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Sunday 27 May 2012

Who will floor whom in the welfare wrestling match?

There has been much speculation that an early casualty of Britain’s coalition politics (by which I mean the fractious coalition within the Conservative party between Cameroon Whigs and Real Tory dissidents) may result in the early exit from the government of the Defence Secretary, Dr Liam Fox -- who appears to be heavily embattled over defence cuts, Afghanistan exit strategy and doubtless also the Prime Minister’s imaginative approach to the defence of the west.

I am even more intrigued, however, by the position of the Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith. Stories have been circulating of an on-going fight between him and the Treasury, which is refusing to stump up the not-inconsiderable funds for the wholesale reform of the welfare system upon which IDS has embarked to ‘make work pay’. Now as the Times (£) reports today the Centre for Social Justice, the think-tank founded by IDS and where all the thinking behind his welfare reform strategy took place, has heavily criticised the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, for a ‘blunderbuss’ approach in seeking spending cuts across the board of an eye-watering 40 per cent.

The CSJ says that, in the absence of any overarching strategy for these cuts, officials will merely make them on the basis of administrative ease while ministers will chop projects they find politically convenient. It states:

The danger of this blunderbuss approach is that effective programmes making a real contribution to the country’s wellbeing will be axed, while other pointless spending will survive.

One might well surmise that, since the CSJ and IDS are virtually interchangeable, the CSJ’s broadside effectively amounts to IDS blasting his own government at one remove. What’s so interesting about this is that, although IDS hails from the right of the party he has made his spectacular political comeback by embracing ‘compassionate conservatism’ and a profound concern to ameliorate the plight of the poor and vulnerable.

Despite the lazy claim by the Times that this is criticism by 'Tory right-wingers', the CSJ therefore cannot easily be tarred as the right-wing spawn of the devil as the Cameroons so contemptuously dismiss their party rank and file (and thus much of Middle Britain, but let that pass). Nor can they thus paint IDS himself, who through the work of the CSJ made himself invaluable to the Cameroons by providing them with a Conscience to parade before the British electorate as proof that the Tories were no longer the Nasty Party but instead the Party of the Heart that Bleeds.

Not that IDS himself is given to such sentimental twaddle – far from it. Tough Love is more his very commendable and deeply moral style. The question for me has always been what would happen if the Cameroons wanted to use him merely as a kind of reformist fig-leaf to cover their own naked opportunism, while having no intention of actually implementing the hard decisions he would want to take.

For the key point about IDS is that, unlike the rest of them, he really doesn’t care about his position round that Cabinet table – except insofar as it enables him to put his reformist ideas into practice. Being without personal ambition, he is therefore uniquely placed to face down his opponents on the grounds that if he walks -- and he will if he is thwarted -- that would leave the Cameroons without a radical and compassionate story to sell.

The question is, therefore, whether he will force the Treasury to back down because Cameron simply can’t afford for him to walk – or, if he loses his fight with the Treasury (or with any other opponents in government), at precisely what point he will decide that his Cabinet post is no longer worth the candle. Will IDS force Cameron and Osborne to bend to his will? Or will he become the Tories’ Frank Field (the Labour welfare radical who is himself part of his team) -- forced out because, when it comes to it, welfare reform requires a degree of political courage that the government just doesn’t possess?

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