The end-game of capitalism is likely a world where all of the essentials for life support are cheap enough for practically anyone to afford. Shades of this can already be seen in many third-world countries where hunger is rare and basic healthcare and medicine is dirt cheap. I caught a parasite in Cambodia and bought anti-parasitic drugs over the counter for like $0.75. In America I would have paid at least 100x more and needed a prescription. I don't doubt that proponents of the welfare state have the best intentions for the poor, but the welfare state is not the Robin Hood fantasy that it is made out to be. In many cases the state robs the poor to prop up the middle class. Empathy for poor people isn't even a politically popular sentiment to have. Nearly all of the entitlement agendas are in service to the middle class, while being misleadingly framed as class warfare.

I don't know enough about UK policy so I'll just cite US examples of this. Social Security is a regressive program, disproportionately benefiting the middle class at the expense of the poor. The tax takes a larger percentage of low incomes and the budget depends on the poor having a lower life expectancy than average. They're now trying to raise the retirement age to sharpen this effect even more.

The minimum wage is in many ways also anti-poor and anti-minority. It essentially props up the wages of the lower income people who already have jobs at the expense of those who are looking for a job. It also encourages hiring discrimination by reducing the number of people who can be hired for low-skill work. If I'm an employer and I *kind of* don't like blacks, with no minimum wage I'm probably still going to hire them if the price is right. If I'm forced to pay a higher-than-market wage and I have a stack of applications of people of all colors, I'm obviously going pick the non-blacks first.

The newest welfare agenda sought after in the US by the democrats is free university education. This is clearly a middle class subsidy that will in many ways be a reverse robin hood. The children of poor people in the U.S. are far less likely than average to even graduate high school, much less go to college. The taxes to pay for free college will come out of their pockets all the same.