I think the question should not be how to reduce the welfare bill, but how to pay for a fair and vital welfare system. This could easily be achieved by increasing taxation on those who are immoderately remunerated for the work they do and closing the tax loopholes for large corporations.

Our welfare state forms the very fabric of our society, created at a time when the country was bankrupt by giants who understood that an equitable society is a stable one, and that the correlation between inequality and crime, ill health and economic stagnation was well-proven. Moreover, as Toby Judt says in 'Ill Fares the Land', "..the welfare state of the mid-20th century established the profound indecency of defining civic status as a function of economic good fortune." Chamberlain said: "My aim in life is to make life pleasanter for the great majority; I do not care if in the process it becomes less pleasant for the well to do minority." Or, as Kolakowski puts it, "…the welfare state entails protecting the weak majority from the strong and privileged minority." It is this protection that the present government – and Tories from Thatcher onwards – is seeking to remove; eradicating the system that has protected tens of millions of British people from the obscenities of poverty and sickness. We support what they are doing at our peril.