why they oppose any significant reform of the system with an almost quasi-religious fervour.

But that is utterly deluded. With a budget bigger than the NHS and a workforce larger than the British Army, modern welfare is an engine of family breakdown, a catalyst of mass unemployment, a magnet for freeloaders and an instrument of fraud. Far from rescuing people from poverty, it actually traps them in dependency.

When the civil servant William Beveridge produced his blueprint for a new social security system in 1942, he emphasised that payments were meant to be based on contributions. “The plan is not one for giving something for nothing,” he wrote.