Can the social contract survive in Britain?

In the vestry of the church where my father was priest, there was a large wall-mounted plaque commemorating some long-dead worthy of the eighteenth century. I cannot recall his name, but he left a large bequest to the parish for the support of ‘poor persons known to be of good character.’ There are similar inscriptions marking similar bequests in churches up and down the country – though perhaps fewer of them now, in these days of fervent ideological scrutiny of such memorials.

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As an idealistic young man, I used to find the plaque rather irritating. I thought it was archaic and unchristian, a relic of the Bad Old Days when the gentry’s arbitrary prejudices about the undeserving poor led to misery and injustice among the working class.