Beliefs about who gets what and who should, and who pays what and who should, have increasingly fostered a welfare state mythology that blames and castigates both the system and the recipients of its benefits. The demolition of myths can be seen as a Sisyphean task that some see as futile. But challenges to complacent and opportunistic acceptance of anti-welfare reforms are harder to mount without meticulous assembling of counter-evidence. In eight chapters with 268 pages of text, charts and tables supported by over 50 pages of notes and references, John Hills provides the evidence in which far too many noses need to be rubbed.

To bring the many statistics alive, John Hills has built very successfully on an exercise that he was involved with a quarter of a century ago: that resulted in two Granada TV mock-game shows in 1989 and 1991. Two stereotypical working and middle class families, the Ackroyds and the Osbornes, were constructed from the available evidence to illustrate who got what out of the welfare state. Chapters 2 to 8 begin with a couple of pages in a separate font suggesting how the two families might typically have fared over three generations until today. The book slowly builds up a picture that moves from the snapshot to a moving picture of the families, ‘looking at how people's lives vary and differ over different time periods, and how the welfare state affects those dynamics’ (p. 6).

Hills then discusses the available research evidence, particularly but not only from CASE (the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at LSE). He brings out clearly, and often in excruciating detail, ‘the awkward complexity’ of people's lives (p. 215). This is why the polarised debates, often with shaming of ‘them’ who are so different from the hard-working and responsible ‘us’, are such a misleading and even dangerous myth. ‘This characterisation is profoundly to misunderstand the implications of the dynamics of our lives’ (p. 268).

The value of a life-cycle approach to policy analysis is brought out in Chapter 3, revealing that both rich and poor ‘have a larger stake in the system than they realise’ (p. 11). Chapter 4 examines the variations in lives and incomes week by week, Chapter 5 year by year. Chapter 6 takes a longer view, showing the ways that benefit and tax systems help or hinder families’ efforts at building up savings and wealth, and the next chapter follows this over the generations. The consideration of greater social mobility and policies enhancing equality of opportunity openly avowed by all political parties ends with a reflection on the increased resistance to such policies as inequalities grow greater and the penalties for downward mobility become more severe.

Chapter 8 engages with central policy issues, considering how social policies affect and are affected by changes over time in politics, society and economy – by, for example, policies of ‘austerity’ or by population ageing. This brings out even more fully a point made in the first chapter: the lifting that has to be done by the welfare state in the UK is heavier work than in most other countries where inequalities are smaller.

The detailed analysis and discussion of complex and changing data from multiple sources are neatly leavened and summarised in the clearest possible terms: for example, ‘And so the wealth cycle carries on’ (p. 183). The concluding chapter, ‘Britain's misunderstood welfare state’, is a tour-de-force. I cannot recall reading a better account of a detailed analysis with clear exposition of the main findings of each chapter and leading up to a succinct consideration of the implications under headings such as ‘the welfare state is not just “welfare”’ (p. 259); ‘myths have consequences’ (p. 264); and ‘there is no “them” and “us”, just us’ (p. 266).

For many years I used the 1989 television programme, The Spongers, on the Ackroyds and the Osbornes for teaching. Julian Le Grand is brought in as ‘the boffin’ by Nicholas Parsons to explain the astonishing evidence produced by Pandora from her box of benefits (Julian told me that Nicholas helped to sharpen up the show). It not only rounded off courses on the social division of welfare here but went down very successfully with students from many countries on ERASMUS, TEMPUS and SOCRATES courses on social security. It invariably provoked vigorous student engagement with issues of data, myth, stigma and national differences. Scandinavians regularly argued the need for more attention to the collective goals of welfare states that John brings out well, particularly in the last chapter.

It may be because of my long usage of this framework that I thought that John Hills missed one particular opportunity to bring out the additional ways that people are supported through the action and active encouragement of other institutions of the state, and not just the welfare state. It is not really until Chapter 6 that he engages with the tax advantages that provide largely regressive benefits to the better-off, and to the best-off most of all. These are not included in the calculations of benefit and contributions, taxes and NI contributions. It could have been very effective to have brought some of this and the differential range of occupational welfare into the opening chapters’ updating of the original contrasts and discussed the effect of changes since then (e.g., Table 4, Woolley and Le Grand, Reference Woolley and Le Grand1990). It would also have added force to the discussion of taxation and other contributions. But this is one minor complaint with a valuable and thought-provoking study which should provide the basis for much policy analysis and making.