From Welfare State to Free Country: A Reflection on England’s Future

England has always had a distinctive constitutional temperament. It is a country that historically trusted the person, protected private property, and limited the state. Its older traditions emphasised responsibility, initiative, and the freedom to act. Yet in recent decades, England has found itself living within a model that assumes the opposite: that the state must provide, direct, and manage ever more aspects of life.

This essay is not about electoral politics. It is not about parties or programmes. It is simply a reflection on how a society might move from dependence to freedom — and how England’s older constitutional instincts might be rediscovered.

A welfare state begins with a good intention: to ensure that no one falls through the cracks. But over time, it can become a system in which the state becomes the default provider for everything. The result is not only fiscal strain but a subtle shift in the moral structure of society. Responsibility moves upward. Initiative moves downward. The person becomes a client rather than an agent.

A free country begins somewhere else entirely. It begins with the person.

A free society assumes that individuals, families, associations, churches, charities, and enterprises are capable of acting. It assumes that human beings are not passive recipients but active contributors. It assumes that the state’s role is to protect the conditions in which people can flourish — not to replace their own efforts.

The transition from welfare state to free country is not achieved by sudden change. It is achieved by recovering certain principles.

First, the person must be constitutionally protected. Freedom is not simply a matter of elections. Democracies can expand or contract the state. They can enlarge or diminish the sphere of personal responsibility. What matters is a constitutional order that guarantees the person: property, conscience, association, enterprise. These are not privileges granted by government but boundaries that government must respect.

Second, responsibility must be restored to the lowest competent level. Catholic social teaching calls this subsidiarity. Help should be given, but it should be given as close to the person as possible. Families, communities, and voluntary associations are not obstacles to the state; they are the natural organs of social life. When they are strong, the state need not be vast.

Third, enterprise must be trusted again. A society flourishes when people are free to act. Entrepreneurs create value not only for themselves but for others. Work is not merely economic; it is a form of human creativity. A free country encourages initiative rather than managing it.

Fourth, taxation must be kept within moral limits. Taxation is necessary for defence and law, but it is always a form of coercion. A free society keeps coercion to a minimum. It funds what must be funded — defence of the realm, maintenance of order, protection of justice — but it does not expand taxation beyond what is strictly required for these essential tasks.

Fifth, friction must be reduced. A society that lowers barriers, simplifies rules, and trusts its citizens will see energy rise from below. When trade, enterprise, and movement are light and open, people flourish. A country that behaves like a freeport — not in a technical sense but in a cultural one — becomes a place where initiative is welcomed rather than hindered.

England’s future will not be determined by programmes or slogans. It will be shaped by whether it chooses to trust the person again. A free country is not built by withdrawing support from those who need it; it is built by strengthening the institutions closest to the person so that support is natural, local, and human.

The older English tradition understood something simple: people thrive when they are free to act. A welfare state can protect, but only a free country can unleash the creativity, responsibility, and dignity of its citizens.

This is not a plan. It is simply a reflection on how societies flourish when they trust the person — and how England might rediscover the constitutional instincts that once made it a free country.

the right future for England

Modern societies often speak as though human flourishing depends on ever‑expanding state programmes, ever‑increasing taxation, and ever‑greater central direction. Yet the older Catholic tradition — and indeed the older English tradition — begins somewhere else entirely.

It begins with the person.

A human being needs a sphere of freedom in which to act, to create, to work, to build, to take responsibility. Private property is not merely an economic arrangement but a moral boundary: it marks out the space in which a person can exercise initiative without interference. Property is inviolable because the person is inviolable. When we protect property, we are protecting the dignity of the one who uses it, tends it, and depends on it.

From this follows a second truth: enterprise is not a private good but a social one. When people are free to work, to trade, to invent, to risk, they generate wealth not only for themselves but for others. The entrepreneur is not a solitary figure but part of a wider network of cooperation. A new idea, a new service, a new business — these enrich the whole community. Society flourishes when individuals are allowed to act.

The state has its own essential tasks. It must defend the realm. It must uphold law and order. It must protect justice. These are not optional; they are foundational. Without defence and law, freedom collapses. Without order, enterprise withers. Without justice, property becomes insecure.

But these tasks are limited. A state that tries to do everything ends up weakening the very human initiative it depends on. Catholic social teaching calls this subsidiarity: help should be given at the lowest competent level. Families, communities, associations, churches, charities, and enterprises all have their own spheres of responsibility. When the state absorbs these spheres, it crowds out the very creativity and solidarity it claims to promote.

Taxation is part of the state’s life, but it is always morally fraught. It is a form of coercion, justified only when it is necessary, proportionate, and directed toward the common good. A government must justify every demand it makes on the property of its citizens. Defence and law require funding, but the state should always seek ways of supporting these essential functions without expanding coercion beyond what is strictly needed.

This vision of society depends less on the mechanics of democracy than on the existence of a constitution that guarantees the person and private property. Elections can change governments, but constitutions protect people. A free society is not simply one that votes; it is one in which the individual has a secure sphere of freedom that no majority can violate. Property, conscience, enterprise, and personal responsibility must be protected not by sentiment but by law.

England could flourish again if it trusted its people more. A society that lowers barriers, reduces friction, and encourages initiative will see energy rise from below rather than be directed from above. A nation that behaves like a freeport — open, light, enterprising — allows human beings to act, to create, and to build without unnecessary drag. This is not a policy programme; it is a vision of how people flourish when they are free.

The older traditions understood something simple: human beings thrive when they have room to act. Property gives them that room. Enterprise gives them purpose. A limited state gives them protection without suffocation. And a constitutional order that guarantees the person ensures that freedom is not at the mercy of political fashion.

This is not ideology. It is simply a reflection on how human beings flourish when they are allowed to act — and how societies prosper when they respect the dignity, responsibility, and creativity of the person.

somebody else's problem

You can do something right now to stop your fellow-humans from dying. So why don't you? Why don't I? Around a tenth of humanity have food-related problems. Of these 0.7bn, 45m need help right now. The United Nations' World Food Programme is ready to help those people and online giving lets us send funds without delay from our phone, tablets and computers.

There is plenty of spare money in the world. We spend billions on luxuries such as confectionery, tourism, gambling, entertainment and alcoholic drinks. So why do we put our comfort and enjoyment before our starving brothers' and sisters' needs? Here are some excuses/reasons:

• aid-money doesn't reach the poor
• my hard-earned money belongs to me and no-one else has any right to it
• I need my luxuries to keep me happy and sane
• poverty is a political problem which must be solved by politicians
• famine is the fault of the nations' governments, and the people of those countries need to pressure their rulers to solve that problem
• destitution is inevitable; a fact of life
• let richer people set an example and maybe I'll follow
• I already give to overseas aid through my taxes. 

recent UK funding of World Food Programme

In recent years, the United Kingdom has been the third biggest contributor to the World Food Programme, after America and Germany. However, in July, the UK ranked seventh, having given less than Norway (pop. 5.5m).

paradigm-shift

www.famine-relief.com is now up, as a focus for this work. Since starting this project in earnest, I have read quite a lot on the web about famine-relief and subscribe to several useful mailing-lists on the subject. There is truly heroic work going on, notably by the WFP. Other key sources are the UK's Bond organisation and World Humanitarian Forum.

These fine organisations and their counterparts are understandably concerned with such matters as:

• the horror of famine
• the logistics of getting food to the starving
• the desperate need to raise funds for food and transportation.

If you read those NGOs' material for too long, it's easy (I've found) to become overwhelmed by the scale and the horrendous detail of this long-running global epidemic (whose death-toll makes covid seem short-lived and mild).

My focus is going to be the need for a paradigm-shift that somehow majorly transforms this situation such that it is unrecognisably better in just a short time. Such a change could come from science and/or technology, or maybe from economics and/or politics. It could be comparable with the attitudinal shift that has taken place in recent decades to environmental matters, where people and governments have started to take climate-change seriously.

This is what we seek: a paradigm shift on famine.

c'est bon mais ce n'est pas le famine-relief

We're being distracted from famine by other issues.

Covid hasn't derailed the global cavalcade of aid-related conferences and reports. The meetings may have shifted online, but the PowerPoints are also up there, along with the glossy PDF brochures. Like major sporting-events, reviews dated 2020 have only appeared this year and the message of human deprivation is all the gloomier for the pandemic's direct effect on the health of the poor, as well as its indirect impact on the public finances. Britain's brutal aid-cut, bravely resisted in parliament by inter alia a former prime minister, is tragically supported by more than 70% of the UK's population.

The World Humanitarian Forum has produced 211 pages on its global review and the UK's Bond group offers 28 pages on what the UK can do. Meanwhile, the British House of Commons' International Development Committee continues to deliberate. Although famine is a massive and urgent problem, discussion of it seems to me to have become mired in the consideration of all sorts of other important but separate issues, including:

• climate
• culture
• decolonisation
• rights
• trade
• corruption
• education
• gender
• conflict
• democracy
• exploitation
• migration.

While it is true that some or all of these matters are important, and some or all of them may contribute to world poverty, national and international discussion seems to be more concerned with ticking the right boxes for current concerns among western politicians and media than with getting food and water to dying people as soon as possible. If a house is on fire you don't stop to assess the diversity of the trapped occupants or of the firefighters; you send in whomever you have to rescue whomever they can.

I think aid needs to get back to basics - helping those in urgent need. You can help now but there's also a role for lobbying governments to concentrate on meeting the basic requirements of the world's 0.7bn destitute people.

shortfall in UN's food-aid budget = 0.3% of what the world spends on alcoholic drink

As I write this and as you read this, someone is starving. Indeed, many people are starving. Arguably, almost 0.7bn people are starving.

Some of us live in countries where there is little or no starvation, so the problem isn't evident to us. Imagine, though, if someone who badly needed food was right in front of you and you had the means to help them. It would be difficult to resist the desire to do something. Imagine you were eating a large meal while being watched by people who have scarcely anything to eat. It would be impossible to continue eating. Yet distance is all that separates those of us who have more than enough to eat from starving people.

Such distances have come to matter less than they used to, beginning with sea-travel, radio and television, then airliners and now the internet. And, of course, these people always were our fellow human beings, regardless of the distance which separated us. The humanitarian urge significantly predates distance-shrinking technology. Many religions and cultures include almsgiving as a spiritual and social duty. The abolition of poverty isn't just an act of charity but can conduce to social order.

The World Food Programme reports that: "Conflict is driving hunger in nearly all the world’s main food crises. War leads to greater food insecurity. And, in its turn, food insecurity increases the chances of unrest and violence." Thus, conflict resolution is an indirect way of solving the problem of poverty. Just as the UN's poverty-reduction goal was met five years early, the world has also become a more peaceful place. So the trend is good (even though covid has set things back).

What will not go away, however, is the reality of the hundreds of millions who are starving right now. These are the people who are metaphorically sitting across from you at your well-stocked dinner-table. In 2020, the World Food Programme raised $8.4bn, but it needed another $5.3bn, less than a 10th of the $67bn that people spent gambling online. Plainly, to many in the developed world, feeding the starving isn't a priority.

People with enough to eat can successfully argue that their money is theirs to do with what they choose. Also, they are not the cause of poverty and, anyway, their taxes are used by governments to send aid overseas. Furthermore, it is widely believed that some of that aid does not even reach the poor. Forbes has reported a World Bank survey which found that significant amounts of aid money ended up in tax havens. Considerable amounts of UK aid money are tied to social, cultural and political objectives which may not be principally about relieving abject poverty but, rather, placating political lobbies in the donor nations. The Guardian has reported: "Too much of Britain’s aid budget is being spent poorly by Whitehall departments on projects that fail the test of reducing poverty in the world’s poorest countries, [The ONE Group] has said."

United Kingdom aid is scrutinised by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact. In a 2019 review of five years' activity, the commission concluded: "UK aid has shown it can deliver in the midst of conflict, in some of the world’s most challenging contexts, giving the UK more flexibility to pursue its objectives and enhance its leadership role in the international response to crises. However, UK aid does not yet have a convincing approach to addressing the long-term drivers of conflict and fragility."

What is one to conclude? Like every human undertaking, famine relief isn't a perfect system; it is open to corruption and human error. One would have to be very cynical, though, to believe that all emergency aid went missing. It is probable that most of it does alleviate suffering. For the current year, the World Food Programme says it needs $12.3bn, yet it expects only to receive $7.4bn (60%). Although government-budgets are understandably stressed because of covid, this missing $5bn is trivial when compared to what mankind might spend this year on gambling (see above), confectionery ($210bn) or alcoholic drinks ($1,640bn). The WFP's projected shortfall is thus equivalent to 0.3% of the world's booze market.

Can we do something about that?

the biggest issue

For some months now I've been reading, blogging and tweeting about food-poverty and, believe me, it's a grim watch to be on. Although the UN's millennium goal on poverty was met five years early, there are still perhaps 0.8bn people who are desperately poor, probably more since covid struck.

It strikes me that, for as long as any of our fellow-humans is starving, pretty well all human activity (apart from famine-relief itself) should take a lower priority. So much of what we do, particularly in the realm of leisure, entertainment and luxury, seems to be in appallingly bad taste for as long as the money we spend could be put to indubitably better use. I don't mean this censoriously, including myself among the guilty rich!

While personal donations have a noble role to play, they are a drop in the ocean when compared with the immense giving-power of governments. It is particularly tragic that the British government is cutting aid from 0.7% to 0.5% of grossnational income, and, worse, 72% of voters agree with them (some wanting it cut to 0%). Although the World Food Programme gets some $8bn a year, it just scratches the surface.

I fear we're all in for a drubbing at judgement-day if we can't say that we've properly addressed the matter and moderated our enjoyments in order to do so. It's not enough to say that poverty is caused by politics and war and/or that some aid goes astray. There are sure-fire ways of ensuring that the hungry are fed and, if they were right in front of us, we'd probably do something.

If you want to do something yourself now, please give to the World Food Programme through my justgiving appeal. Politically, please do all you can to persuade G7 and other nations to sustain and increase their giving. In the UK, the aid budget goes through the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office who are scrutinised by the relevant House of Commons committee. Lobbyists in this area are Bond. Start a dialogue on aid with your deputy, senator, TD or MP.