The Future State of Welfare

Humphrys is of a generation and a background for whom stigma acted as a break on behaviour that others might consider anti-social or even immoral. He was brought up in a working-class area of Cardiff where there were few single mothers and the only man in his street who refused to work was treated with contempt, and the veteran broadcaster’s evident bafflement over the way the post-war welfare state has nurtured a dependency culture made for compelling viewing. This was a serious programme about an important subject with a fundamental question at its heart: how did the great ambitions of William Beveridge to banish the Five Evils of Want, Ignorance, Squalor, Disease and Idleness produce a society in which hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, choose to live off their fellow taxpayers and consider that they are entitled to do so?