The Tories’ revolutionary schools and welfare policies are the way forward

13 October 2007

AFTER a disastrous three months, the worst is finally over for David Cameron and his Conservative Party.

Most important of all, it shows the Tories finally understand that Britain must follow America’s lead on welfare; the famous reform bill that Mr Clinton signed into law in 1996, ending the automatic entitlement to hand-outs, helped slash the welfare rolls from 12.2m to 4.5m in a few years. By the end of the Clinton administration, child poverty was as its lowest level since 1979 and the poverty rate for children of single mothers the lowest since records began.

The Clinton reforms demonstrated the efficacy of turning welfare into a hand-up rather than a hand-out. In Britain, however, only 19% of welfare expenditure places any obligations on recipients; so much for Mr Brown’s rights and responsibilities agenda. The system also fails to move people back into work. The direct financial cost of this is huge; its social and cultural cost even greater. There are now more workless males in Britain than at any time since records began; scandalously, one in four of the population are on out of work benefits in cities like Liverpool and Glasgow at a time of unprecedented immigration and with vast numbers of Eastern Europeans finding work every day across the UK.

Education is a policy area where the Tories are showing even greater promise. The fact that Turkey is the only country in the OECD with a larger attainment gap between the private and state education sectors should shame the UK educational establishment; it is even more of a scandal that the gulf between pupils on free schools meals and the rest actually grows during their time in state schools. Thankfully, the Tories have got their act together on education since their disastrous row over grammar schools, thanks largely to Mr Cameron’s decision to put Mr Gove in charge.

Unlike many of the privileged members of Cameron’s inner circle, Mr Gove is someone for whom social mobility is not merely an abstract notion but a personal reality; in his speech this week he unveiled a truly revolutionary education policy which would finally break the stranglehold of Local Education Authorities, allowing charities, faith and voluntary groups to set up their own state-funded schools with a minimum of bureaucratic hassle.