Such benefits therefore penalise work savings and honesty

Such benefits therefore penalise work, savings and honesty.In their craving for extending means-tested assistance, the Tories have launched the most significant attack ever by government on both the individual's and the nation's natural drive for self-improvement. While expenditure on insurance provision since 1979 has risen by under 30 per cent, means test costs have soared by 300 per cent. It involves recasting the relationship between the state and the individual, of switching the balance away from centralism towards other forms of collective association, as well as re-drawing the border between the public and private domain.At the centre of today's welfare lurks a cancer that has been nurtured by the Tories. The uncontrollability of this budget increasingly makes prioritising government business difficult. It wasn't for nothing that Aneurin Bevan remarked that priorities were the language of socialism.How can a future Labour government break free of the curfew DSS expenditure would impose on most of its major initiatives? By addressing that question Labour begins the big debate of the Millennium. And second, the social security budget is growing at a rate - twice that at which the economy has been growing - which, unchecked, will financially derail the next Labour government. A moment's reflection tells why more needs to be spent on welfare.

Working lives have shortened and decades now are spent in retirement. An adequate retirement income depends on saving more now.Paradoxically the message of spending more on welfare comes at a time when the welfare budget is already growing like topsy. Each year the budget overruns by pounds 3bn only to overrun again by a similar amount in the following year. The social security budget is not only by far and away the largest of all government budgets, but is increasing faster than any of the others. To embellish former mandarin Sir Geoffrey Holland's observation, other departments are left to scavenge the scraps that fall from the table upon which welfare feasts. Yet under existing rules taxpayers are understandably reluctant to pay more. The first fruits of Labour's review of social security, which were revealed last week by Chris Smith, stretch to the limits the possibilities of action within the present system of taxation and social security.

There are two compelling reasons why radical reform isn't merely an option but a necessity for Labour. First, the hard truth the country has to face is that more, not less, needs to be spent on welfare. I wonder what he would he reply if he was asked about the prospects for a party similar to his in the UK. Would he say: "A hopeless case: not enough social distress, too little ethnic tension, only sporadic hatred of foreigners, tradition of tolerance too strong? Or would he respond, "Yes, promising situation"?.

As a result, some French politicians, led by Francois Leotard, met last month to attempt the construction of a "republican front", in which the mainstream parties, both of left and right, would put forward only one candidate in contests where the Front National has a chance of winning These proposals have been met with scepticism. One reaction is that one should not diabolise the Front National because only a small proportion of its electors are extreme and because, anyway, its very weight already gives it a legitimacy.Thus we see how the clever, aggressive, dangerous M Le Pen makes progress. One will only be done with this situation by reacting vigorously One must kill one's enemy The Israeli right has killed Rabin and won the elections. I don't mean that it is necessary to kill Chirac, but we must stop having a position of respect or of consideration."These are alarming sentiments, all the more so in light of M. Le Pen's success in the recent presidential election, when he attracted 15 per cent of the votes.

The mainstream parties fear that if this share of the poll were to be repeated in the 1998 elections for the National Assembly, where the Front National is unrepresented, then M Le Pen could hold the balance in a hung Parliament. Le Pen last March: "Only the people is capable of sensing, by a sort of biological intuition, the mortal danger that blights its future." In this context, "biological" is a word from a racist vocabulary Or a colleague of M. Le Pen: "We are going straight towards an ethnic war and that war will be total." In Bosnia or in France? Or another who scarcely fudges at all: "The nationalists are treated like dogs or pariahs. One enters into French nationality, says Le Pen, by "blood received, or blood spilt" - chauvinism, after all, goes back to the blind admiration for his country shown by Napoleon's soldier, Nicolas Chauvin.In practice, the Front National has been ambiguous in its public statements, being, in Alexander Pope's words, "willing to wound and yet afraid to strike" Thus M. Then as nationalism becomes racism, it becomes far right or extreme right.In his right of reply, M Le Pen was engaging in a great pretence. Since 1973, the programme of the Front National has centred on the survival of a French identity refined, as it believes, through 4,000 years of European culture, 20 centuries of Christianity, 40 kings and two centuries of the Republic. Mr Redwood's formulation made no mention of preserving Britishness as an objective.