Indeed, it is the obvious second target after disability benefits, where spending has tripled in 15 years, out of all proportion to any possible increase in real disablement.But, in both cases, doing anything about the problem has proved much more difficult than identifying it. The budget has grown out of all proportion to its original intentions, enriching landlords and creating perverse incentives, making it more likely than before that poor people will stay on benefit. As we report today, ministers have abandoned the idea of big changes to the housing benefit system, in favour of "streamlining".Now, housing benefit is a prime target of the reformer's knife. Patching and mending are sound principles of the serious reformer.

Grand schemes to remoralise society or end welfare benefit as we know it will end in mere tinkering anyway, having raised expectations and pleased no one.And so it proves. He declared ringingly that he did not want to be remembered as just another social security secretary "who tinkered with the system, patched and mended it before handing it on to somebody else to do the same" We warned him, as well. When he found out, Mr Field took his expensive schemes back to the back benches and in came Alistair Darling, a technocrat who can do political arithmetic.But Mr Darling, too, made the mistake of over-claiming. After the fiasco of the cut in lone-parent benefit two years ago, Mr Blair went on the road to sell his message. It consisted of a simple proposition, "the welfare state isn't working". This newspaper warned him then that it was a dangerous proposition, not just because it undermined support for those parts of state support that are needed in any civilised society, but because he had no idea of the shape of change. He liked the cut of Frank Field's jib, but had no idea what the saintly minister for welfare reform meant by his talk about ending dependency and insisting on responsibility.

Despite being pathologically cautious on specific promises, the Prime Minister is increasingly found wanting when measured against his extravagant and sweeping claims of radical change. THE ABIDING weakness of Tony Blair's Government is rhetorical excess. But next time the defenders of free markets need to make a much more vigorous case for free and fair trade as the basis of prosperity, security and environmental protection for all.. Let us hope that the US has learnt something from its failure. If the US can adopt a more sensitive approach to the fears of other nations, perhaps something can be rescued from the wreckage, which would be in its interests too. It was in the interests of, above all, the people of the poorer countries of the world that trade should be made more free.

That does not mean, however, that the collapse of the WTO talks was a good thing Far from it. As hosts in the chair, the US urgently needed a "line to take", if only to head off the ragbag army of eco-warriors and anti-capitalists who converged on the streets. Instead, Mr Clinton was obsessed, as ever, with the internal divisions of the US polity on the issue of protection, which in this case took the guise of trying to write in a labour standards clause. The US administration, and President Clinton himself, were woefully under- prepared for this conference and fully deserved to be embarrassed. They did not want the conference in the first place, but then had no idea what they wanted to do with it when they got it. YOU DO not have to have a ring in your nose and a dog on a string to feel a twinge of satisfaction at the public humiliation of the United States in the collapse of the World Trade Organisation talks in Seattle.

Let us not dwell, however, on England's decline, but on Scotland's resurgence. For a nation with its own parliament again, this is the best, defiant answer to the carping of James MacMillan, the classical composer who moaned about his country's lack of spirit, confidence and tolerance. Arguments about independence, currencies and whose North Sea oil it is are all very well, but this is much more important This is football.. This is the news that puts the English in their place: their national football team has been ranked lower than Scotland in the seedings for the 2002 World Cup qualifiers. Never mind that England won - just, on aggregate - in their most recent encounter Scotland is rated 13th in the world, England 16th.