The Welfare State

Subject: The welfare.

Is the Benefit System 'a right' in the sense that clean uncontaminated water is a right. 
Should we anticipate, on a gross scale, the needs of people, especially for those who have not the means and should we, as a society provide those means. 
Is our concept for support not dependent on a persons 'real need' and is it not sensible to evaluate the individuals specific need and not necessarily presume, using some sort of box ticking exercise to find a societal bottom line.
Should a society act as a backstop, a bank of last resort or should it be tougher in its analysis, more dependent perhaps on age or the persons willingness to help themselves.
Of course the people who operate the offices where welfare claimants go when they they need advice are under pressure to identify the difference between 'real need' and the 'chancers'  who in any system when money is handed out if you fit a certain profile will develop their profile to suite the needs of the system.
From meagre beginnings and during a time, long ago when to receive welfare was a secret you kept to yourself we now have a huge industry where people are profiled like a commodity and drawn into silos of educational attainment or a  post code lottery which makes assumptions, often incorrect about the people living within them.
It wasn't always so. Before the war there was little help available and people worked 'hand to mouth' as they say with little anticipation that things would get any better. 
After the war the politically motivated Acts were enabled to cover social security,  employment benefit and the right to healthcare which all  became the shining achievement of the first Socialist Government. It took away the frightening insecurity of being sick or out of work coupled to the need to continually provided food for the table. 
For the first time we seemed to usher in an age of attempting to  respect all members of society regardless of class and from these relatively small beginnings, a  hydra has grown to encompass illnesses which were then unknown and a plethora of new gender and inter-marital combinations, each introducing a new set of claimants. 
Women no longer think it shameful to bring a child up on their own and men are no longer shamed as they were when I was growing up for not providing for a family. 
Work which once was plentiful with people spending their whole life with the same firm now see employment as short term and in many instances so poorly paid that the money is insufficient to meet even the most basic needs. With the lack of any contractual relationship between employer and the employed, work is dependent on the ebb and flow of demand, a phone call  "come in on Friday, but nothing until  then" becomes  common.
The insecurity of life at this basic level has  brought with it both a mental strain and a physical strain which fills the doctors surgery with sad and weary people.  Poor diet eaten in a perpetual  rush, the increasing use of stimulants to find some sort of pain free plateau to compromise  their actual reality has taken its toll and the only backstop for this fragmented, unhappy society, has become 'The Welfare'.