Occupy Wall Street Protesters Demand Transaction Tax, Marching Straight into the Globalist Trap

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Robin Hood Tax: Occupy Movement Now Marching Straight into the Globalist Trap

The Robin Hood Tax is an identical transaction-tax scam to the one proposed by globalists at the 2009 UN COP15 Climate Summit in Copenhagen

By Patrick Henningsen, Infowars.com
October 25, 2011

It was inevitable that a movement which has struggled to agree on a manifesto, in the end, would do the bidding of the very elite globalist powers that they are demonstrating against to begin with.

Instead of achieving freedom from Central Bank debt enslavement, naive Occupiers appear to have taken the bait, pulling the mob towards endorsing a global taxation system, and one to be administered… by a brand new global government body.

As the Occupy Movement sets its sights on the upcoming G20 Summit in France on November 3-4, its globalist handlers behind the scenes have succeeded in carefully directing its crowds towards the Holy Grail of all socialist super-states — the celebrity supported, trendy “Robin Hood Tax”, also known as a Tobin Tax, a financial transaction tax levied on all transactions involving shares, bonds and derivatives.

It’s likely that such a blanket tax will eventually end up on the end of things like cash withdrawals and the like.

They claim that the resulting funds, counted in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year, would go toward popular Bono-led liberal heart-string fantasy causes like ‘reducing poverty in the third world’, social programs and— surprise, surprise — “combating climate change” and perhaps even saving polar bears — a move that would surely please desperate men like Al Gore (but a complete waste of money seeing that man-made global warming has already been thoroughly discredited).

The rallying cry for this globalist wet dream is coming directly from the supposed brain-child of the Occupy Movement, the globalist foundation-funded organization, Ad Busters, quietly shepherding its flock towards one of the biggest revenue spinning and control scams ever conceived.

Reuters reported yesterday:

“Canada-based Adbusters wants the Occupy Wall Street protest movement against economic inequality to take to the streets to call for a 1 percent tax on such deals ahead of a November 3-4 summit of the Group of 20 leading economies in France.

“Let’s send them a clear message: We want you to slow down some of that $1.3 trillion easy money that’s sloshing around the global casino each day — enough cash to fund every social program and environmental initiative in the world,” the activist group said on its website, www.adbusters.org.

Adbusters put out the initial call for Occupy Wall Street and since protesters set up camp in a park in New York City’s financial district on September 17, they have inspired solidarity demonstrations and so-called occupations around the world.”

In many ways, the Robin Hood Tax is an identical transaction-tax scam to the one proposed by globalists at the 2009 UN COP15 Climate Summit in Copenhagen, where a number of new taxes on financial transactions and new carbon taxes would be put into a giant “slush fund” to be handled by none other than the World Bank.

Ultimately, any Robin Hood Tax will most likely end up in a giant fund to “ensure that banks are adequately capitalized”, and one which will be used to bailout, or insure big bank losses and trillions in gambling derivative bets gone bad.

In reality, a Robin Hood Tax does just the opposite of what its name represents. Rather than stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, it is designed to steal more money through taxation from working people — money which will end up directly in the hands of institutions like the US Federal Reserve and its cartel of Wall Street banks.

OWS losing the plot

It’s very easy for the throngs of young protesters to fall into an obvious socialist, or collectivist trap, as many naive young Americans are unable, or unwilling, to liberate themselves from the Hegelian dialectic which tells them that the government must raise taxes and spending in order to achieve any social progress.

It’s obvious that the number one and two problems in America are a lack of jobs and creeping inflation, a duel plague which is fueling poverty — and ultimately dissent in the US. Occupiers are not asking why their government allowed US corporations to ship millions of American jobs off shore, and why it never bothered to offer incentives to foreign corporations to relocate in the US. Likewise Occupiers have not identified that their own Federal Reserve is robbing them every day by creating artificial scarcity, driving the kind of boom and bust cycles which ultimately rob Americans of their life saving and assets.

Rather than demand an additional new monster system of taxation, Occupiers should first be asking if any government can be trusted to spend their tax revenue responsibly. Certainly today it seems that pork rules in Washington and Obama’s Administration is presiding over the biggest budget deficit in the history of the US. This should be cause for alarm, yet, it’s hardly mentioned by the Occupy crowd.

They might also consider asking their beloved government in Washington — and elsewhere around the globe too, where all their tax revenue actually goes right now. If they understood that at present, their Federal Income Tax (in some cases, collected at gunpoint by the IRS) goes directly to paying off the debt which their government owes on each and every dollar printed by the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank… then Occupiers would surely be wary of allowing a Federal or global government to erect a new massive taxation system.

The OWS has, to their credit, urged protesters to close their bank accounts and transfer their money to credit unions with a bank transfer day on November 5th, certainly a step in a positive direction. But is it enough?

Disengage with the financial system

OWS protesters should be talking about taking steps to completely disengage from the system that enslaves them — this might include removing their hard-earned liquidity from the system by canceling all credit cards, not taking out student loans, or pointless car and electronic loans.

Another obvious trap of the Robin Hood Tax is that it would target all transactions — including pension funds. Occupiers should instead consider not paying in their pensions and 401K’s into stock market-indexed retirement funds. For older protesters, it might be a case of shifting their IRAs into gold and silver-backed retirement funds, disallowing the speculators and gamblers on Wall Street to decimate their life savings any further.

Has their been any call for a mass protest against the IRS, who continue to defy the US Constitution by robbing each and every working American of their labor and property in order to service their national debt to the Federal Reserve cartel? Certainly this would rock the establishment overnight. The Occupy Movement would have struck the most serious — and the most obvious blow imaginable, one which would finally call into question the legitimacy of a national income tax.

Or even better, Occupiers might consider taking the total expenditure of the US military — domestically and overseas, and divide by the number of working Americans, giving them an individual figure of money which each protester will refuse to hand over to the Federal government — a peace protest combined with an intelligent liberty move by free men and women.

Sadly, none of these kind of truly revolutionary ideas have come out of the Liberty Square protests. Instead, all they could manage in the end up with is to latch on to one of the most misleading and tyrannical ponzi schemes, the Robin Hood Tax, where the 99% end up giving the 1% even more of their hard earned cash over to the banks. Ironic, but this is the current direction which the angry, but naive mob is being led.

If any of the 99% truly believe that the top tier banks would happily give away trillions per year to the new Robin Hood Taxman, then think again. Their new tax will likely be imposed most stringently on small to medium size institutions and fund managers in an effort to drive out any competition to the mega banks — who already enjoy cuts to corporate income tax, and in some cases, pay no tax at all. Big banks are safe, but smaller competition will surely be hit hard by a Robin Hood Tax — ensuring the current hierarchy stays exactly as it is. This has always been the way when blanket government regulations and punitive taxes come into play.

In typically disingenuous fashion, when a mob has no clear objective it normally plays follow the leader. In this case, the leader is foundation-funded Ad Busters, who have supplied the directionless, vague OWS movement with the master plan to its own demise.

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Obama Has Even Lost the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Crowd

By Glynnis MacNicol, Business Insider
October 29, 2011

If President Obama is hoping that his support of the Occupy Wall Street movement will help his reelection chances he may want to take a look at this poll.

The New York Times reports on a poll done by a Fordham University political science professor that reveals what some have long suspected: Occupy Wall St. is mainly made up of (very) disgruntled Obama supporters.

Check out these numbers.

Sixty percent of those surveyed said they voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and about three-quarters now disapprove of Mr. Obama’s performance as president. A quarter said they were Democrats, but 39 percent said they did not identify with any political party. Eleven percent identified as Socialists, another 11 percent said they were members of the Green Party, 2 percent were Republicans and 12 percent say they identified as something else.

Emphasis mine.

Those are brutal numbers. And suggest that essentially what we are seeing with the Occupy Wall St. movement is 2008′s unprecedented youth support for Obama grown bitterly cynical.

That Obama can win back that support with any gesture seems unlikely, but he’s certainly going to have to do a great deal more than throw obscure 99% references into phone calls by his advisers.

‘Occupy’ Forms Alliance With Obama Lobby Group

Teachers are always the first to protest, followed by students being encouraged by the teachers and their unions

By Paul Joseph Watson, Infowars.com
October 10, 2011

The “official” Occupy Wall Street website has publicly formed an alliance with yet another Obama campaign front group, the New Jersey branch of the American Federation of Teachers, the parent organization of which spent $1.9 million on Obama’s 2008 election campaign.

Fears that the OWS movement is being subverted by Democratic Party operatives will only be heightened after OccupyWallSt.org celebrated the fact that “AFT fully endorses Occupy Wall Street,” noting that the local chapter stood in “solidarity” with ‘Occupy’ demonstrators.

The American Federation of Teachers financed Obama’s 2008 campaign to the tune of $1.9 million and has also recently offered its strong support for Obama’s “Jobs Plan,” which critics have pointed out will lead to higher taxes not for the super-rich, but for middle class Americans.

The United Federation of Teachers sub-chapter of the AFT, which has also publicly backed the Occupy Wall Street protests, was rewarded for their parent organization’s support for Obama when the administration made the union representing New York City’s public school teachers the largest beneficiary of the notorious Obamacare waiver.

As we previously documented, the Occupy Wall Street website has openly embraced the likes of MoveOn.org, AFL-CIO, and SEIU, all of whom financially backed Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and have supported his bid for re-election in 2012.

Of course, the irony of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ leaders seeking alliances with Obama campaign front groups is the fact that Obama himself is the ultimate creature of Wall Street. His 2008 campaign was financed by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley. Obama is even more reliant on Wall Street for his 2012 campaign and his cabinet is stuffed with former Wall Street insiders.

Users of the OccupyWallSt.com website flooded the page on which the announcement appeared with comments, many expressing discomfort that the leaders of this “leaderless” movement were forming bonds with outfits who have aggressively supported the Wall Street-financed Obama administration.

“For OWS to accept an endorsement from Union Bosses (who interestingly enough are the same people that OWS began protesting) makes them lose so much credibility,” wrote one respondent.

“I actually was going to join one of the protests in my state because I believe in freedom and believe that corporations, INCLUDING UNIONS, should not be in control of government and politicians like they currently are. Union bosses are also the people giving politicians (specifically Obama) MILLIONS to do what is best for them and only them. If OWS steered free from endorsements from any groups, especially ones with money, they would have doubled, tripled, even quadrupled the amount of people they currently have attending these events.

“Now all the people attending these things just look like democrats who want more social programs and want MORE government control. Don’t fall for these people that try to act like they care. OWS will fail, and fail very rapidly I might add, if they accept endorsements from the people causing the problems.

Stick to the principles of freedom, free market, NOT corporatism and crony capitalism. Don’t accept endorsements from the people causing the problems. Obama came out and supported OWS today, BUT HE IS THE PROBLEM. He is the one FOR the bailout of the banks and the wall street crooks. Don’t accept their lies and their attempts to act like they truly care, because they don’t. All they want is your support for a next election. You are destined to fail and accomplish nothing if you accept support from the enemy.”

“Occupy Wall Street is well on its way to being co-opted by them all,” added another.

It’s clear that many OWS protesters are growing increasingly frustrated with brazen attempts to co-opt their “leaderless” and “non-partisan” movement by lobbying groups that are little more than campaign fronts for the Wall Street puppet Obama.

The encampments in New York and other areas are beginning to be dominated by “General Assembly” meetings where Union operatives pose as leaders and manufacture consensus amongst the demonstrators. These gatherings are also starting to take on a bizarre cult-like tone, with participants engaging in weird ritualistic chants and hand gestures.

As Webster Tarpley has outlined, the movement risks being hijacked by infiltrators who have set up steering committees with the purpose of manipulating demonstrators “into a posture of supporting the presidential candidacy of Wall Street puppet Obama.”

How Our Welfare System Has Created an Age of Entitlement (Excerpt)

Are we on the brink of another welfare revolution? In this thought-provoking article BBC Radio 4 presenter John Humphrys talks to those affected and examines the solutions on offer.

By John Humphrys, Daily Mail
October 24, 2011

...Idleness takes two forms today: one enforced and the other voluntary. One is the result of unemployment made worse by recession, spending cutbacks, growing competition from abroad and a dozen other economic factors. The other is the predictable effect of a dependency culture that has grown steadily over the past years. 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 that we have a right to do so. This, seventy years on from the Beveridge Report, is the charge many people level against it (Lord Beveridge wrote his report at a time when vast numbers of unemployed wanted to find work, in contrast to modern times when there is little incentive to do so).

I have spent the past year making a documentary for BBC2 in which I have tried to deal with that charge. 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 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 off nor worse off than most other families in the street. All the parents seemed to work just as hard as my own — with one exception. The father in question had lots of children and no job and 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 are now living on benefits. But maybe that’s because there are no jobs to be had. I went to the nearest job centre, a smart modern building where bright young staff smile a lot and there are plenty of computer terminals to display what’s on offer. Last month there were more than 1,600 jobs advertised in Cardiff.

The centre’s manager Rosemary Gehler agreed with the rather brutal verdict of my ex-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'.

So 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 for nothing. I think it’s disgusting. Honestly it is really, really disgusting.'

Her figures were slightly inaccurate — the national minimum wage is now £6.08 an hour — but she’s right about losing some of her benefits, depending on how many hours she worked. And that’s the problem. I came across it again and again as I traveled around the country.

On a pleasant housing estate outside Middlesbrough I met Steve Brown, as calm and mild-mannered as Ms Dale was defiant and angry — but equally dependent on benefits and equally unapologetic about it. He and his partner 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.

Mr Brown told me that before he could take a job he’d 'have to sit down with them and work it out whether it’s acceptable to go to work or not'.

I suggested that some people who work tor the minimum wage might do so because they reckon working is better than not working. Had he considered that?

'No, no, no… not at all. I just don’t want to be going out to work for forty 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.'

I’m not sure I did understand, but then again I’ve never had to try living on the minimum wage.

There are about 840,000 people in this country today who have been out of work for more than a year and are claiming Job Seekers’ Allowance (JSA). The total number of unemployed is now 2.57m. But that’s only the half of it. Literally. There are another 2.5m people who do not work and claim sickness benefits of one sort or another.

That figure was much smaller until governments in the Eighties 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 went through the roof. Now it works out at roughly one in eleven of the entire UK labour force.

I talked about that to Dr Sharon Fisher, 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 has been exploited and that is actually 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.'

And what does she think of the statistics that say there are 2.5m people too sick to work? Unbelievable, she says. Literally unbelievable.

David Cameron has another word for it. He says we’ve been conned. 'Conned by governments' was the phrase he used at this year’s 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.'

So 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 specifically target because it barely existed in his day. Single mothers. Today there are 590,000 lone parents 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 what it would have been twenty 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, once again, 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 the welfare secretary Ian Duncan Smith, calculates that the number of households in which no-one works has doubled over the past fifteen 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. So does he want to force people to work? He preferred to talk about 'mentoring' and 'encouraging' people, but he 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 on them, 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 ourselves 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 have never gone back.

But what happens in a very 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 welfare 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 they failed, 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 and for a while things looked good. 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 fifteen years ago. I went over to New York to see if the light is still shining as brightly.

The city’s welfare commissioner Robert Doar told me there had been no alternative to workfare:

'Our system had developed a sense of entitlement in people who expected cash benefits without having to do anything in return. The benefits without work were greater than the benefits of going to work. We said: ‘We expect you to work’.'

Sound familiar? Elaine Hewitt, the manager of the Manhattan job centre 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 queuing 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:

'The safety net has literally buckled and given way under the need among families… 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 professional men and women 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’re on their own.

Editor's Note: 'Ninety-niners' is the same term used to describe Americans in the same position — certainly not a coincidence in a world where we are in the home stretch of the globalists' plan to usher in world totalitarian government.

Elaine Huitt, 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 set and most of her jewelry and furniture and was reduced to sleeping on a mattress on her kitchen floor. She has lunch at the soup kitchen seven days a week and a nearby church has started serving free dinners as well. She told me:

'I can’t imagine how I’m going to keep paying my rent or my phone. I’m scared. I’m just hoping for a miracle.'

Professor 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 Job Seeker's Allowance with other benefits into one personal allowance called universal credit.

Editor's Note: Leading us toward a cashless society and the 'mark of the beast'.

As with workfare, the aim is to encourage the jobless, and particularly the long-term unemployed, to get back to work.

Iain 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 Duncan Smith and every other politician knows, though, is that fundamental reforms to the benefits system will come about only if there is the 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.

So what is the mood of this nation seventy years after Beveridge?

The first conclusion from our Ipsos Mori poll would have gladdened the old man’s heart. Fully 92% agreed that we must have a benefits system that provides a safety net for everyone who needs it. Only a trifling 4% disagreed. In polling terms, that’s as close as you get to unanimous approval.

But 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 of people claiming benefits who should have those benefits cut. They were particularly suspicious of people on sickness benefits: 84% wanted stricter tests to make sure they were really incapable of working. They were pretty hawkish on housing benefits too: 57% 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 after a year of talking to so many people caught in the welfare trap against their wishes, I’d like to think it was as simple as people like Professor Mead seem to suggest.

The problem is, for every claimant who makes you want to scream in frustration because they’re perfectly happy to be living off the State, you meet another who makes you want to weep because they are so desperate to find work. Any work. And can you blame youngsters who can’t see the point of working if their parents have never bothered? I went to 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 in school and, yes, when I first met her she seemed to fit the stereotype. She got angry when I asked about her benefits and stormed out of the interview.

But she agreed to come back and 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 was doing it and then she got pregnant and then she was 'trapped.' She didn’t look to me like a tough young woman who’d set out to milk the system and was enjoying every minute of it. She wanted a different life from the one she had, but she 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 in a depressed area that will pay the rent and all the other bills when there are close to a million other young people out of work and living on benefits across the country?

It may well be that we really are on the brink of another welfare revolution. In my decades of reporting politics I have never before 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.