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Sunday 7 September 2008

The cross-party consensus on welfare reform echoes the Gingrich–Clinton revolution

Fraser Nelson on the coming political week

The Conservatives are making about as much headway in next week’s Glasgow East by-election as they would on Mars. ‘I told one guy I was from the Conservative party,’ moans one shadow Cabinet member who was campaigning there. ‘He said, “Oh, aye. Where’s that happening then?’’’ Hatred would at least entail some kind of recognition. And yet the emerging Cameroon mission is precisely to help places like this — where the party is, quite literally, beneath contempt.

The curse of Glasgow East is worklessness — not just its 6.7 per cent level of unemployment. For every unemployed person, there are seven other people on some other form of welfare dependency. Most of these have not worked for at least five years and are, statistically, more likely to die than work again. Drink problems, drug addiction, violent crime and family break-up — all stem, ultimately, from mass joblessness, a curse visited upon the area by the welfare state.

And it is this curse which the Tories are now pledged to remove from Glasgow East and the many places in Britain like it. Delivering the prestigious Centre for Policy Studies annual lecture on Tuesday, George Osborne quoted William Beveridge’s diagnosis of the problem in 1944: ‘Idleness is not the same as want, but a separate evil, which men do not escape by having an income.’ And it is this evil, Mr Osborne said, which the Conservatives would make it their business to conquer by radical welfare reform. It is a hugely ambitious undertaking — but still a plausible one.

On Monday, meanwhile, the Secretary of State for Work & Pensions, James Purnell, will declare himself to have embarked on an identical mission. Like the Tories, he will pledge to reassess every one of the 2.6 million individuals claiming incapacity benefit (including 9,900 in Glasgow East) to see what work they are capable of doing. Like the Tories, he will propose to privatise great chunks of welfare-to-work provision. And like the Tories he will say he is implementing the report of the man Mr Osborne singled out for praise in his speech: David Freud.

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