This could just as easily apply to the United States as it does to Britain, although we're a few years behind them.  Will we be smart enough to use them as the canary in the coal mine before it's too late for us, or are we already dying?

Has anyone noticed, either, that what we used to call the working class has shrunk? Not merely because, as surveys tell us, so many now think of themselves as "middle-class", but because something called the respectable working class has almost died out. What sociologists used to call the working class does not now usually work at all, but is sustained by the welfare state. Its supposed family units are not as the rest of us might define the term. It lapses routinely into criminality and lives in largely self-inflicited squalor. It has low educational attainment and is bereft of ambition. It is what we now call the underclass.

We have an underclass because we pay to have one. I do not mean that to be a glib remark, from which it could be inferred that, if we were to stop paying for one, it would magically disappear. What I mean is that 60 years of welfarism, far from raising people out of poverty and of the vices that sometimes (but not inevitably) go with it, has simply trapped them there. Welfarism has smashed the traditional, and vital, family unit. The state readily takes responsibility for families if those who should be running them decide, in part or in whole, to abdicate it. The huge outlay of money that allows this to happen is represented by politicians - and not exclusively those of the Left - as a great act of humanity and philanthropy. It is nothing of the sort. It is, rather, an act of sustained and chronic cruelty, and it leads to such horrors as happened in Liverpool last week.

To take this idea even further, and reiterate points I've made before, the welfare system has made it more difficult for people to raise themselves out of poverty because the government has prevented the poor from passing on any wealth they accumulate to their children.  Social Security has destroyed that ability.  Because the government has taken ownership of your retirement fund, when you die, your children don't get anything you don't spend during retirement.  Someone else gets it... someone you don't know... and someone you don't care about.  That may be great in the short term as sit on the government dole, but it's terrible in the long term, and traps entire families in a cycle of poverty that government keeps them from escaping.