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Thursday 16 October 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.

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.

More articles from: Fraser Nelson | this section

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