Politicians have spent years arguing about welfare – and all the time the public’s support for it has waned. Here, experts on poverty and social security argue that only abandoning a means-tested system and re-creating a contributory one will work The welfare state faces a crisis of finance and of legitimacy. Yet the Government’s welfare reforms fail to address adequately either issue. Cuts there are, but these leave the structure in place that in part gives rise to the benefit-cutting strategy in the first place, and this very structure of the welfare state is the root cause of the growing crisis of legitimacy, as decreasing numbers of citizens take “ownership” of it, given it is no longer rooted in a contributory system. An alternative strategy is conspicu