an heroic social reformer on the scale of Beveridge -- is seeking to unravel Gordon Brown's catastrophic system of tax credits, which imposed a brutal economic punishment on unemployed people who sought to work. Meanwhile, Danny Alexander has launched an attempt to control the cost of state pensions. Taken together, we are talking about an incredibly bold programme of reform, which will hit the living standards of working people savagely hard: no wonder that Britain is facing a wave of strikes this summer. This coming Monday will see a further, and very painful, attempt to address the conundrum identified so expertly by Utley: the economist Andrew Dilnot will produce his long-awaited report on how to pay for care for the elderly. Like so much else, this issue was scarcely on the horizon when the modern welfare state was created -- back then, life expectancy for men was 68, and 71 for women. Today, when most of us have a reasonable expectation of living into our nineties, it is a looming financial disaster. There was a second, crucial factor, also unforeseen at the time: the collapse of the traditional family. Go back 60 years and divorce was almost unknown, births outside marriage quite rare. Indeed, the Beveridge Report made the explicit assumption that, with the war over, married women would return to their homes and concentrate on what Sir William viewed as their most important task -- "to ensure the continuation of the British race, which at its present rate of