The argument of the book is not that everything was perfect before the welfare state. Clearly it was not. There were people who suffered terribly. There were people who died needlessly. There were people who were treated incompetently or inadequately in hospital. Children were generally only being educated up to the age of 11 or not much more. (Only a tiny proportion even of the middle class went to university.) And so on and on.

This is all true and the book does not suggest otherwise. What the book suggests is simply this: that the self-provision, family support, mutual provision, charity and minimal state support of the second half of the 19th century provided substantial and fast-developing welfare. The progress of education, for example, over the 19th century was astonishing. The hospitals were world leaders. Many poor people received free or subsidised healthcare from private doctors, charitable dispensaries, charitable hospitals and other sources. There was very little unemployment. The vast majority of industrial workers were protected by Friendly Societies which were forces for social good.

If these things had been allowed to develop and continue, then, I argue, the result would be better than what we have today. Again, I do not suggest it would have been perfect. There would still have been people who suffered, who were badly treated and who were hungry. But there would have been dramatically fewer than there are now, under in our state welfare system. This is a country, right now, in which 10,000 people a year die unnecessary deaths from cancer every year because the NHS provides medical care so much inferior to the average provision on the Continent (see the estimate by Professor Karol Sikora in the NHS chapter). This is a country, right now, in which a fifth of adults have been so badly educated that they are functionally illiterate. This a country, right now, with mass unemployment - a country where crime has risen to a frightening extent and where people in some council estates literally cower behind multi-locked doors in fear of their neighbours.

We are comparing imperfect systems. My argument is that non-state welfare, if it had been allowed to develop, would have been vastly less imperfect than our current state welfare.