What does May's promotion mean for the welfare reform agenda?

Aless Bieri

I think Iain Duncan Smith would have made a very good choice for that role.

When I heard about the reshuffle I hoped they might just bring him back

TC

Once the election is won, I suspect IDS will be brought into the Cabinet to run the department and to oversee the radical reform that we are told Cameron is committed too.

For now though, maybe it makes sense to someone like Theresa May doing it, since she's not going to scare anyone. Don't forget the way Cameron reacted to Labour's plans to get mothers off benefits and back into work. Maybe he sees an opportunity to paint Labour as 'the nasty party' on welfare.

geoff

I think James has read it right. May is there to attack purnell on single mums.

True Bred Pomponian

It's startling that May is still in the Shadow Cabinet on the basis of previous form.

George Laird

Dear Fraser

Cameron has made a massive dog's dinner in putting May into Work and Pensions.

This position was ideal for Iain Duncan Smith.

With 3.4 million ppeople expected to lose their jobs in 2011, these potential voters will be looking for someone who understands the problem.

This appointment is truly pathetic.

Here is an example of how pathetic she is;

"Theresa May: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions for which Government websites his Department is responsible; how many visitors each received in the last period for which figures are available; and what the cost of maintaining each site was in that period".

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University

David Webster

This is driven both by the need to have a few women at the top table - and there arent too many credible Conservative women now - and I suspect it might be a move to push a more family friendly line around flexible working and disability care for the truly disabled. I can't see TM being in this post for a Conservative government, but she plays as a softer caring face. This has an electoral advantage even if it doesnt result in the policy reform that is needed.

David Lindsay

It means that Purnell keeps his job if Cameron wins. But we knew that anyway.

Kevyn Bodman

I do not believe that welfare reform takes years to explore and understand fully.

jon

If you reform welfare and get people back to work paying taxes, the budget deficit is cut and less money has to be quantively eased out of the BOE or printed.

ChrisD

That's a hat trick on the Coffee House Blog!

For a bunch of political journalists, all right leanings males, you are missing the point entirely!
But I don't think Cameron or Osborne have, and they are a couple of strategic steps ahead of you.

This brief is going to be a very hot potato over the next couple of years, especially in the present economic climate. This has been a purely political appointment, and IMHO, a very clever move by the leadership to place Theresa May in this brief.

Labour have got the smarted suited and young Blairite Purnell in place, why the hell would the Tories wish to put up a similar young and smartly suited guy in this role too?

Honestly, when Blair needed difficult decisions to be made in this area, he put up Harriet Harman, that doyen of the left....Think out of the box boys!

Fraser Nelson

So Kevyn, why has no one in Britain ever succeeded in doing it?

And what other walk of life could you take a novice, put them in charge, and expect results?

Verity

David Webster - "This is driven both by the need to have a few women at the top table-".

But there is no such need! Women don't care. They just want competent people governing. If there's an ultra competent woman who shares their mindset fine. But if not, also fine. Tokens are the playing chips of the Labour and Democrat parties and have absolutely no place in national (or local) governance.

Tiberius

Fraser, you're going to have TGF UKIP on here ramping this topic up if you're not careful. And weren't you virtually taking a Cameron Government for granted yesterday?

I know welfare is a particular passion with you, and we all recognize the importance of dealing with the hopelessness welfarism causes. But ultimately you have either to give fundamental support to Cameron's judgement or not.

Alternatively, I suppose someone could ask him why he appointed Mrs May to this brief.

Kevyn Bodman

Fraser:
It's a lack of will, not a lack of understanding, that has impeded welfare reform.
And Ms. May is not starting from nothing, unless you think her predecessor and other colleagues have deleted all their files.
She'll be on top of this by Easter, 3 months not years.

As for your second question, in what area of life could you take a novice, put them in charge, and expect results?
That's what our voting friends across the pond have done, he starts at midday tomorrow.
I don't think it'll work but that's because I think he's not much more than a superb speech-reader, but most of the world seems to think that it will work.

Fraser Nelson

Tiberius, I still would bank on a Cameron government. I would no longer bank on a Cameron government implementing radical welfare reform - but I could be proved wrong.

ChrisD, I agree - strategically, it has its uses. Having a woman accuse Purnell of being hard on single mums has its merits. But this, I fear, comes at the cost of actually doing something in office.

Aless, Im pleased IDS is on the backbenches - he can be more influential there.

George Laird

Dear ChrisD

“For a bunch of political journalists, all right leanings males, you are missing the point entirely!”

I think that all people from whatever end of the spectrum who stop and think it through will come to the conclusion that May is wrong for the Work and Pensions brief.

“But I don't think Cameron or Osborne have, and they are a couple of strategic steps ahead of you”.

Can I say ‘Russian billionaire’s yacht’ with regard to these claims about Osborne being strategic?

Can I also say that Cameron corrected his gaff re Dominic Grieve at the Home Office.

“This brief is going to be a very hot potato over the next couple of years, especially in the present economic climate”.

Are you saying far too hot for a man?

We need a 52 year old woman with an MA in Geography?

Is it because she can point her finger and say, ‘there’s a job over there’?

“This has been a purely political appointment, and IMHO, a very clever move by the leadership to place Theresa May in this brief”.

Clever move, no, no, no! Sorry, try mistake, big mistake, this is Grieve at the Home Office brief Mk 2.

“Labour have got the smarted suited and young Blairite Purnell in place, why the hell would the Tories wish to put up a similar young and smartly suited guy in this role too?”

You’re right, a power suit wearing middle age woman will make everyone forget the massive unemployment affecting the country.

“Honestly, when Blair needed difficult decisions to be made in this area, he put up Harriet Harman, that doyen of the left....Think out of the box boys!”

Blair stuck up Harman because she could drop any lower in people’s eyes, she was cannon fodder.

As to thinking out of the box, it isn’t rocket science to put the right person into Work and Pensions brief, Iain Duncan Smith.

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University

Callie

Iain Duncan Smith would have been a much better pick for this job. IDS and Frank Field are the two MP's with the most knowledge on this subject. Unfortunately I suspect May has been kept in the shadow cabinet due to one fact she is female!

Hysteria

May is just more of the same old same old centrist approach.

Th economic mess is a slow train wreck. Eventually someone (or a party) will realise that we need to actually DO something about welfare reform and wealth creation. Unitl we do we are well and truly stuffed.

None of our politicos seem to grasp this with one or two notable exceptions (Redwood for example)

Take a look at the raw data available on the economy and be very afraid ! Here is but one example from the OECD

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/32/43/41968271.pdf

Explanation of what these metrics mean is here

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/26/39/41629509.pdf

DW

Weren't there recent comments on other coffee houser threads that IDS wasn't actually keen on a cabinet post?

Prodicus

For a start, it means Dave doesn't get how annoying May is to the average TV viewer. Keep her off the box, Dave. She is a rentagob, patently not a listener but a facile talking machine - and incidentally a destroyer of TV sets because I have to hurl heavy objects in her direction whenever she pops up on QT purporting to represent Tory thinking. A debating disaster, she could not get the ball into an undefended goal if you wheeled her across the line in a bath chair with the ball in her arms.
Far more importantly, it means that Dave does not realise how incredulous many Tory supporters are in seeing, still on the front bench (give me strength), the patronising woman who inflicted all but lethal damage on the party when she gratuitously branded us 'The Nasty Party' on prime time TV, to the eternal gratitude of Blair, Brown, Leninspart, Toynbee, the entire Labour Party and the BBC.
With that one phrase, May did more than anyone else, inside or outside the entire political class, to keep the Conservative Party out of government after 1997.
Until Cameron’s absolutely Herculean effort to (partially) erase memory of it, that phrase of May’s has rung out over the years every time a Tory has opened his or her mouth in public. It has coloured both policy development and every statement from the party since it clanged to the floor of the conference centre.
Not because she was right. She was not, but such a priceless gift to the chattering classes could only become common coin. It was a brand both in marketing terms and in the sense that the label is burned on the forehead of every conservative politician facing a camera or an interviewer. Imagine Pepsi changing its name to Horsepiss. Would you buy or sell Coca-Cola shares?
‘Nasty Party’ became the background to everything the Party has done and will do for a couple of generations. Gee, thanks, Teresa. Good job! Here – have a pay rise. WHAT?
May's two major achievements are to hand Blair at least one election and to hand Brown the keys of Number Ten. (Yes, I know Number Ten does not have keys…)
Mrs May has never apologised to the party nor even acknowledged making the political error of the decade and she never will because she does not get it. She is always right.
May is a vote loser who should be fired pour encourage les autres, not promoted.

Verity

Prodicus - Nail. Head. Hit.

I have been puzzled from afar that May still has any kind of job at all in the Conservative Party after the lethal damage she did to the Party and to the country by opening the floodgates for the Labourites to whoosh through.

The woman's a moron if she doesn't understand what she did, as in disgrace - through no fault of the Party itself - the Conservatives for a decade and hold the door open for slithy tove Tony Blair to wriggle over the threshhold of Downing Street.

You rightly say that every Conservative politician giving a quote or an interview over the last decade up until the present is hobbled by having her disgusting, lying phrase branded on his brain. In her way, she is as destructive as Gordon Brown is in his.

As soon as she uttered her phrase, she should have been booted out with vigour, contumely and derisive laughter. This destructive moron should not be a spokesman for anything.

Of all the people in British politics, I hate Gordon Brown and Teresa May with more or less equal volumes of toxicity. They're a draw for first place. Third is the Speaker.

Tony

From Welfare to Warfare.

Absurd, confused and strange politics from my friends on the right - sounds more like communism - wanting to enslave your compatriots to subsistance labour or poverty. Welfares home is the right liberating a man from the bonds of slave labour and abject poverty.

auditinggovtpoverty

Fraser Nelson says:

“You’re talking about liberating millions of people from welfare dependency. You need someone with the knowledge and energy to engage in hand-to-hand combat with the system – as Milburn did on health and Adonis on city academies. It requires the most energetic, most aggressive and determined member of his team. That’s why Chris Grayling was such a good hire. He immersed himself in it, met the people, read the studies, did the grunt work himself.”

I totally dispute the evidential basis of these assertions.

What exactly is Mr Nelson referring to as being Chris Grayling’s work while he was the Tory shadow in the Work and pensions brief?

Being a ‘good hire’ is not proven only because Mr Nelson says so. He has to publish a list of what his hero did. Otherwise the assertion is discredited.

What ‘studies’ has Grayling read? We should be told at least some of the allegedly leading or authoritative and up-to-date ones

Fraser Nelson may find it shocking. But there are no studies. Not from ANY of the UK university institutions. Not for at least 20 years. Not dealing with the actual situation.

I would stress: there are NO studies of the actual ‘welfare dependency’ situation by any UK university academics covering the past 30 years…..

It is also important that Mr Nelson tells readers what he means by ‘hand-to-hand combat with the system’.

What ‘system’ is he referring to there?

Saying the word ‘system’ and not demonstrating what he means by that is also a bankrupt statement.

The EVIDENCE of the holders OF THE POST AS Secretary of State in the Department for Health and Social Security [DHSS] and the Department for Social security [DSS] and now the Department for Work and pensions over the past 30 years shows that they have ALL misled the public. That there is no such thing as welfare dependency in Britain. What there MOST DEMONSTRABLY is and has been in that part of Government conduct is corruption by Government. Successions of Government ministers have lied on welfare and have allowed generations of ignorant, irresponsible and illegal 'commentators' to make assertions as a way to put pressure on unnamed people who cannot then answer back.

The UK system is CREATED to hide Government creation of poverty. This is the truth.

The repercussions of the Government-created poverty are then misstated and mis-exhibited by propaganda tools and media who act as de facto touts for particular parts of the political careerists divides.

The benefit system in the uk is a fraudulent system, the fraud is very much one created by the Tories in office and maintained by their alleged alternative side.

Otto

Theresa May has been kept in the Shad Cab due to the lack of women.

But IDS is best placed on back benches - he has much more freedom and he can really steer the party on the social justice agenda. Remember he has held this position before - it wouldn't exactly be a promotion for him.