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What's so great about the welfare state?
...The old notion of the welfare state as a ‘safety net’ to help citizens cope with hardship assumed that individuals, families and communities were generally able to run their own lives most of the time. Social assistance, therefore, was designed to return people to a situation where they could get on with their lives unaided, as autonomous, capable human beings. But the model of welfare that has developed over the past two decades entirely rejects the idea that individuals have the capacity to run their lives. Welfare provision now starts from the assumption that individuals and communities are incapable of managing their own health and lifestyles, family life, child-rearing and informal community relations without the constant intervention of the state and its institutions to advise, train, counsel and (re)educate them.

The change has been so profound that it is really no longer appropriate to talk about a ‘welfare’ state at all. In its place there has developed what former New Labour prime minister Tony Blair described in 2006 as an ‘enabling state’. This new ‘enabling state’ might promote itself through the rhetoric of responsibility and empowerment, but in fact its impact on individuals and communities has been extremely disabling. Virtually every welfare-state intervention is now premised on the assumption that individuals are vulnerable, physically and psychologically incapacitated, and in need of constant therapeutic intervention.

Questioning the role of the welfare state in our lives has never been more urgent. And to do this effectively, we must first understand what the welfare state was really all about in the past, and then consider the more recent transformation of state institutions from providers of discrete assistance and material resources into vehicles for therapeutic guidance....

...In 1899, the political class was appalled to discover that, despite the apparent willingness of the British working man to enlist to fight in the Second Boer War, almost 25 per cent of volunteers were unfit for military service. In Manchester alone, 8,000 of the 10,000 men who volunteered were rejected on the grounds of ill-health and physical incapacity. Worse still, the difficulties experienced by those working men who did pass the basic fitness test and then struggled to defeat the less-experienced Boers made the elite worry that this might be the beginning of the end of Britain’s military greatness. How could Britain be great if its fighting men were so physically weak? There emerged a heated elite discussion about the degeneration of the British race, and how this might be turned around by improving the basic conditions of the working man....