No Beveridge to look after our welfare ...

WHEN times are hard, imagination should be to the fore. So it was in Britain in the early 1940s, as bombs rained down, and a future under the yoke of Nazism loomed large.

So it is now, as this State struggles under a mountain of debt, and, more importantly, faces a future when social and democratic structures will come under serious pressure.

This year is the 70th anniversary of the publication of the Beveridge Report in the UK. The report set forth a social model that came to be known as the welfare state, in which the government pledged to cater, to the best of its ability, to all its people.