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I sometimes feel that the welfare state exists (like some morality left over from the middle ages) largely to remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour. To assist the poor we have huge expenditures and labyrinthine administration — yet the poor are always with us. Indeed the effect seems normally to be the reverse of what is intended — and we find Professor Townsend or someone writing to The Times to say that under a Labour Government the poor have been getting relatively poorer. We are familiar with the phenomenon in education. A hundred years after Mr Forster's Education Act, 1870, a researcher like J. W. B. Douglas can note, without surprise, that the middle class child retains almost intact his historic advantages over the working class child — only now he does it at public expense.