PUBLISHED: 00:36, 1 August 2013 | UPDATED: 07:43, 1 August 2013
The writing is spidery, the occasional ink blob suggesting an old steel nib that had seen better days and the grey unlined paper might have been ripped out of a cheap notepad. The title is uninspiring too: Social Insurance And Allied Services.
This could be the work of a rather sloppy civil servant, too junior to qualify for a secretary of his own, jotting down a few thoughts that might one day impress his boss. But when I took it from its dog-eared folder I felt like a Shakespearean scholar handling a rare first folio.
Of all the documents stored away in the library of the London School Of Economics, none has had a greater impact on the way we live our lives than this. There is scarcely a soul born in this country over the past 70 years whose life has not been affected by what resulted from this scruffy piece of paper.
Controversy: The BBC Trust ruled that The Future of the Welfare State, a documentary written and fronted by presenter John Humphrys, breached rules on impartiality and accuracy
When it was published, a year after these original scribblings, it had a slightly snappier title: The Beveridge Report. Its author, Sir William Beveridge, had said he wanted a revolution and that's what he got: the creation of the welfare state.
What, I wondered as I scanned the pages, would he have made of the way his revolution turned out?
His ambition was immense: to slay what he called the five evil giants of society. Want. Disease. Ignorance. Squalor. Idleness.
The first four may not have been slain but, given how grim life had become for all but the privileged few, their malign power has faded.
It's the fifth he'd have a problem with today and the great irony is that so many people believe it was his own creation that is at least partly to blame.
Idleness takes two forms today, one enforced and the other voluntary. One is the result of unemployment made worse by recession, cutbacks, growing competition from abroad and other economic factors.
The other is the predictable effect of a dependency culture. A sense of entitlement. A sense that the State owes us a living. A sense that not only is it possible to get something for nothing, but we have a right to do so.
Seventy years on from the Beveridge Report, this is the charge many people level against it. I have spent the past year making a documentary for BBC2 in which I have tried to deal with that charge.
Opinion: An Ipsos Mori poll found 92 per cent of the British public want a benefits system that provides a safety net for everyone who needs it, but 84 per cent wanted stricter tests to make sure claimants were really incapable of working
In the process I have talked to people who are desperate for a job - any job - and to people for whom idleness is a lifestyle choice and who are quite happy to admit to it.
I have talked to assorted academics who have studied the subject for decades and arrived at entirely contradictory conclusions.
I have been to the United States, where they had their own welfare revolution a few years ago, and have witnessed some of its outcomes in the soup kitchens of Manhattan.
And we commissioned our own opinion poll to test the mood of the nation. Do we still want the benefits system that the welfare state has spawned, and if not why not?
Inevitably, our opinions (our prejudices, maybe) are influenced by our childhood. I was born in a working-class district of Cardiff called Splott. My father was a self-employed French polisher and my mother had been a hairdresser and still managed to do the odd home perm in our kitchen for friends and neighbours in between bringing up five children.
We were often broke, but probably neither much better nor worse off than most other families in the street.
All the parents seemed to work as hard as my own - with one exception. The father in question had lots of children and no job, nor did he seem to want one. He was happy living on the dole. Because of that he was treated with contempt.
That was more than half a century ago. When I went back to my old neighbourhood we found others like him. In the words of an old lady who lived opposite my house when I was born and who lives there still: 'If they can get money without working, they will.'
Times have changed, she told me sadly, and the 'pride in working' has gone. The statistics seem to suggest she may have a point: one in four people of working age in this area is now living on benefits.
But maybe that's because there are no jobs to be had. I went to the JobCentre, a smart modern building where bright young staff smile a lot and there are plenty of computer terminals to display what's on offer.
Figures: There are about 250,000 people in this country today who have been out of work for more than a year and are claiming Jobseeker's Allowance. The total number of unemployed is now 2.57 million
Last month there were more than 1,600 jobs advertised in Cardiff. Rosemary Gehler, the manager, agreed with the rather brutal verdict of my former neighbour.
'There is undoubtedly less of a stigma to being on benefits and I don't think anyone would argue with that,' she told me.
'Benefits became fairly easy to access ... too easy, probably, in some cases ... and people taking them didn't see themselves getting back into work. That situation has built up over the years.'
Back in my old street I talked to Pat Dale, a single mother of seven children. She was most indignant about the 'people who've never worked in their life ... they don't even know what a job is'.
When did she last work? Twenty years ago. The older children don't have jobs either. The problem, she says, is that the jobs on offer don't pay enough.
'If I worked for the minimum wage, I'd get paid £5.50, right? That means I'd lose out on my rent benefits and I'd be working.
'Why work if I only get a few extra quid for nothing. I think it's disgusting. Honestly, it is really, really disgusting.'
Her figures were slightly inaccurate - the national minimum wage is £6.08 an hour - but she's right about losing some benefits, depending on how many hours she worked.
That is the problem. I came across it again and again as I travelled around the country. On a pleasant housing estate outside Middlesbrough I met Steve Brown, as calm and mild-mannered as Dale was defiant and angry - but equally dependent on benefits and equally unapologetic about it.
He and his girlfriend live with their three children in a comfortable rented semi. Their household income is about £20,000 a year without, of course, any deductions for tax.
Brown told me that before he could take a job he'd 'have to sit down with them and work out whether it's acceptable to go to work or not'. Had he considered that some people on the minimum wage might reckon working is better than not working?
'No, no, no ... not at all. I just don't want to be going out to work for 40 hours and missing my kids if I'm only going to receive a few quid extra for it, d'you understand? I'd be missing my kids growing up.'
Change: John Humphrys suspects Britain is on the brink of another welfare revolution, with the public mood shifting towards benefit reform
I'm not sure I did understand, but I've never had to try living on the minimum wage. There are about 250,000 people in this country today who have been out of work for more than a year and are claiming Jobseeker's Allowance.
The total number of unemployed is now 2.57 million. But that's only the half of it. Literally. There are another 2.5 million people who do not work and claim sickness benefits of one sort or another.
That figure was much smaller until governments in the 1980s set about hacking back the number of people on the dole by the simple expedient of transferring vast numbers of them onto sickness benefits.
So the dole queues grew smaller and the number of people on the sick list went through the roof. Now it works out at roughly one in 11 of the entire British labour force.
I talked about this to Dr Sharon Fisher, a GP who left her native South Africa ten years ago to practise in this country. Her surgery is in Tower Hamlets, one of the poorest boroughs in London.
She told me the system is harming her patients: 'I tell some patients it's actually not in their best interests to be off sick, but sometimes they're really adamant.
They say their previous doctor signed them off, or they've been off for a very long time.
They say: "What's different now, doctor? Why aren't you giving us the time off?"
As a clinician I know that the longer a patient is off sick, the lower the chance of them ever returning to work.'
What does she think of the statistics that say there are 2.5 million people too sick to work? Unbelievable, she says. Literally unbelievable.
David Cameron has another word for it. 'Conned by governments' was the phrase he used at this year's Tory party conference. And not just by governments, apparently, because he went on: 'It turns out that of the 1.3 million people who have put in a claim for the new sickness benefit in recent years, one million are either able to work or stopped their claim before their medical assessment had been completed.'
The long-term unemployed and people on sickness benefits make huge demands on the welfare state.
There's one other group - a group that Beveridge did not target because it barely existed in his day: single mothers.
Today 590,000 lone parents are on out-of-work benefits. Professor Paul Gregg of Bristol University calculates that the level of support a single mother receives for a child today is about three times the amount it was 20 years ago.
It was raised, he says, in a deliberate attempt to reduce child poverty. But the other side of the argument, he told me, is that 'the very creation of the safety net encourages people to exist on it longer than they otherwise would'.
So we're back to perverse incentives. When Beveridge wrote his report in the 1940s he saw a nation in which there were vast numbers of people who were desperate to work if only they could get a job.
Now there are many who have no incentive to get one because they are better off on benefits. The Centre For Social Justice, which was set up by Iain Duncan Smith, the Welfare Secretary, calculates that the number of households in which no one works has doubled over the past 15 years.
Gavin Poole, its director, told me it shows there is something wrong with a system that enables part of the population who could work to choose the option to live a life on benefits.
Roots: John Humphrys was born in a working-class district of Cardiff called Splott, to a father who was a self-employed French polisher and a mother had been a hairdresser
Does he want to force people to work? He preferred to talk about 'mentoring' and 'encouraging' people, but conceded that if all else fails some form of sanctions might be needed.
So that's it, then? The solution is right there, staring us in the face. You cut the benefits and people who don't want to work will have no choice.
It might be tough but why should hard-working taxpayers (every politician's favourite phrase) have to work even harder to keep others in their idleness - especially when we're all feeling the pinch these days? It's not as if every other European country takes the same approach.
I talked to a group of Polish building workers on the South Coast, all of whom said they couldn't find work in Poland and it was impossible to live there on benefits.
They told me you can just about survive for one week on what the State pays out for a month. So they left Poland several years ago, came here and stayed.#
What happens in a rich country when the government decides the benefits system is too generous?
When Bill Clinton was President of the United States he said what no British politician would dare to say: America would 'end welfare as we know it'. He declared a revolution.
Instead of welfare, Americans would have 'workfare'. Instead of the State paying its citizens to be idle, the citizen would have to find work. If not, the State would find something for them to do.
And if they didn't like what was on offer - sweeping up leaves, perhaps - then that's just too bad. No work, no welfare.
The first American state to raise the banner of revolution was Wisconsin. Other states followed. The number of people on benefits dropped by as much as 80 per cent and the revolution took hold.
Many British politicians beat a path to the revolutionaries' door and returned, having seen the light, with shining faces. That was 15 years ago.
I went over to New York to see if the light is still shining as brightly. Robert Doar, the city's welfare commissioner, told me: 'Our system had developed a sense of entitlement in people who expected cash benefits without having to do anything in return.
Dependency: The Centre For Social Justice, which was set up by Iain Duncan Smith, the Welfare Secretary, calculates that the number of households in which no one works has doubled over the past 15 years
'The benefits without work were greater than the benefits of going to work. We said: "We expect you to work."'
Sound familiar?
Elaine Huitt, the manager of the Manhattan jobcentre, told me what happens if someone doesn't want to do the job the city offers them or, in the official lingo, 'fails to co-operate with our guidelines'.
That, she said, 'results in a denial'. And that means? 'No more assistance.'
If workfare has a godfather, his name is Professor Larry Mead. He says the figures prove it's working.
About 60 per cent who were on benefits before it was introduced have taken jobs. And what about the other 40 per cent?
'There is some debate about whether they are worse off or not because they are not working and they are not on welfare, but it is still clear that the overall economic effects of welfare reform are positive.'
To which the obvious answer is: not if you're one of the 40 per cent.
I talked to some of them queueing outside the soup kitchens and 'pantries' of Manhattan where people go when there's nowhere else left.
The manager of one, a fiery Irish New Yorker called Aine Duggan, described the welfare reforms as an 'atrocity'.
She said: 'We have used welfare reform as an excuse to cut and cut and cut and to push more and more families out of the welfare system.'
Many of the people in her soup kitchen were professionals who lost their jobs at the start of the recession and have become 'ninety-niners' - people who have passed the period when they are still eligible for the most basic benefits. Now they are on their own.
Yvonne Fitzner, an articulate, neatly-dressed middle-aged woman, told me her payments had 'run out' more than a year ago.
When her modest savings ran out too, she'd had to sell her television, most of her jewellery and furniture and was sleeping on a mattress on her kitchen floor.
She has lunch at the soup kitchen seven days a week and a church has started serving free dinners.
She said: 'I can't imagine how I'm going to keep paying my rent or phone. I'm scared. I'm just hoping for a miracle.'
Mead was invited to Downing Street last year to talk about welfare reform. Since then the coalition government has been putting some flesh on its own proposals.
The plan is to combine Jobseeker's Allowance with other benefits into one personal allowance called universal credit.
As with workfare, the aim is to encourage the jobless, particularly the long-term unemployed, to return to work.
Duncan Smith uses tough language: 'This is a two-way street ... We expect people to play their part ... Choosing not to work if you can work is no longer an option ... We are developing sanctions for those who refuse to play by the rules.'
What he and every other politician knows, though, is that fundamental reforms to the benefits system will come about only if there is public will. It happened in the United States because of what was called at the time 'moral panic'.
The politicians detected that taxpayers were no longer prepared to tolerate a system under which they worked hard to pay the dues of those who chose not to. What is the mood of Britain 70 years after Beveridge?
Reform: When Sir William Beveridge wrote his report in the 1940s he saw a very different nation in which there were vast numbers of people who were desperate to work if only they could get a job
The first conclusion from an Ipsos Mori poll would have gladdened the old man's heart. Fully 92 per cent agreed that we must have a benefits system that provides a safety net for everyone who needs it.
In polling terms, that's as close as you get to unanimous approval. We got a different response when we asked whether people think the present system is working effectively.
Only two-thirds think it is. Even more think there are some groups claiming benefits who should have those benefits cut. They were particularly suspicious of people on sickness benefits: 84 per cent wanted stricter tests to make sure claimants were really incapable of working.
They were pretty hawkish on housing benefits, too: 57 per cent said people who get higher benefits because they live in expensive areas should be forced to move into cheaper accommodation.
Of course, public opinion changes. When a relentlessly rising benefits bill collides with the national coffers running dry, it would be surprising if the public mood did not turn sour. But talking to so many people caught in the welfare trap against their wishes, I'd like to think it was as simple as people such as Mead seem to suggest.
The problem is that for every claimant who makes you want to scream in frustration because they're happy to live off the State, you meet one who makes you want to weep because they are so desperate to find work.
And can you blame youngsters who can't see the point of working if their parents have never bothered?
At the City Gateway charity, which tries to get young people into apprenticeships and off benefits, I asked a group of about two dozen who'd volunteered for training how many had a father or mother in work.
Not a single hand went up. For every single mother pilloried by the tabloids for deliberately getting pregnant so she can claim the benefits and live rent-free, you meet young women like Gemma, who lives in Knowsley, the Merseyside town where the number of single mothers is nearly twice the national average.
Yes, she got pregnant when she was still at school and, yes, when I first met her she seemed to fit the stereotype. When I asked about her benefits she stormed out of the interview.
Later we talked at length. Her eyes filled with tears when she told me she'd been doing well at school.
Then she started taking drugs because everyone else was and then she got pregnant and was 'trapped'.
She didn't look like a tough young woman who'd set out to milk the system and was enjoying it. She wanted a different life from the one she had but couldn't see how to get there.
Trapped was the right word. How does a young woman with a small child and no qualifications find a job that will pay the rent and all the other bills, in a depressed area, when there are close to a million other young people out of work and living on benefits across the country?
It may be that we really are on the brink of another welfare revolution. I have never seen the sort of political consensus on the benefits system that we seem to be approaching now and our poll suggests the politicians are reflecting a changing public mood. But that consensus has yet to be converted into hard policies acceptable to the nation as a whole.
Beveridge tried to slay the fifth evil giant and, in the process, helped to create a different sort of monster in its place: the age of entitlement. The battle for his successors is to bring it to an end.
© John Humphrys, October 2011.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/debatesearch/article-2382198/JOHN-HUMPHRYS-shift-public-mood-benefit-dependency-Britains-age-entitlement.html#ixzz2ahPzLa7x
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