Rather than blaming it all on the spill-over from the war effort, Bartholomew claims that the rot set in as early as 1536. The first act of nationalisation was Henry VIII’s seizure of the monasteries, which had previously spent some ten per cent of their income on charitable work (alms, medical care etc.). Ten per cent may not sound much, but medieval income was land-based, the monasteries owned some one-third of the land in England, so monastic welfare must have accounted for around three per cent of GDP.

Realizing that her father had demolished the medieval welfare system at a stroke, Elizabeth I attempted to plug the gap with her ‘Poor Law’ of 1563, which obliged local parishes to look after their own paupers and for everyone else to pick up the tab. Fast-forward then to 1832 when Viscount Althorp, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House, announced in Parliament that he was setting up a royal commission to ‘ascertain how the different systems worked in different parishes’ (i.e. to address the serious problem of Poor Law welfare-dependency).

For the Elizabethan system was widely abused. In the words of Edwin Chadwick, the commission head, the pauper ‘need not bestir himself to seek work; he need not study to please his master; he need not put any restraint upon his temper.’ The parallels between early-Victorian pauperism and our own culture of welfare-dependency are uncanny: Gordon Brown appears to have lifted his working family tax-credits system directly from the 1795 Speenhamland system, whereby meagre wages were made up with a supplement from parish funds. But, as the commissioners reported, this led to farmers paying lower wages and hiring part-timers, subsidised by the parish. Plus ça change…

Bartholomew is careful to allow for the (frequently) good intentions of the advocates of state intervention in welfare and education. W.E. Forster, the architect of the 1870 Elementary Education Act, merely proposed ‘to complete the present voluntary system, to fill in the gaps’. Forster only wanted to create free state schools under ‘special circumstances’ in places of ‘exceeding poverty’ and would have been horrified to see his modest proposals lead to the replacement of the existing diversity of provision by a state monolith. Nevertheless the high levels of pre-1870 literacy (over 95 per cent) have now been replaced by the scandal of one in five adults being functionally illiterate after eleven years of full-time state education (DES, 1999). As Karl Popper was to observe a century later, every social action has unanticipated consequences which usually drown out the intentions of the original agents.

In the social security arena Lloyd George, Churchill and Beveridge wanted self-sufficiency and mutual support through friendly societies to continue. As a result the benefits introduced by the 1911 National Insurance Act were very selectively targeted and even after being made universal following the 1942 Beveridge Report, were still to be at the ‘subsistence’ level. The benefits should only be basic, otherwise they would discourage voluntary insurance and savings. What Beveridge failed to foresee was that subsequent generations of politicians (Eden, Macmillan and Wilson being the prime culprits) would raise benefits to the level that work itself became only marginally worthwhile. As Bartholomew demonstrates, increases in unemployment have shadowed increases in benefit rates almost exactly. And under New Labour, household savings levels have halved.

The author is not always so charitable in reporting the motives of political actors. According to Michael Foot, Nye Bevan’s biographer, the foundation of the NHS was attributed to Bevan’s ‘detestation of a class-ridden society’, his ‘belief in a collectivist cure’ and ‘his dream … that democratic processes and democratic vigour, intrepidly unleashed, could accomplish revolutionary ends.’ No mention of the quality of healthcare. Although Bartholomew doesn’t doubt the benign intentions of Beveridge’s proposals, the grandiloquent language in which they were expressed was a reflection of the author’s disappointment that his prodigious talents were being wasted on a ‘mere tidying-up exercise’. (Ernest Bevin, his political boss, asked him to write the report as a way of ‘getting rid of someone whom he had come to see as a pain in the neck.’). H.A.L. Fisher’s 1918 Bill to establish free schooling was prompted largely by military concerns, implicitly concurring with Bismarck’s view that the Prussian schoolmaster was the real architect of German unification. And Lloyd George’s national insurance proposals were a desperate attempt to secure the future of the Liberal Party by taking the wind out of the socialist sails (not to mention Churchill’s wish to make a name for himself).

Like his idol Margaret Thatcher, Bartholomew’s explanatory framework is thoroughly Marxian, albeit repackaged as ‘rational choice’ theory. Human behaviour is largely shaped by the economic infrastructure; ideology is an epiphenomenal and plays no causal role. Thus Thatcher didn’t waste time with communitarian waffle about the loss social capital, she just encouraged people to buy their own homes from the council. In a similar vein, Bartholomew claims that the cultural decadence that the Daily Mail (along with many readers of this magazine) sees as the cause of our modern malaise is in fact the consequence of the welfare state. As the Victorians discovered, get rid of welfarism and the result is moral regeneration.

Some historians claim that the Victorian revival was caused by the earlier evangelical revival, but Bartholomew would have no truck with that. The connection between traditional (non-state) welfare and religious charity is no coincidence and the relationship is mutually beneficial. Conversely, there is a direct correlation between the growth of the welfare state and the decline of the church. The decline of religion has nothing to do with modern scepticism; educated Victorians were a pretty cynical lot, yet they were still frantically building churches long after Darwin published his book, as the church played an essential role in welfare and education in Victorian Britain. Pace Callum Brown the decline of Christian Britain has nothing to do with cultural developments during the 1960s (although the Forsyte Saga certainly helped kill off Sunday evensong), otherwise the US would show an even greater decline in religious participation. Christian Socialism is an oxymoron in the sense that although it is possible for a Christian to be a socialist, state socialism sounds the death knell of Christianity. The one Western country where religion is still flourishing, the USA, is the only one to remain largely untouched by socialism.

The Welfare State We’re In is a bloody good book and deserves to sell by the truck-load. Everyone should read it – including Will Hutton (who kindly donated the title) and the Pollyanna Toynbees of this world. Bartholomew’s own banking apprenticeship shows in his clear presentation of financial data and statistics; his lucid prose-style – every sentence is carefully crafted for ease of understanding – owes a lot to his time as a leader writer at the Telegraph and Mail. Give the man a medal (and his courageous commissioning editor, Iain Dale).

Writers of critical reviews are obliged to find some fault with the work under consideration. In the case of a book as good as this, it’s a bit of a challenge! I’m reduced to the cheap jibe that the jacket illustration (fresh-faced youths in ‘hoodies’) might well have been lifted from a Next catalogue – the boys look remarkably like my son’s friends from his posh private school. And I might also complain that Gordon Graham’s comments on university education should be properly cited from his book Universities: The Recovery of an Idea (which I happened to publish).

In fact the author’s compelling presentation of the case against the welfare state is reminiscent of another of Professor Graham’s books, The Case Against the Democratic State. Both authors are left with the problem – OK doc, thank you for the diagnosis, but what about the cure? Gordon Graham concludes that even if an individual‘s vote cannot affect the outcome of an election, voting still provides an invaluable exercise in civic education. That may be good enough for a professor of moral philosophy but it’s not much help for those of us interested in constitutionalism and political science. Does Bartholomew have anything better to suggest as to how we might undo the appalling mess he uncovers in his book? He takes heart from the close parallel between our present condition and the report of the 1834 royal commission on the Poor Laws. Edwin Chadwick’s team reported that:

Moral character is annihilated, and the poor man of years ago, who tried to earn his money, and was thankful for it, is now converted into an insolent, discontented, surly, thoughtless pauper, who talks of ‘rights and income’.

As a result, the commissioners proposed that virtually all welfare benefits paid to people outside the poorhouses should be abolished and the regime of the poorhouses should be made far tougher. Parliament accepted the report and implemented its recommendations in the same year (1834). As a result the Victorian era was a period of dramatic economic growth, low unemployment, plummeting crime levels and the re-invigoration of both middle-class charitable giving and self-provision among working people. In 1885 the combined incomes of London charities came to more than the revenue of several European governments and the average middle-class household spent more on charity than on housing or clothing. Most of the workers covered by the 1911 National Insurance Act were already insured through their friendly society or trade union.

Most readers of this journal would agree that the 1834 quotation is also an accurate description of our current malaise. But is it conceivable that a modern parliament would act with same radical decisiveness? The Great Reform Act of 1832 extended the franchise, but in no conceivable sense were the beneficiaries of welfare ‘represented’ in Parliament. By contrast thirty-eight per cent of voters are now in receipt of means-tested benefit and nine out of ten families are able to claim the (means-tested) children’s tax credit. Governments of all persuasions compete with each other to provide ever more generous benefits, by bribing electors with their other people’s money.

In the light of gerrymandering on this scale it’s inconceivable that any parliament would be able to act as decisively as the Parliament of 1834. Some of us were gullible enough to believe New Labour slogans about ‘thinking the unthinkable’ in welfare reform but remember what happened to Frank Field. The sad truth is that a revolution in the welfare state will only happen after equally dramatic constitutional changes. To the barriers!

Keith Sutherland is author, The Party’s Over: Blueprint for a Very English Revolution.

[he above is the unedited draft of the review. I am grateful to Keith Sutherland for emailing it to me.]