A rare and first rate examination of this taboo subject, September 26, 2005
Reviewer: jarmolkiewicz from London

This book is a well balanced and very thorough examination of all aspects of the British welfare state, including healthcare and education and the wider social impacts of welfare dependence. The arguments are well made and backed by comprehensive research and facts. It presents a worrying picture of the state we have got ourselves into. It is also worrying that so few have chosen to tackle such a major issue and thankfully this author has done a first rate job.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

If you only buy one book this year.........., March 26, 2005
Reviewer: chrisp12 from Notts United Kingdom

This book by Mr Bartholomew is a truly marvelous read. Page by page and using hundreds of references he gradually dismantles the illusions created over the last 50 years in relation to the Welfare State from the health service, education, social benefits, pensions and beyond. Mr Bartholomew gives credit to the true founders of the welfare state in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century, not those in the twentieth century that have persued an agenda beyond welfarism for their own political gain. A remarkable read !

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

The Scariest Book I Have Ever Read, March 19, 2005
Reviewer: amazonreplies2 from London

The NHS needlessly kills thousands of people each year by failing to do as well as an average healthcare system. If you have heart problems or cancer you're far more likely to die if you rely on the NHS than if you were to rely on more consumer-choice-driven healthcare systems that other countries have choosen. This is just one of the politically-unsayable facts this book uncovers.

This book scares me. It joins together the dots of many of the stories you have seen in the papers, and reveals a horrifying picture. The Welfare State is nothing short of a disaster. Everything to which it turns its hand ends up getting worse, as it creates perverse incentives and crowds out more-effective alternative provision.

Like everyone else, I believed that the NHS and state education could be better. What I didn't appreciate until reading this book was the shocking levels of failure in our public services. For example, 1 in 7 students leave school, after 11 years of full-time education, without passing a single GCSE-level exam. That's after senior schooling costing £5,500 per year. The only word for that is incompetence. The book is filled with page after page of similarly shocking statistics, showing how the welfare state hurts the poor, the sick and the vulnerable - and everyone else in Britain.

Typically the author provides some history of provision in a given area prior to the welfare state's intervention, details of the state's good intentions, anecdotes that show how things have changed for the worse and statistics that demonstrate that the anecdotes illustrate a wide-spread worrying trend. Bartholomew considers alternative explanations that might absolve the welfare state of blame. One by one he brings out statistics and arguments that demolish these alternative explanations, leaving us with the unpaletable truth that the welfare state does more harm than good.

21 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

Read This and Ponder, January 26, 2005
Reviewer: 9f from Crawley, West Sussex United Kingdom

This is a book that is well worth reading, whatever your political orientation. It should certainly cause you to ponder the welfare state and its affect on the British people. Basically, the author's thesis is that the welfare state has created more problems than it solved and has also altered the character of the British people, causing them to become less civil and decent.

However, I wonder whether the author could be confusing cause and effect - perhaps the British people have become less decent and civil and that has caused the failure of the welfare state. Certainly my childhood recollections are that the welfare state worked tolerably well until the 1960s, when the old certainties and deferential attitudes were overthrown. Since then we have seen the triumph of "rights-ism" and rampant consumerism. The old idols have also gone - the British people have lost their faith in God and the royal family. Today's idols are footballers and politicians, with the latter rapidly falling out of favour, as they promise much and deliver little. The old villains have gone too. There are more and more laws and correspondingly less and less respect for them - most people break laws every day, so who are the real criminals?

A factor that the author seems to neglect is democracy - the British people have voted pretty consistently for the welfare state and don't look like changing any moment now. No one could possibly get elected by promising to do away with the National Health Service, no matter how bad it gets (and in my part of Sussex that is pretty bad). You may agree with the author that the welfare state is in a sorry mess and can only get worse but there seems to be no practical alternative. Perhaps in the long term pressure and competition from the rest of the world will trigger reforms in health, education, welfare and so on. I do not believe that this book alone will trigger the reforms that the author hopes for - but it is still an interesting, if depressing, read.