The Welfare State

Reading articles such as this, one could easily forget that every extension and expansion of the welfare state has been the consequence of a previous economic policy having failed. 

That fact alone suggests to me that scrapping it would be a rather bad idea. That's not likely to cut much ice with the softly spoken right-wing fanatics currently dismembering it the way a sparrowhawk carves apart a fieldmouse, I admit; it was just more of a footnote for the record.