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Sunday 7 September 2008

The Tories are radical again

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

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.

He first slipped this out in a television interview in Blackpool, and then repeated it for good measure in his conference hall speech. The invocation of Wisconsin — a state in America’s upper Midwest — would have passed over the head of most people in the Winter Gardens, let alone in the country. The word triggers few images, if any: snowploughs, badgers and perhaps bicycle lanes. But to policy wonks, it is the home of the most aggressive and successful welfare reform programme the world has ever seen — which became the template for Bill Clinton’s federal reform. And this was what Mr Cameron seemed, quite explicitly, to sign up to.

Even now, members of the shadow Cabinet are not entirely sure if he misspoke. Didn’t Tony Blair try all this in 1999, and wasn’t he forced to drop the strategy after disabled people chained themselves to the No. 10 railings in protest? Isn’t welfare reform so toxic an issue that even Baroness Thatcher didn’t dare to touch it? And why, precisely, would the famously risk-averse David Cameron, who does not dare touch the health service, decide to go straight for the root canal of the British welfare state?

Yet the debate on welfare has changed fundamentally since Mr Blair threw his hands up in despair. Now, there is much wider discontent with the benefits system and the jobless total. It emerged this week that, since 1997, most new jobs have been taken (or created) by immigrants. When New Labour started, there were 5.7 million on out-of-work benefits. Now, the figure is 5.4 million — hardly any change. ‘British jobs for British people,’ Mr Brown’s most fatuous slogan, is, as it happens, the precise opposite of what Labour has done.

So Mr Cameron has come to believe that the connected issues of poverty, welfare dependency and idleness, far from being hostile territory for Conservatives, is terrain where they can take on and defeat Mr Brown. Welfare reform, he believes, encapsulates both the weaknesses of Mr Brown’s ideas and the strengths of his own. It is an area of policy where, he believes, the hitherto vague Cameroon themes of ‘general well­being’ and ‘social responsibility’ can be made vivid, dynamic and relevant to people’s day-to-day lives. And it is an area of policy where he can offer a genuine and palpable alternative to Labour’s failure.

The first task will be to highlight Labour’s dismal record. Mr Cameron is slowly grasping that he who chooses the terms of debate tends to win. After 18 months of using Mr Brown’s language (saying ‘investment’ rather than ‘spending’) he is setting his own terms. And when welfare policy is measured according to the level of joblessness — as opposed to ‘equality’ — the picture becomes devastating.

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