The Tories are radical again

Cameron means business on welfare: the Tories are the radicals again

Fraser Nelson

31 October 2007

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David Cameron is about to take up the issue that Margaret Thatcher didn’t dare touch and that defeated Tony Blair at the height of his powers: welfare reform. Fraser Nelson explains how the Conservative leader intends to bring the American welfare revolution to this country, challenge Labour on its home turf and make poverty history in Britain.

Yet much has changed since Mr Blair backed down in 1999. The problem of welfare ghettos is growing more acute, and more obviously so, spawning gang warfare and endemic criminality. Jonathan Matondo, the 16-year-old boy shot dead last month by another teenager in Sheffield, was killed in one of the most welfare-dependent areas in Britain. Violent crime goes hand in hand with male joblessness (itself at an all-time peak). The Conservatives could plausibly argue that such ghettos are not just a waste of human potential. They are Petri dishes where social malaise festers.

Mass immigration now makes it impossible to argue that there are not enough jobs in Britain. Ministers say the ‘skills agenda’ is the solution, but the bulk of the immigrants arriving are unskilled and still finding work. The Labour and Tory party’s respective preparations for the election that never was uncovered mounting public anger over welfare, especially in council estates where working families resent the fact that their welfare-dependent neighbours seem better off and appear to be able to afford longer holidays. A sense of deep unfairness is starting to take root. Britain is a tolerant, decent country, but there is a growing impatience with those who seem to exploit the rules rather than observe their spirit.

Politically, too, the sands are shifting. Labour has accepted that it will miss its target of halving child poverty by 2010. Sure Start nurseries for the poor are proving an expensive flop. The idea that the solution to poverty is to give more resources to the needy has been tested to destruction. Yet this remains Mr Brown’s immutable creed (and that of the anti-poverty pressure groups who test his performance in public). It seems we can already write the epitaph of this government: that Labour fought poverty — and poverty won.

But poverty lost in Wisconsin. And in promising to re-enact the battle here, using the same plan of attack, Mr Cameron is undertaking his boldest mission yet. The electoral pressure-cooker of Blackpool may have forced him to make the leap, but now that he is on the other side he seems comfortable. It is a better place from which to take on Mr Brown: hugely ambitious, yet in tune with the times. And there are few better ways to unnerve the PM than to claim, as Mr Cameron now does, that only the Conservatives have the strength, energy and ideas to make poverty history in Britain.

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Julio Juncal

November 8th, 2007 8:33pm Report this comment

Mr Nelson says: "This is no accident. It was the American Left which grasped that traditional welfare was actually locking people into poverty, and decided to fight it not by raising incomes through benefits but by cutting welfare rolls." Can you substantiate that statement? The American Left, as we know it, fought tooth and nail against welfare reform under a Republican-dominated Congress and a Democratic President.

Richard Prior

January 8th, 2008 6:53pm Report this comment

David Cameron should go out himself and do some real work for 5 Pounds per hour. Mr Cameron lives far away from reality on cloud Nr.17 Nobody should vote for this stupid and arrogant person

E. Meller

January 8th, 2008 7:04pm Report this comment

So jobseekers should now accept any "suitable" job, OK, but what is a suitable job, you cant put out an IT engineer to clean the streets,or a musician to become an IT enineer. But that is exactly what will happen if private companys get paid to bring people back to work. Mr Cameron wants to rob the jobseekers and give the money to private companys instead. One wonders if Mr. Cameron will have shares in these companys. And regarding "suitable" jobs, I think a suitable job for Mr Cameron would be to clean public toilets.

Jake

June 1st, 2009 8:10pm Report this comment

So if someone is ill will they be forced to work? Many in America have to work whilst still receiving chemo or on dialysis etc. We already have the lowest levels of welfare in Europe and Labour have launched a sustained attack on the system. If Cameron is going to go further God help anyone who loses their job or becomes ill.
Finally if you deny people benefits what do you think will happen? They will resort to crime - or starve. Most wont want to do that so crime it is. Our estates will become a seething mass of drug abuse and crime on a scale like those huge social housing projects in America.
To make people work for their benefits is a disgrace - they should at least get minimum wage if doing a job. This will stop me voting Tory I am afraid.

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