The Welfare State We're In is broader in scope. Bartholomew covers the whole welfare state including health, education and housing, not just social security. And he traces the history well beyond the post-war period when most people assume the welfare state began.

He shows the extraordinary vitality and extent of social provision – most of it voluntary and funded by individual subscription or charitable giving – that existed long before Beveridge. Many young people I talk to assume that the NHS built most of our hospitals after the war. In fact, nearly all were built long before the NHS, which simply nationalised them, closed many small ones and built no new hospitals for years. Still fewer people are aware that school attendance may well have been higher before it was made compulsory in 1870 than it is now – given current truanting levels.

More significant than what existed before 1948 is the failure of each component of the welfare state to live up to its founders' admirable intentions. Bartholomew has unearthed the pamphlet setting out the "Labour Party's Post-War Policy for a National Service for Health", which based the case not primarily on the inadequacy of provision for the poor but on the need for "efficient" central planning to replace the "unplanned… medley of public and voluntary institutions". Neither lengthy waiting lists nor poor hygiene then merited a mention. It took a centrally-planned NHS to achieve the longest waiting times and most infectious hospitals in Europe.

The author's most controversial thesis is that the welfare state is largely responsible for the decline in civility and rise in crime since it came into being. He argues that the voluntary arrangements which preceded the welfare state fostered self-reliance and self-respect. And he links the decline in both the two-parent family and the extended working-class family to the combined impact of benefits and brutal rehousing on soulless council estates. I suspect secularism and affluence also played their part. He is weaker in explaining why the destruction of civility has been so much greater here than in other countries that have adopted welfare states. Maybe our system is more comprehensive, centralised and hostile to the family than even the more lavishly funded welfare states abroad.

The unacceptable implications of this book are that we should never have established the welfare state and should now dismantle it. It is impossible to tell whether the extensive voluntary and limited state provision which predated the welfare state would have evolved successfully to ensure better provision for all – particularly the least well-off – than we currently offer. Even if it had, I am sure many on the Left would find inferior state provision morally preferable to more generous voluntary provision.

If you are persuaded that, had the welfare state not existed, we would now have much better provision for all, it still does not follow that dismantling it will result in the same nirvana. Hysteresis in social affairs, as in physics, means that a system once distorted does not necessarily return to its previous shape when the distorting force is removed. If the welfare state has damaged the national character as badly as Bartholomew argues, it will be all the harder to restore a situation which requires the virtues of generosity and self-respect.