Who believes the welfare state is working? Not even its fans, argues james bartholomew
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Last month, the BBC had the idea of putting me on the radio to argue that "the welfare state was a mistake". They reckoned it would be good, controversial stuff. Four experts on welfare would be licensed to heckle me in the Radio 4 equivalent of bear-baiting.
The programme was recorded at the London School of Economics - the intellectual heartland of the welfare state. They found two professors to tear apart my arguments. One, Prof Pat Thane, had her hair dyed pink and was particularly hot on the oppression of women. It was all set up for me to be mauled.
Faced by the four hecklers, I apprehensively argued that the welfare state had provided low quality healthcare and education. It had caused damage to the fabric of British society in a wide variety of ways, not the least of which was the introduction of persistent, mass unemployment.
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| My hecklers did not claim that the welfare state was great. They barely claimed that it was even good |
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The hecklers duly attacked. But as they sank their teeth into my arguments, I noticed something missing. You could call it passion.
They did not claim that the welfare state was great. They barely claimed that it was even good. Niall Dickson, the chief executive of the King's Fund, the healthcare think tank, said the NHS had achieved a big improvement in the survival rate for breast cancer. He doubtless knew that, despite this improvement, the NHS's performance in breast cancer is still amongst the worst in the advanced world. And that, no doubt, was why he summarised his defence of the NHS by saying it was "coming right" - a phrase which contained the obvious implication that it had been wrong for quite a while.
Edward Davey, a Liberal Democrat MP, conceded that there was a lot to my criticisms of state schools. Then one of the LSE professors suggested that no system was 
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