Of intended and unintended consequences

If you can judge a society by how well it treats its weakest members (the criterion variously credited to Aristotle, Churchill, Dostoevsky, Gandhi, and Pope John Paul II) how will Britain’s Big Society be judged after last week’s comprehensive spending review? (doi:10.1136/bmj.c5952)

Here are some pointers. Welfare spending took the biggest hit: to already announced savings of £11bn (€13bn, $17bn) another £7bn was added, to come “mainly from making working-age benefits for poorer households stingier” (The Economist 2010, 23 Oct, http://bit.ly/bKowOO). “Was it fair that children should emerge as the prime losers?” asks Polly Toynbee in our online debate over the fairness of the cuts (doi:10.1136/bmj.c6053, doi:10.1136/bmj.c6049). In every income group families with school age children lose the highest proportion of their …