Your editorial (“‘Changes Without Consent”, 25 July) completely ignores the fact that we had a General Election on 7 May this year. Before the election the Conservative Party made it clear that it would implement the reforms to the Welfare State that it is now carrying out, and it won that election with an overall majority. So in what sense are these “changes without consent”?The basic idea of the welfare reforms is to get people off welfare and into work by making sure that work always pays. So there is now a policy to increase the Minimum Wage to compensate for a reduction in welfare payments. The original idea of the Welfare State as laid out in the Beveridge Report of 1944 was to provide a safety net for those who had fallen on hard times. It was never in