A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
THE Dean of Windsor has been vigorously denounc- ing the Welfare State. I rather welcome that, in spite of the fact that if the Dean is half- right he is also half-wrong. Every civilised State must be a Welfare State. Every State modelled on the New Testament inevitably is. The needy must be succoured, the sick be cared for, the aged be, in part at any rate, maintained, and to make sure that all this is done adequately it must be done by the State. But I am all with the Dean when he points to the demoralisation that this may lead to, as I am all (or nearly all) with Lord Woolton when he points to the degree in which among the citizens of today acquisition tends to overshadow obligation. Not what you can get out of the State but what you can do for the State is the ideal to inculcate. The Dean of Windsor was speaking to Boy Scouts, and there could have been no more appropriate audience. The Scout spirit and the spiv spirit are at war, and in certain circumstances undiscriminating zeal for the Welfare State could reinforce the latter. I admit that it is hard to know how and where to discriminate, but a feather-bedded people is not likely to be a venturesome people.
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