THE attack by the ruling Labour group on Blackburn with Darwen Council on cuts in benefit for single parents is typical of the flak Tony Blair and Harriet Harman will face as they seek to sell the government's welfare reforms in special "roadshows" around the country.

One can understand the councillors' concern that poor people may be deprived.

But, though no government can expect popularity through taking money off people which they have had before, is the essence of the welfare shake-up actually that of hitting the poor - or helping them?

Certainly, the spectre of means-testing of universal and even contributory benefits, which is now being raised as the government's ideas take on more substance, suggest that better targeting of state benefits - directing them at the needy and away from the affluent - is what the shake-up is all about.

This, coupled with ploughing the savings on welfare into schools and hospitals and, in the case of single parents, the element of social engineering designed to combat benefit dependency by making work a more attractive option, are aspects of the reforms with which no-one can reasonably argue.

On top of this a demographic timebomb is threatening to tip the balance between contributors and drawers of social security towards collapse of the system.

As a result the governments must, of necessity, assess how much welfare the country can afford.

Though this is patently what the government is setting out to do, the sort of reaction that it can expect at grassroots level is the one Blackburn councillors are delivering. The government can expect a hard time as it strives to sell its reforms and the reasons for them.

But it might have had an easier start if it had constructed a complete package of proposals for the whole benefits system instead of dribbling them piecemeal into the public arena with the most controversial - those concerning single parents and the disabled - coming first.

For consider those that have followed.

Taxing the child benefit payments to the well-off

Scrapping maternity benefits payments, capable of amounting to thousands of pounds a week, to the rich.

Means-testing the state pension so that the poorest get more than the prosperous.

They are bound to run into automatic hostility, particularly among the middle classes, over the reduction of existing benefits rights and the money that comes with them.

But such ideas have the tempering aspects of reason and fairness that the government must sell as the basis for welfare reform.

As the first "roadshow" rolls this week, that is a theme Mr Blair and Ms Harman will have to stress again and again.

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