UK Budget 2009 - Comment & analysisOnce or twice in a generation the opportunity – or, more often, the requirement – comes to rethink the role of the state.
It happened in the 1940s when, amid even higher levels of public debt than today, the decision was taken to build Britain’s modern welfare state in reaction to the depression of the 1930s and the collectivism – “we are all in this together” – engendered by the second world war.
