It was the commitment to end child poverty within 20 years that captured media interest in the days following the Beveridge Lecture. Before 1 May 1997, poverty had been a proscribed word in official circles for a political generation and the idea that government should or, indeed, could, do anything about it was also ridiculed. Tony Blair not only promises to eradicate child poverty, he commits himself to a timetable that could conceivably fall within an unbroken spell of Labour rule. This new policy goal was not chosen at random, it is consistent with the concept of social justice that lies at the foundation of Blair’s vision of social welfare.

Less remarked upon, but of real importance, is the emphasis given in Blair’s Lecture to transforming welfare from ‘a term of abuse’ into something ‘popular’. A necessary pre-condition for achieving the goal of eradicating childhood poverty, it could also have profound implications for both the delivery of welfare and the status accorded to welfare recipients. Welfare might become the instrument for fostering social cohesion through the language of social inclusion in the way that Beveridge foresaw it as part of post-war reconstruction.

The continuing legacy of Beveridge is indeed remarkable. Beveridge was engaged in the policy arena for so long, in so many capacities and offered so many insights, some of them contradictory (as Tony Atkinson affirms), that almost any policy prescription could be presented as being either ‘new’ or ‘old’ Beveridge. Nevertheless, Jose Harris, who knows more about Beveridge than anyone else, concludes that “the principles and assumptions woven into the fabric of the Beveridge Plan … have a certain relevance – even an elective affinity - with some of the core ideas of New Labour”.

But the Lecture is perhaps most notable, in this age of soundbites, for the opportunity afforded to assemble the concepts and principles that define New Labour’s thinking and to apply them to a central policy concern, the future of welfare. As a consequence, much is learned about Blair’s ideas on ‘the Third Way’, ‘modernisation’, the ‘knowledge economy’, ‘social responsibility’, ‘welfare contracts’ and ‘social inclusion’.