首相有一千年难得一次的机会，重新将同情心引入福利体系。他必须抓住这一时刻。回到2009年，在联合政府推出广泛紧缩政策之前的几个月，时任保守党后座议员伊恩·邓肯·史密斯制作了一项研究，该研究后来为普惠信用的推出奠定了基础。如今，近二十年后，邓肯·史密斯及其智库社会正义中心（CSJ）发布了《依赖现状》——一份具有里程碑意义的报告，承诺揭露“英国失业危机的全貌”。
The prime minister has a once-in-a-generation chance to reintroduce compassion to welfare. He has to seize the moment Back in 2009, months before the coalition government unleashed sweeping austerity, the then Conservative backbencher Iain Duncan Smith produced a study that would go on to lay the foundations for the rollout of universal credit. Now, nearly two decades later, Duncan Smith and his thinktank, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), has published State of Dependency: a landmark report promising to expose “the full scale of Britain’s worklessness crisis”.
该研究描绘了大规模依赖福利的图景：它确定了3400个地区，其中超过一半的劳动年龄人口领取失业救济金，或者说，正如作者所称的“经济鸦片”。他们甚至提供了一个交互式地图（颜色为黄黑相间，就像道路危险标志一样），供公众输入邮政编码查看其社区是否是“福利热点”。弗朗西斯·瑞安是《卫报》专栏作家
The study paints a picture of mass benefits reliance: it identifies 3,400 local areas where more than half the working-age population are on out-of-work benefits, or “economic opiates”, as the authors call them. They’ve even provided an interactive map (in the yellow and black colours of a road hazard sign, no less) so members of the public can type in their postcode to see if their neighbourhood is “a welfare hotspot”. Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist