There's been an awful lot of terminologically inexact harrumphing going on all week, in no small part I hope egged on by my contributions to the "debate" within the party. The "debate" that is, about neo-Thatcherite Tory entryist libertanarchist corporate shills who are either a. trying to capture the soul of the party for their wicked ends or b. seriously deluding themselves that it is possible to persuade the Lib Dems to be a truly liberal party.

What I have learned this week is that:

• My unknown father must have been a Tory, perhaps even one of those grandee types who gets to tup one of the milk-maids for his fourteenth birthday just to make sure he's not one of those left-footers that needs to be put away in a military school.
• I must have, unbeknownst to me, been a closet Con all my life until waking up one morning and thinking "hey, I know, the best place to promote my arch-conservative ideas would be in the liberal party, I think I'll join them and make my life difficult."
• Either that, or I have come under the evil influence of such closet Tories since I joined the party, possibly closet Tories with names like Smith, Ricardo, Paine, Spencer, Mill or Henry George, and "double agents" such as Fred "Why I am not a conservative, no wait, I really am...or maybe not" Hayek. Or ideas from such evil closet Tories speaking from beyond their graves.
• I shouldn't be in the party, because I believe in a world "in which no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity".
• I should be in the party, because, erm, I believe in a world "in which no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity".
• I want to have carnal relations with an octogenerian former Prime Minister and a dead former US President in tribute to the fact that they are the true leaders of my global conspiracy theorist ideology. Possibly some kind of spit-roast arrangement. Perhaps filmed by Ann Coulter.
• I am the willing, small dicked, narrow minded, socially inadequate gnarled goblin herald of the twin devils of inequality and wealth and their four horsemen; monopoly, capitalism, markets and MacDonalds.
• When I grow up, I'll find myself under a bed, or out of a tree, or off a trolley.

Still, this might seem to have little to do with the "five wars" and "four battles" of my title. I just wanted you to be able to read what I'm about to say knowing what some others think of me and my type.

Liberalism cannot win the five wars without fighting the four battles. In other words you cannot be a "social liberal" truly without fighting those battles the "classical liberals" first promoted.

The five wars, of course, are from the Revelations of St William, first Baron Bill of Beveridge. More precisely his "war on the five giant evils" that stalked the entire fabric of a society emerging from a devastating world war - Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. The cult of St William is observed by many in the party who use his Revelations to stake the claim that the "welfare state" in Britain was a "Liberal" invention that defines the essence of British Liberalism of the entire 20th century. So dominant is this cult at times that they may even claim that some time in that century, perhaps early on, say in 1911 or something, there was a "Year Zero" for British Liberals before which it is somehow no longer permissible to look for answers to modern problems.

The thing is, that many of the intractable problems that the Venerable Leonard and St William worked on appear to remain quite intractable. A hundred years later. When we realize this, we find this warning from the pre-year zero Liberal Anti-christ Herbert de Spencer prescient:

"To mitigate distress appearing needful for the production of the “greatest happiness,” the English people have sanctioned upwards of one hundred acts in Parliament having this end in view, each of them arising out of the failure or incompleteness of previous legislation. Men are nevertheless still discontented with the Poor Laws, and we are seemingly as far as ever from their satisfactory settlement."

...how many thousands now more acts in Parliament do we need to have, tinkering with this, toying with that, before we listen to him? The real difference between what some have called "classical liberals"† and "social liberals" seems to me to be the sort of questions they were asking in their exploration of political economy.

The classical liberals seem to have been more interested in preventing causes; the social liberals in treating symptoms. The classical liberals on the systemic problems that contribute to inequity; the social liberals in how to mitigate that inequity after it's arisen. The classical liberals say that by changing the core system, by reducing government interference, government protection, corporate welfare, and specifically by focussing on what Individualist Anarchist Benjamin Tucker and Mutualist Clarence Swartz called the "four monopolies" - the monopolies of money, of land, of tariffs and of patents we can create a far fairer economy; social liberals that the system was not simply unfair but fundamentally somehow unalterable and that we had to deal with its consequences through increased government action.

It seems to me that just at the point our Liberal party forebears were coming to understand these systemic monopolies of the classical liberals and beginning to want to do something about them, there was also a collective feeling that "these can't help quickly enough" and that the argument that won out was the one that said "we can only deal with the effects". This perhaps especially after the Land Tax was derailed by the privileged interests in the House of Lords and in spite of two general elections returning a government mandate to implement it.

And it is true that the basic principles of the two positions are, apparently, irreconcilable. On the face of it the one insists that the solution to poverty and inequity is to reduce government; the other to increase it. The one says reducing government results in greater liberty; the other that increasing government results in greater liberty. How can both be right? Well, of course, they cannot. They cannot both be the "end game".

Now, surely, if we are at all liberal, we would all agree that other things being equal, we would prefer to have less government interference in our lives and property than more interference. Furthermore, I am sure we would agree (or we would not be liberal at all but just enamoured of power over others like other ideologies) that of two solutions on offer, one which increases the freedoms of all without harming the freedoms of any would be preferable to one where the improvement for one group can only be delivered by decreasing the liberty of another group. Indeed there's even a "second place" in between those positions, one that's less bad than interfering by force in someone's freedoms in order to make something more equitable for someone else; that it is be better if the "interference" were voluntarily accepted than state enforced. The state action is always the least good of these three, because however democratically we dress it up, government is still always interference by someone else and by force. Like an S&M party we can accept that force on us of course, and some may even enjoy it, but far better not to have to inflict it in the first place if at all possible.

Classical liberalism's advocates claim we can have the former solution if we fight the big battles, the four great monopolies. Social liberals would say that at the very least, we need to be prepared to use the latter solution, the interventionist solution; most, I fear, would go further and say that a priori there are some things that only state intervention can deliver at a certain cost, in a certain timeframe and most equitably. Here the two can co-exist, to an extent. Whilst classical liberals' policies tend towards a longer term large scale systemic change, perhaps taking a generation or more to feed through, in the mean time the ongoing problems of inequity continue and their adverse consequences need to be addressed in the shorter term. But if we don't make our "end game" a more classical liberal vision of a level playing field rather than giving the uphill facing team a lighter ball, we will be doomed to continue the state of welfare we appear to have become and not the safety net St William and the Venerable Leonard envisaged. And that state of welfare is likely to get more costly, and require more interventions into other peoples' freedoms to achieve as a. our expectations rise and b. as we take more of the market's production away to pay for earlier liabilities and failings.

Whenever we see a mismatch between demand and supply, which seems to be what people mean when they talk about "market failure" to deliver something generally regarded as important to everybody's welfare, we must first check to see whether that mismatch may be caused by something actively preventing the market addressing the demand - which is, after all, how enterprise functions, by attempting to meet a demand at the right price at which the buyer and seller will mutually agree to trade.

Perhaps affording a home is an unrealizable dream for some not because they have too little money to afford one in a truly free market, but because our system subsidizes landlords at our expense making land also more expensive for everyone else in a largely unfree market. You don't want to increase government interference and bureaucracy by adding to the subsidy, but reduce the cost by removing the subsidy. Smaller government, more level playing field, social justice. Perhaps people could afford private GPs if we didn't (deliberately) create an economic rent in GPs' remuneration in a publicly owned monopoly which in turn keeps the average cost of choosing private provision up.

We must, moreover, seek evidence to prove that a given interference would be better than non-interference and private provision. We cannot rest assured that Hobhouse a hundred years ago said it was a good thing to provide a universal education actually means via a monopolistic state provider and purchaser as opposed to a private mechanism. And if the answer is that we "cannot prove or disprove it" we should assume the thing to try first is private provision. And even if we don't have private providers capable of meeting the task in the market at the moment, we should seek to create private providers (most probably as mutual or social enterprises), perhaps through seed capital if the barriers to entry in a particular market are high (or by removing the barriers would be even better), rather than create a structure that requires constant input of tax money to continue delivering.

So, it is quite wrong to say that there's no room for classical liberals, in the broadest sense, in what has become a social liberal party. Social liberalism's aims simply cannot be met unless we address the concerns of the classical liberals and their libertarian friends. And both are needed to prod the other into proving that the interventionist case is the necessary one in the likely few cases that turns out to be true.

† - in which I include, probably, what people think of as "anarchists", "minarchists", "libertarians", "mutualists" and no doubt other -ists.

Nick Clegg, upon his election as Lib Dem leader, said that he wanted to break what he called the "cosy consensus" between Labour and the Tories that has impoverished Britain's political discourse. With Labour now nicking policies on welfare from the Tories, and both vying to be "tough on the work-shy", now is surely the time to offer a radical alternative.

It is not just their approach to benefits that is backwards in vision, but the whole assumption that "full employment" is the thing we should be aiming for. Such a policy actually highlights even more starkly the difference between being independently wealthy on the one hand and having to work for the basics of life on the other. In an era in which more and more of our tasks can be automated or even exported we should be aiming more to live off the financial assets that past productivity has created.

Liberals have, for a century, harboured the secrets of changing all that. Shamefully, over the past quarter of a century we have dropped every one of those secrets from our policy platform, presumably so we could compete in that "cosy consensus". We are only just on the cusp of really rediscovering the oldest of these...

Three key policies in particular would end this cycle of dependency once and for all. A bold claim for sure, but why not? We have gone through sixty years of the welfare state and are still arguing about the outcomes of welfare, health, housing and education, just as Beveridge was trying to address in his report.

The Single Tax - the one policy we are slowly re-engaging with. Though we seem to be stuck on the idea that LVT is simply an alternative tax, we need to get beyond that and understand that it goes to the very core of our relationship with the planet. Land, economic land that is, "everything in the material universe not created by the application of labour and capital" (so basically the things of nature that we all have to share between the 6bn of us born here), is the third factor of production. David Ricardo pointed out nearly two hundred years ago now that land, especially where it is a monopoly, such as with a physical location or site in the built environment or, say, a section of EM Spectrum that can only be used by one wireless operator at a time, tends to absorb the surplus value created by the labour and capital expended around it that makes it a popular location. Ground rent is created where there is more than one potential occupier that could make good, productive use of a site. It creates a massive transfer of wealth from those who don't own a popular site to those who do, through no effort on the part of the owner of that site.

As a non-land example, the UK government has auctioned off the part of the EM spectrum that carries the new WiMax wireless network signals to a single enterprise, Freedom4 for the whole of the UK. They now hold a monopoly on something that is a gift of nature that anyone else wanting to develop WiMAX networks have to use. They can therefore charge more or less what they like for licenses to others to use that part of the spectrum whilst doing precisely nothing to develop the services that would run on it.

Creating so called "free land" by capturing the value of these natural assets for the common wealth rather than having to tax economically beneficial processes like work and trade is absolutely essential to achieve equity. And the best time to do it would be the bottom of a property cycle. Hint. Hint!!

Citizen's Income - this is the real challenge to the "cosy consensus" that has emerged in the past few days on welfare. It was, I believe, Lib Dem policy up until around 1991. At the top of the recent property cycle there would have been enough land tax (on residential locations alone, setting aside what might be available through commercial, industrial, central business disrict or agricultural locations, airspace, EM spectrum or other forms of economic land) available to pay a citizen's income of about £100 per week per adult and a proportion of that for children depending on age. Further reforms, for example on seignorage - the extraordinary "profit" that creating money as debt gives to the banks that is rightfully part of the common wealth (since the money they "create" is denominated in our national currency) - would enable us to pay for the current health or education budgets if we wanted to, or to add around another £1,000 to the adult Citizen's Income.

People seem to have a problem with the idea of giving everyone an unconditional and non-withdrawable payment like a Citizen's Income because, they say, it will entrench the work-shy in their bad habits, maybe even create more of them. But let's face it, if Joseph Rowntree's lot reckons you need £13,400 to live a basic but comfortable life in the UK, less than half that is hardly going to be comfortable. And it's not meant to be comfortable. It is meant to be hard enough to persuade anyone who wants anything more than the basics of life to do something to earn some additional money. Minimum wage would be scrapped so people would be free to choose to accept a job for whatever they like - just to be able to top up their citizen's income to whatever level they want, but crucially, it would not be withdrawn when people start earning, so there is every incentive for all that nearly ten per cent of the population trapped on various benefit systems to work, even if only a little.

Yes, in the light of campaigns by the tabloids against "benefits scroungers" and the "something for nothing culture" it will be a difficult alternative to sell, but we should be prepared to do it. Think of it the other way around - if we all contribute to the value of locations by our activities around them, why should the dividend from that only go to those who can't work, say? Why not to all of us. It creates a cushion to fall back on in hard times and the ability, even if only for a short while, to be more choosy about the work we accept. No longer do we have to accept the lowest job just to survive. Instead of only the very wealthy gaining financial independence by privatising the collection of land rents, everyone gains a measure of financial security from the common wealth we all contribute to creating.

You could then say that any additional "benefits" must be provided locally, through locally raised taxes and much more accountably than at present. The "parish rate" would have to be used to provide say a basic education for those who were not earning anything more than their Citizen's Income and A&E type health services. But remember, much of the illness in society is because of the sort of poverty that both the Single Tax and the Citizen's Income would eradicate. And not having to pay several taxes on incomes - employers' and employees' NI, income and capital gains taxes - would enable more people to save more of their incomes in productive financial assets for their old age reducing the reliance on a crumbling state pensions system. And, apart from say the armed forces, the troughs at Westminster could be emptied and everyone sent home (and James Purnell would have to find a real job, or discover how life is on the dole perhaps!)

Ownership for All - this third plank of Liberal "redistributive" policy came to the fore in the middle decades of the twentieth century, this is crucial to creating more financial independence for more people. I'm not talking about the sort of free for all sale of state companies as in the eighties, which became in effect a gambling opportunity for anyone who had a few quid stashed away - "Let's have a flutter on Sid" type thing. This is about creating structures in which the workers can share in the success of their employers by becoming part owners. Much more like, say, John Lewis, or, in the seventies, the National Freight Corporation. And things have moved on even since then. New corporate forms such as limited liability partnerships enable different types of partners entitled to different proportions of the profit, not just the providers of the capital.

Again, with the Citizen's Income behind them enabling people to turn down work that does not offer optimum returns to the worker, more and more employers would have to offer the sort of package of benefits that enables ordinary workers to build up a financial stake for the future. These financial assets are fairer than putting all your capital assets in the single basket of one's home, which is not really "net wealth" in any case. More liberal than both socialist style "common ownership" and ownership solely by the capitalist, such partnerships would generate real wealth that can produce an income when you no longer want to work for whatever reason.

-------------------------------------------------

These three measures are, I believe, essential to a truly economic liberal platform. They share, equitably, the common wealth created by us all, and distribute more fairly the ownership of financial assets between those who provide capital and those who provide labour to an enterprise. They would reduce the cost of the basics of life by removing tariffs, subsidies and the private collection of rents and so instantly make people better off. They would leave a vanishingly small number of people genuinely unable to fend for themselves and the "parish rate" system would enable localities to support them while the work-shy would have a hard time surviving only on their Citizen's Income and those who are currently trapped on benefits have every incentive to take up even small amounts of work to top up their Citizen's Income.

It is time for such a revolution, for the Liberal Democrats and for the country. You don't have to be the first country on the planet to do this, but whoever does will instantly become the most liberal and economically just country on the planet and a magnet for international trade seeking to avoid damaging tariffs. We have gone sixty, a hundred, even, if herbert Spencer is to be believed a hundred and fifty years tinkering with redistributive policies involving moving incomes that people have worked to achieve around and still have not achieved the "greater good". The recent press coverage of the Welfare Green Paper shows that the politics of envy and "deserving and undeserving" are still alive and well. It is time to try these different strategies instead of "more of the same" attempts to be tough on the undefined undeserving.

And the biggest prize of all - it would enable us to get rid of vast swathes of bureaucracy and get those state employees into real productive work generating real additional wealth for the country instead of pushing other peoples' around the corridors of Whitehall.

The Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services was published on 2nd December, 1942, in the depths of World War II. The committee, under its chair, the liberal economist Sir William Beveridge, had been established by the wartime government to plan ahead for the challenges of reconstruction of the national fabric after the war.

The report identified what it called the "Five giants on the road to reconstruction: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness". Each was to be enjoined in battle by a major plank of the post-war welfare state - social security, the NHS, expanded state education, the nationwide house building schemes that would produce "homes fit for heros" and Keynesian style economic stimulus programs to maintain high employment respectively. That National Health Service Act of 1946 brought into existence, sixty years ago last week on 5th July 1948, what has become Europe's largest employer, the NHS.

The Beveridge Report indeed made much of its wartime heritage. The war was a turning point in history that deserved revolutionary measures afterwards to ensure peaceful and equitable reconstruction. The battle ahead was couched in terms of a "war on want" (and the others of the "Five Giants"). But as my former university chancellor (as of Friday), news anchor Jon Snow, often says, you cannot win a "war on a noun".

So how has the NHS, and the other key planks of the welfare state mentioned, fared in this "war"? It seems obvious that we have not, sixty years on, beaten any of those giants:

Want: we have a society in which the least well off are dependent on the state. If you believe such things matter, and I do, still a fifth of children grow up in relative poverty and the gap between the wealthiest and poorest is larger than ever. Not only that, but as as with "idleness" many are actually trapped in that dependency, facing the highest penalties if they actually manage to find themselves work that might remove them from that dependency in the form of punitive benefits withdrawals rates. None of the myriad benefits in the system are sufficient on their own to sustain life (particularly the pension, now in its hundredth year), so people are often on multiple benefit regimes.

Disease: whilst quite obviously the range of ailments that are now routinely cured or treated is a huge step on from 1948, there is still a six month waiting list for almost any kind of surgery, hundreds of people denied drugs even their own NHS doctors believe may help them, and the whole headless structure is running around trying to meet centrally set targets, which are fundamentally opposed to the founding principles of the NHS - that it should be responsive to particular local needs. In parts of Glasgow East constituency male life expectancy is lower than in some developing countries for example, which, whether it is an improvement on the state of play in 1948 or not is a pretty terrible indictment.

Ignorance: the state education system has become more comprehensive and more centralized. Students are of course now paying for tuition fees in tertiary education, and we see a constant stream of stories from universities and business leaders saying that many people leaving school are functionally illiterate. The most well off are still using private education and the least well off, as Nick Clegg has constantly complained about, seem condemned to inner city sink schools often with little aspiration planted in their heads.

Squalor: this one was primarily about housing. Sure, we had a post-war building boom but now that's looking quite hollow. In fifty years, the UK's housing has become smaller; the only developed nation on the planet where that is the case - elsewhere increased affluence has seen larger, more comfortable homes. If you are stuck on a sink estate, you probably have as much chance as in 1948 of escaping it. Even the right to buy has often failed to give people who were persuaded that buying their fifties built prefabricated type semi (such as the Orlits design currently being demolished all over Oxford) a meaningful asset. And we are in a situation where those who aspire to ownership currently have little hope of being able to afford it.

...and finally Idleness: it is very difficult for work to help the poorest when getting a job can mean lots of hassles with your various benefits and a punitive regime of clawing back those benefits such that you are often effectively earning very little indeed for all the effort of getting a job in the first place and going out to work once you have. And actually I would argue that we want more "idleness". I realize that in the report "idleness" is something either down to the laziness of the individual, or more likely a state enforced on one by lack of work opportunities in the economy. However as we get closer to the ideal of having many menial jobs and tasks done for us by machines, the idea that the only way of gaining purchasing power with which to participate in the complicated world economy is through work should be rethought in any case. It is nothing to crow about that people still have to remain wage slaves in order to achieve some measure of financial security.

So, on a purely cursory glance, these five "wars" are not going well sixty years on. Some battles have been won, and clearly some things are better in so many ways than it would have been at the end of World War II. But some of the problems are as intractable as ever, others are almost victims of their own successes; for example some of the problems of the NHS of course stem from them now being able to treat far more problems than previously and so creating more demand for itself. But I'd go one step further, and say that the weapons deployed in these various wars have in fact entrenched dependency, reduced choice, stifled innovation and competition. Not only that, but they are hugely expensive, now between them consuming not far off half of all our national income and may be suffering from the law of diminishing returns.

It is time we realized that the approach is itself wrong. That, as Einstein said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them".

...so, what can we do ...?

There has been much said and written about the NHS as we approach its sixtieth birthday, or to some more like Diamond Jubilee, and no doubt much more is to come. I do want to celebrate the founding of the NHS. It was, of course, the brainchild of a Liberal economist, William Beveridge, whose report about the "war on the five giants on the road to reconstruction" was the genesis of this and other key planks of the welfare state.

It is axiomatic that to be critical of the NHS and its founding principles, free universal healthcare based on need and not wealth from the cradle to the grave, is arch-heresy. If the Vatican had devolved the production of its new Seven Deadly Sins a few months ago to national churches, criticising the NHS would be right up there in the English version. The four new things crying to heaven for vengeance would indeed be "willful murder, defrauding bosses of their rightful share of your labour, the sin of Sodom and criticising the NHS" (nobody, least of all the Labour Party, the Catholic church's historic bosom buddies in working class Catholic areas, cares about "oppression of the poor" any more!).

But I've long had this theory that the great man himself would not be so pleased that his creation was still around. It doesn't seem terribly liberal to use force to compel people to accept decisions about issues as personal as their health or education outcomes made by the state. Indeed, there have been liberal writers since long before the NHS, a hundred years before in the case of Herbert Spencer, who would say that it is on the contrary fundamentally illiberal for the state to educate people, even children, or to try to cushion us from the health consequences of our own life decisions.

But more important than these theoretical arguments about whether it's a good thing or not, I very much suspect that Beveridge would find no cause for celebration that his war on the five giants was still raging to the extent that we still needed the interventionist institutions that any real liberal would surely hope were "emergency measures" necessitated by the recovery from wartime devastation, both physical and social, rather than a permanent feature of life over half a century later. Indeed, not only that they exist sixty years on, but that if anything they have become more centralized, more illiberal, and that in many cases, their benefits seem to have stalled, whilst all the time many people remain utterly dependent on them - a state of welfare, rather than a welfare state.

Let's not forget that this founder of that welfare state was also the man who, like few others, recognized that both Keynes and Hayek had their place in liberal economic discourse. I am sure that even Keynes who, however much he may be portrayed by the Austrian tendency as an inveterate socialist and apologist for big state interventions and planned economy, had pragmatism as one of his catch-phrases ("When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do, sir?") would have concluded long before now that the institutions that were supposed to have put to an end the war on want decades ago now were perhaps no longer, if they ever were, the solution.

One thing about my political inner journey, from what would be seen as far libertarian left to pretty economically right libertarian, is that when involved more closely with trade union types I used to hear quite a lot how many activists would be delighted if they lived in a world where unions were no longer needed. Yet the same people have elevated the centralized behemoth that is the NHS to a status of its own, not as a weapon in a winnable war on want, but as an end in itself. An end we are not allowed to criticize. Ten years ago, at the Golden Jubilee, I would have been right there with them.

(as a highly ironic aside, I'm listening to something on Radio Four that appears to be a political "TOTP2" about June 1968, and someone has just said of the NHS that, "if we cannot change the NHS to fit our modern society, we may find over the next twenty years or so that we have to change our society to fit the NHS").

Now, don't get me wrong, it's not the aims of the key planks of the welfare state to which I object. Who could say that health care and education or income and housing security were things that should only be attainable by a relatively few wealthy people? No, it's the means by which this access for all is delivered that must be questioned.

And it is perhaps ironic that it is after the longest Labour government in history which has undeniably ramped up levels of expenditure and expectation that it must be most starkly evident that the benefits in outcomes have not been in the same proportion to the additional expenditure. We have to ask whether what was once a powerful argument for the economies of scale in the 1940s and 50s might now be experiencing the full might of the laws of diminishing returns. Or, as I would prefer to say, that the whole way we have prosecuted the war on the five giants so far has been completely arse about face.

Indeed, it seems to me that the whole notion of the welfare state is such a terribly pessimistic one; rather than saying "let's make sure as many people as possible have the financial security to afford to make their own choices about health and education, retirement and whether or not to accept a job just for the money" we are resigned to an ethos that says "there'll always be so many people unable to afford to make those choices in a competitive market that we must monopolize that market and control it". It's the same classical economic fallacy as saying we have a fixed pie and must slice it ever thinner and give everyone less to make it go around, rather than increase the size of the pie so we can all have more.

And the supreme irony is that this very monopolization increases the problems by eliminating competition; protectionism keeps costs artificially high - the NHS may be the world's biggest employer, but that doesn't take into account all the jobs at Glaxo Smith Kline or whoever it also artificially supports through its enormous capacity for patronage and corporate welfare through its purchasing regime.

We could do worse than to look again at the three guiding principles that frames the Beveridge Report:

"The first principle is that any proposal for its future, while they should use to the full the experience gathered in the past, should not be restricted by consideration of sectional interests established in the obtaining of that experience. Now, when the war is abolishing landmarks of every kind, is the opportunity for using experience in a clear field. A revolutionary moment in the world's history is a time for revolutions, not for patching."

"The second principle is that orgaisation of social insurance should be treated as one part only of a comprehensive policy of social progress. Social insurance fully developed may provide income security; it is an attack upon Want. But Want is one only of five giants on the road of reconstruction and in some ways the easiest to attack. The others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness."

and

"The third principle is that social security must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual. The State should offer security for service and contribution. The State in organising security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family".

How do the current workings and institutions of the welfare state match up to those principles now? And would Liberals do things differently starting now? Will we still need the NHS at sixty-four? Of course, but perhaps lamentably so since it stands as indictment to the lack of progress in addressing the underlying inequities that price many out of the market for themselves.