THERE is a famous, brilliant and totally surreal scene in the 1994 satire programme, "The Day Today" (see it here), in which a narrator tells the viewer, over a patriotic rendition of "I vow to thee my country", that "This is Britain, and everything's alright". The images are a sort of parody of Conservative "broken Britain" rhetoric. Police officers smoke spliffs, paramedics rob old ladies and children help to light a man's cigarette. I was reminded of it today, when reading the front page of The Daily Telegraph, which has a preview of a speech that Iain Duncan Smith, the welfare secretary, intends to give this evening. He will say that the current system of benefits is supporting "dysfunctional behaviour".

"All too often, government’s response to social breakdown has been a classic case of 'patching’—a case of handing money out, containing problems and limiting the damage but, in doing so, supporting—even reinforcing — dysfunctional behaviour."

It's an argument put about quite often by government ministers. The last administration, they say, massively increased benefit spending, which led lots of people to opt out of work. The children they are raising are growing up delinquent. As David Cameron put it after last year's riots, "Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices have no consequences. Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort." All quite convincing. Thankfully, however, mostly quite wrong.

The first part is that society is not broken, at all. If anything, it's healthier than ever. In this week's issue, we've published a story about the current generation of young people—those aged between around 15 to 25. This generation of young people is the best behaved in decades. They drink less, smoke less, take fewer drugs, and have fewer teenage pregnancies. They get better exam results and are more likely to go to university. Frankly, they're incredibly well-behaved. All this has happened despite a huge and ongoing increase in levels of single-parenthood and a similarly large decline in marriage, not to mention the lack of discipline in schools that Mr Cameron mentioned.

The second part is that there wasn't really a big increase in the numbers of lazy or benefit dependent people under Labour. Certainly, Labour spent a lot on welfare, but here is a fact that fits uncomfortably with Mr Duncan Smith's analysis: in 1997, 17% of households with children were workless. As of last year, the number had fallen to 12.8%. Almost all of that improvement happened under Labour. It happened because far more lone parents now go to work. That is probably because Labour spent a lot of money devising elaborate benefit systems—primarily tax credits—to encourage single mothers to find jobs. It may have been expensive, but "patching" didn't only contain problems: it arguably helped to solve them.

I sometimes feel as though Mr Duncan Smith thinks he lives in a world where every urban corner is occupied by a hoodie with a knife and every council flat with a feckless, drug-taking single mother. That is perhaps unfair—when he drops the rhetoric, he is actually quite well briefed. But it would help his case if, for once, he was a little positive about British society. After all, this is Britain, and everything is alright.