Mr Dorrell has established a new type of partnership in the welfare state.What has driven Mr Dorrell's new approach and has started to underpin Labour's thinking, is the ageing population, which is proving evermore costly because of their requirements for health and social care. Meanwhile, there is the problem of how to finance better and longer education for the general population. Individuals who take out private cover will be able to protect a larger part of their assets, including their home, from the increasingly invasive means tests for long-term care. By allowing individuals to protect more of what they have earned, the scheme should reward thrift, responsibility and self-provision. "The welfare state is after all a framework which the Government sets in order to enable citizens to achieve security; it is not a particular mechanism per se for delivering that security." Implicit in that is more private provision - both by individuals in terms of insurance and savings, and by the private sector in terms of delivering services.Take Mr Dorrell's scheme first. And Chris Smith's twin statements on the role of the welfare state - revolutionary for Labour - have implications that could go way beyond the large but narrow field of the pounds 90bn social security budget. "We have," Mr Smith said, "a responsibility as a community to support those amongst us who fall on hard times." But, he instantly added, we also have "a responsibility as individuals to make provision in our own lives for those times when we can't earn and support ourselves by doing so."He coupled that with a statement that the state must act "as the guarantor of all provision, the regulator of all provision" but the administrator only of "some" of that provision.

But in a big way in terms of the ideas that are likely to mould and drive it over the coming decades. On both sides of the political divide, new partnerships, both between the citizen and the state, and between the public and private sectors, are in the making. Stephen Dorrell's scheme to allow middle England to protect some of its assets from the means tests for long-term care is a new departure - nothing quite like it has been seen before in the 50 years since the Beveridge report. In fact, he says, he intends to spend part of his prize on drink for the party to launch this declaration at a London church.. This week the shape of the welfare state changed Not yet in reality. Even moderate evangelicals have an extraordinary paranoia about anything that can be labelled "New Age". But things are changing.Professor Berry has got 90 prominent British evangelicals to sign a declaration committing their churches to environmentalist values.