Miliband’s problem is that he seems to believe he will be facing Mrs Thatcher at the next election. His strategy is built around fighting a Conservative party that is perceived to be harsh on the poor. This was the critique for the late 1980s, when almost half of Labour voters agreed with the notion that people live in need because of social injustice and three quarters wanted benefits to be increased. The reforms Mrs Thatcher made were radical, the disruption huge.

Back then, Miliband’s automatic response to stand up for benefit claimants would have made perfect sense. He would have been tapping into a significant well of feeling that the poor were poor because hard-headed economic reforms had pulled the ground from beneath their feet, and that it was callous to expect the jobless to get on their bikes and look for work outside the industries in which they had been brought up. Such feelings extended well beyond the Labour-voting classes. In 1987 — the year of Thatcher’s third general election victory — two fifths of Conservative voters thought that the government should increase welfare benefits.

The public, however, has become a good deal more hard-headed on the issue of welfare benefits over the past quarter-century, and this is especially true of Labour voters. Now, a quarter of Labour’s support agree that poverty is the result of social injustice, and only a third want welfare benefits to be increased. Remarkably, almost half agree with the notion that if welfare benefits were cut, it would help people to stand on their own two feet. Perhaps most striking of all is Labour voters’ perceptions of the reasons behind child poverty. A third are minded to blame ‘society’ — and a whacking 63 per cent are more inclined to blame the children’s parents.

These views are changing not because of Tory propaganda but because of what people on council estates see with their own eyes. The welfare state is now fostering the very worklessness it was designed to eradicate. Workers on low pay are well aware that their neighbours on welfare do not face similar constraints. In some parts of Britain’s inner-city estates, parents have watched in horror as their children leave school and sign on to welfare as a lifestyle choice. The fault lies not with the teenagers, but the system. This is more than just a waste of money; it is an unforgiveable waste of human potential.

These are not views you will hear much coming from Labour’s middle class, the metropolitan elite. Among the circles in which Ed himself moves, there still exists a patrician socialism, where the poor are seen from a distance and the state takes on, formalises and enhances the role of traditional charitable structures.

Ed Miliband’s fight against welfare reform does make some political sense. It is a policy likely to win over well-heeled Liberal Democrats offended by their party’s dalliance with the Conservative devil. On virtually every measure of their attitude towards the welfare system, Liberal Democrats are now significantly to the left of Labour voters. Miliband’s problem, though, is that he must hold on to his core voters who, as was seen a fortnight ago, are quite capable of leapfrogging to Nigel Farage’s Ukip. An overgenerous benefits system which encourages worklessness is becoming entwined with mass immigration as a cause of dissent among the working class.

In some ways we are going back to the late 1970s, when a large body of those who had been assumed to be natural Labour voters were poised to switch to the right. Now as then, if the Conservatives could find a way of winning over these potential defectors, they might look forward to two or three election victories. The problem is that, apart from Iain Duncan Smith, so few Tories speak eloquently about welfare reform. The Work and Pensions Secretary has given his party a new tune, but they seem happy to let him do all the whistling. When the Chancellor joins the debate, he does so with a relish that leaves the party open to Mr Miliband’s attacks.

As so often, the Tory party’s problem is that it does not know what it is doing right. The emergence of a welfare class has been one of the most damaging legacies of the last Labour government. The public recognises that, and wants to support Iain Duncan Smith’s reforms on social security. David Cameron has shied away from his own party’s welfare agenda — perhaps for fear of being branded an upper-class enemy of the poor. But if the Prime Minister wishes to retain power after 2015, he must find a convincing way of talking about welfare. Nigel Farage — himself from a privileged background — has succeeded in doing just that.

The post Labour’s welfare weakness appeared first on The Spectator.

As the Prime Minister has said in a letter to MPs, he is powerless to bring in a vote while in coalition because the Liberal Democrats are so vehemently against it. Nick Clegg’s commitment to the Euro project is such that he would not allow it to be threatened by giving the public a say. But the Prime Minister’s strategy is a sound one anyway, and not only because he will need all the reasons he can muster to encourage people to vote Tory in 2015.

Even if it were politically possible to bring forward the date of the referendum, the fag-end of the current parliament would be a rotten time to hold it, giving little time to enact the legislation which would fulfil the demands of a public mandate to leave the EU. This momentous event ought not to be rushed. And the public’s mood is fairly settled: for some time now the European Commission’s own opinion polling has found the British the most reluctant members of the union. Just one in six of us have favourable impressions towards the EU; even the Greeks like it better.

There is a limit to the time any democracy can be kept in a union against the will of its people. David Cameron is simply trying to renegotiate membership terms to a position that the British public find acceptable. As Lawson argued, it is unlikely that we will be given concessions; the EU will prove every bit as intransigent and power-hungry as its detractors suspect. All Cameron is doing is asking Brussels to make its best offer — not to him, but to the people he works for. Four years is a generous amount of time for the EU to think of what those terms might be.

What Britain wants is what we voted for in 1975: a common market. But even this has proven far less beneficial than those who voted for it (including Margaret Thatcher) first envisaged. As it turns out, a customs union did not lead to a boost in continental prosperity. William Hague’s description of the eurozone — ‘a burning building with no exits’ — has proven closer to the mark. The policy of erecting barriers against those outside the continent has badly hurt Britain. Switzerland now sells more to China than the United Kingdom does. British exports to emerging markets are among the lowest in the continent.

Mrs Thatcher’s biographer, Charles Moore, reveals on page 11 that she came to believe that Britain’s best interests lay outside the European Union. This ought not to be a surprise; it is those who demur who are now in the minority. The British are a fair-minded people, and want to give our troubled relationship with the EU one last go. If David Cameron is re-elected and sets off around Europe to begin his attempted renegotiation, we will see if the EU is similarly reasonable. After this discussion, we should be able to cast an informed vote in a referendum. Eurosceptics ought to be licking their lips at the prospect. It will be worth the wait.

Long may she reign

Queen Elizabeth looked in remarkable health as she read out the government’s list of legislation on Wednesday — some achievement, given the paucity of content. Even so, the talk of her possible abdication will dominate newspapers for months to come — not because there is any such plan, but because for royal correspondents her decision to skip November’s Commonwealth meeting is a gift.

These writers are unsurpassed in the dark art of making something out of almost nothing. A single glance between Elizabeth II and Prince Philip provides enough material for a double-page feature; one sharp word to a corgi and the self-appointed palace priests augur doom. So of course within a few hours of the announcement that Prince Charles would fly to Sri Lanka in his mother’s stead, royal-watchers were wondering what sort of a monarch King Charles III might be.

In America, where England is sometimes depicted as a semi-fictitious fairyland, the internet has hummed with rumours of an attempted coup by the Duchess of Cornwall, wicked stepmother to Kate’s Snow White. But ‘The Windsors’ is not a TV show, and the Queen’s sensible decision not to take long flights is not a cliffhanger. Although millions of words will be written in the coming days about her possible abdication, the most telling are those of the Queen herself. In 1947 the young Princess Elizabeth broadcast live to the Commonwealth: ‘My whole life,’ she said, ‘whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.’

The post Lord Lawson’s exit appeared first on The Spectator.

A set of figures teased out of the police this week presents a different picture of police clear-up rates. Constabularies appear to have decided that now even a caution is too harsh a punishment for thugs. Many thousands of violent offenders are being dealt with through ‘community resolution’- which requires them to say they are sorry, in return for which they receive no criminal record whatsoever. In the past year, 33,673 cases of violence against the person have been dealt with in this way, including 10,160 cases of serious violence and 2,488 cases of domestic violence.

A bizarre schism is opening up in our justice system. Against the constant downgrading of punishments for serious crime exists an increasingly belligerent regime for dealing with the most minor of offences. Among the many people who might feel aggrieved by the treatment of violent offenders is a non-smoking Welsh pensioner fined £75 for picking a cigarette butt from his shoe and discarding it on the pavement.

That is one of the many stories of over-zealous council enforcement officers who have been armed with powers to hand out civil penalties. It is easy to wonder whether, if fined in this way, the most profitable course of action might be to punch the officer on the nose. That would ensure one was dealt with under the criminal code, which could well involve an apology but no further action.

Councils that send civil enforcement officers on to the streets are allowed to keep the fines; in many cases the officers themselves are incentivised to hand out as many fines as possible by being allowed to keep a percentage for themselves. Police forces, by contrast, do not profit from putting a criminal behind bars. On the contrary, pursuing a criminal case costs them money. Their temptation, therefore, is to ‘clear up’ a crime in the quickest and easiest way possible.

It did not help to hear Tom Winsor, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, this week assert that the primary role of the police is not to catch criminals but to prevent crime in the first place.

Although Mr Winsor had a reasonable point to make —- that poor use of technology was hampering the police keeping tabs on serial offenders — it was a remark which could be used by chief constables to excuse officers from frontline duties and give them the less challenging role of hectoring people to lock their doors and windows.

It would be crude and wrong to put police officers on incentive schemes to lock up as many criminals as possible (just as it is crude and wrong to have civil enforcement officers on similar incentive schemes). But the police must not forget that they are employed by us to remove criminals from the streets.

A sorry silence

Ed Miliband tied himself in knots this week trying to evade the question, would borrowing rise under a Labour government? Eventually he admitted it would, to the delight of his enemies. But Labour’s problem is not just that its leader fluffs his lines. Miliband is more hampered by his refusal to recognise that the last Labour government ruined the public finances by running a £40 billion overdraft during the boom years, when it should have been paying off debt to prepare for the inevitable bad times.

There is no political reason why he cannot make such an admission: he was a junior member of Labour’s last cabinet who had little to do with fiscal policy. It would not harm him in the eyes of the electorate if he admitted that Labour lost the election because Gordon Brown turned his back on his famous promise to balance the budget over the economic cycle. Indeed, he would profit just as Tony Blair did in the mid-1990s by apologising for the Callaghan government’s record on the public finances. Either Miliband is too scared of his shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, who really did have a hand in Brown’s fiscal policy,- or he believes that even with a £120 billion overdraft you can still borrow your way out of an economic crisis. Neither explanation inspires confidence.

The post Criminal records appeared first on The Spectator.

This would be a strange form of independence. It would reduce Scotland to the status of Panama, which uses the US dollar without the approval of the US government. It is not proving a happy arrangement for the Panamanians. As the US Treasury, like the Bank of England, rolls the presses in an attempt to print its way out of economic crisis, it is exporting inflation. Panama is powerless to stop this, because it has no control over its money supply.

This is just one of the many problems. How would an independent Scotland defend itself? It is hard to remain part of a UK military if (like the SNP) you disagree with most interventions. What happens if its major banks go bust? That’s hardly a hypothetical, given that the Bank of Scotland and RBS are both owned by the UK taxpayer. The biggest unanswered question is even simpler: would any of Scotland’s many problems be solved by secession? And since devolution has done little for Scotland in the past few years apart from saddle an ingenious country with perhaps the most witless bunch of politicians in Europe, what possible benefit could accrue from giving them even more power?

Yet for all this, the ‘No’ campaign still has a fight on its hands in the run-up to the referendum planned for 18 September next year. Mr Salmond is a giant amongst pygmies, and his victory in 2011 was one of the most spectacular turnarounds in modern politics. So for all George Osborne’s reasoned arguments this week, the government has little reason to feel confident that it will succeed in preserving the union.

The politics of nationalism is utterly different from the Westminster parlour games in which the Chancellor specialises. It is about language — referring to the devolved administration as a ‘government’, for example. It is about whether Scotland, rather than Britain, should send aid to a disaster-struck country. It is about the SNP campaign being a positive ‘yes’ and unionists a curmudgeonly ‘no’. It is treating David Cameron like a foreign dignitary when he visits northern parts of his own country. It is about attaching faux-diplomatic titles to any accord between Holyrood and Westminster, such as the ‘Edinburgh Agreement’ on the coming referendum.

Osborne has already made concessions on the wording of this referendum. One would imagine that the only sensible way to proceed would be to produce a set of detailed proposals and then ask the people: do you approve, yes or no? Instead, the Scottish people will be asked a question more in keeping with an SNP-commissioned opinion poll: ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’ As Charles Moore has observed, it is a safe bet that the promised referendum on our membership of the European Union will not be worded in a similar way.

David Cameron has taken great pains to say that the EU referendum will not take place until the details have been thrashed out. Yet he has allowed the SNP to do things quite the other way around: pose the question first and only then consider the details. The idea of post-referendum negotiation is another goal of the Scottish Nationalists, which was achieved without a fight in the so-called Edinburgh Agreement.

However many punches that the ‘No’ campaign manages to land on the ‘Yes’ campaign’s nose, the people of Scotland will next year enter the polling booth to make a choice in which the meaning is in the mind of the beholder. The question that will be put — devised by the Electoral Commission and eagerly agreed to by the SNP administration in Edinburgh — could not have been better designed to maximise the ‘Yes’ vote. Asking people if they think their country should be independent begs them to think that the alternative is dependence.

Scotland is anything but dependent. She is part of one of the most successful unions in world history, and has played a disproportionate role in the United Kingdom’s achievements. Sir Chris Hoy, the cyclist feted by Salmond as a ‘Scolympian’, angrily dismisses the idea that he would have achieved anything like his success without having been able to train in England. The Olympics showed Salmond how few Scots share his small-minded outlook. The successes of Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah were celebrated throughout Scotland as the achievements of fellow countrymen, not foreigners.

Three weeks ago, David Cameron made a speech to defence workers on the Clyde, imploring them to listen, in the Scottish -independence debate, to ‘arguments of the head’, not just of the heart. But Cameron has made his job much harder by ensuring that Scottish voters next year will face a question which invites them to focus on the latter.

The post The Scottish question appeared first on The Spectator.

The atrocity at the Boston Marathon this week is a reminder that such threats never vanish — they just get intercepted. But as the IRA put it after the Brighton bomb, ‘remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.’ The best minds in counter-terrorism would struggle to detect two bombs made from explosives packed in ordinary kitchen pressure cookers and hidden in rucksacks. Three days after the bombing the authorities had received 2,000 tips, but had no suspects. Barack Obama has said he is treating the two explosions as an ‘act of terrorism’ — but it is a strange form of terrorism. There is no suicide tape, no claim of responsibility and no fathomable motive.

Obama also said he wanted to find out ‘who did this and why’. That wish is unusually open-minded: George W. Bush wanted the perpetrators killed, rather than understood. But Obama’s point is sound: the threat mutates. The US authorities do not release data on how many plots have been foiled since 11 September 2001, but now and again the British spooks let us know. Jonathan Evans, the director-general of MI5, said in a speech last year that ‘Britain has experienced a credible terrorist attack plot about once a year since 9/11’. Some of the interceptions, such as the thwarting of the Heathrow airport plot, have been nothing short of spectacular, but they never seem that way, because the end result is that nothing happens.

Years of improving intelligence, infiltration and drone strikes have allowed the West to win the battle with al-Qa’eda. Osama bin Laden is dead, his group’s leadership in Afghanistan has been decapitated and the net is closing on the biggest single threat: the al-Qa’eda franchise in Yemen which was behind both the US-bound underpants bomb and the printer bomb found in an East Midlands airport. The Islamists in the Sahara desert, against whom David Cameron recently promised to fight a ‘generational struggle’, do not seem to reciprocate his attention and have at present no overseas ambitions. The era of global terror networks appears to be drawing to a close.

But attacks still come. Only last week, the final members of a Birmingham terror cell were found guilty of plotting to detonate eight bombs in the city. One of them, Irfan Khalid, had boasted that he wanted to create ‘another 9/11’ — we know this because the security services had somehow bugged his car. Both British and American security services have seen a sharp fall in would-be jihadis flying off to Pakistan to train, now that the chances of interception are far larger. There is more evidence of them following advice from the now-dead leader of al-Qa’eda in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki: do it anyway, tell a minimal amount of people.

The threat of improvised Islamist attacks is serious enough to have inspired the Birmingham plotters. It would result in precisely what we saw in Boston: smaller, cruder bombs. Self-radicalisation is far harder to track, especially if the chemicals are being extracted from sports injury cold packs (as was the case in the Birmingham plot).

As the threats change, the security services adapt with it. A few years ago, three in every four people being traced by MI5 were linked to Pakistan or Afghanistan. Now this is fewer than one in two. It is not just the rise of Africa-based terror groups but also the rise of home-grown enemies within. Developments in Northern Ireland, where the splinter groups have splinter groups, show that the Republican threat is evolving rather than dying. The renewed focus on so-called ‘lone wolf’ attackers is the latest trend in counter-terrorism.

If it emerges that the Boston bomb was the work of an American — similar to Timothy McVeigh, whose Oklahoma truck bomb was the biggest terrorist incident the US had experienced until 9/11 — then the British may draw the incorrect assumption that such madness could not happen here. Norway had no history of this, until Anders Breivik struck. There is already evidence that the disintegration of the British National Party has pushed people to violent extremes. The London nailbomber, David Copeland, was an ex-BNP member who wanted to advance a lunatic idea of racial purity. The rise of the lone wolf attacker is of just as much concern to the security services as the jihadi.

Public patience with security can wear thin when there have been no attacks. People may ask — for example — why the policing bill for Baroness Thatcher’s funeral was so large. The Royal United Services Institute has part of the answer: it keeps a record of potential terrorist plots on British soil and counts 43 since the Twin Towers were struck. After the tragedy at Boston, the police did not consider cancelling the London Marathon — and that decision did not arise from an arrogant assumption that nothing of the sort could happen here. It was a vote of confidence in our security services, and their ability to adapt as quickly as terrorism itself.

The post Enemies within appeared first on The Spectator.

Her victories were so decisive and spectacular that it is possible — as we have seen in the last few days — to dwell almost entirely on them (and those who didn’t like them). But another part of the Thatcher story is the battles she regarded as unwinn-able. She knew, for example, that the welfare state had started to ensnare the very people it was designed to help, that the National Health Service was being slowly captured by a bureaucratic elite, and that state schools were being made into the playthings of local government politicians. But there was only so much she felt able to do.

She had the solution. It was 1981 when Mrs Thatcher first came up with what she referred to as ‘education credits’ — now known as the Michael Gove agenda for school reform. Her mentor, Sir Keith Joseph, was put in charge of the project but faced uniform hostility from his department. His only reinforcement was a son of one of his friends, a young Cambridge graduate named Oliver Letwin. The two of them were blocked by their civil servants, failed to articulate a clear agenda, and reform was formally abandoned in 1983.

Mrs Thatcher can be forgiven for not fighting this battle: she had an economy to save, a Falklands conflict and a Cold War to win and a Brussels rebate to secure. But throughout her decade in power there was a slow decline in the quality of British education. Grammar schools kept on closing, and the comprehensive education experiment continued — with calamitous consequences for poorer communities. Her later reforms did allow a fifth of secondary schools to opt out of local authority control, the high-water mark of her reforms, but it took a Labour government to begin reform in earnest.

In this area at least, then, Cameron’s government has surpassed Thatcher’s. In under three years, the majority of state secondary schools are now independent ‘academies’. The seeds of school reform, nurtured by Blair’s education minister, Andrew Adonis, are blooming under Michael Gove. There are now 2,886 ‘academy’ schools and 79 entirely new schools, which have brought choice in education to 13,000 children. On Thursday next week, The Spectator will hold its third conference for Britain’s emerging schools industry. We will hear from free school pioneers such as our own Toby Young and head teachers of profit-seeking state schools such as the extraordinary Sherry Zand, from IES Breckland in Norfolk.

When pits and factories closed, ministers imagined that men of a certain age — who could not be expected to retrain — would sign on to benefits and wait for retirement. A one-off cost. Instead, welfare dependency moved in as industrialisation moved out, and it continues to blight each new generation. In combination with failed schools, this was a formula for deep social decay. The extent of this social tragedy was unforeseen. The consequences would become fully apparent only during the Labour years, when the boom failed to wash away the worklessness. ‘We must do something about those inner cities,’ declared Mrs T after the 1987 victory. She never did work out exactly what should be done.

What to do about those inner cities is to assess every single person on incapacity benefit for what work they can do, then require that they do it. But first you need years of advocacy to persuade the country this is being done to save lives not money. Until five years ago, the Conservatives had regarded welfare and poverty as Labour territory. No longer. Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reform has been as clearly explained and implemented as Thatcher’s economic reform. Like Gove’s school reform, it follows the finest traditions of Tory radicalism.

It is natural for Tories to look back with pride and nostalgia on a period in which one woman’s energy, grit and fearlessness saved a nation. But there was plenty of unfinished business then — and there is plenty now. Conservatives should be wary of accepting the myth of Mrs Thatcher as a Tory Boudicca who would have flown into every battle no matter what. Her success stemmed from her ability to mix principle with practicality. As they mourn, Tories ought not to be too hard on themselves or their current leader. In many important regards, this government is completing the Thatcher revolution.

The post Mrs T’s unfinished business appeared first on The Spectator.

In those days, Labour posed as the party of compassion — and portrayed the Tories as economic obsessives who would crush the poor through the blackness of their hearts. The next 13 years saw Labour forfeit any claim to stand up for the poorest. It was generous with benefits, but this simply served to condemn a generation to welfare dependency. Most of the increased employment in the boom years was accounted for by extra immigration. Under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, at no point were fewer than five million working-age people on out-of-work benefits. This was not just a waste of money, but a criminal waste of human potential.

Iain Duncan Smith returned to frontline politics with only one objective: to end this outrage. He infuriates many on the left because he is impossible to caricature as a heartless cutter. Labour has now relinquished any claim to welfare reform and once again defines compassion by the size of the benefits cheque. There are hundreds of communities in Britain that can testify to the damage inflicted by this shallow, materialistic approach. This is perhaps why the IDS agenda carries remarkable public support, which infuriates the left even more. Newspapers are blamed for somehow indoctrinating the masses (even though most people don’t read them any more).

The reverse is true: you need to see the world through the lens of the Guardian not to grasp how the welfare system is harming the very people it is supposed to help. The coalition government’s basic proposal — that a family on benefits should not receive more than the average working family — is an easily understood and widely accepted idea. It may cause outrage in Islington, but certainly not in Ilford. The feeling in the council estates is, if anything, stronger and more venomous. No self-respecting MP would use the word ‘scrounger’, for example, but polls show two in five think that it applies to at least half of welfare claimants.

When invited to attend a Work Capability Assessment — a medical examination to see whether claimants qualify for Employment Support Allowance, the successor to Incapacity Benefit — more than a third (878,000 people in total) decided to stop claiming the benefit altogether. More than half of those who did submit for assessment were judged to be fit for work. Among them were claimants who had ruled themselves as unfit for work on account of acne or blisters. It is possible to see how such people can be described as ‘scroungers’. But the term is uncharitable and it is unforgivable for a politician, however hungry for votes, to use such terms.

George Osborne has joined the debate with a little too much enthusiasm. He senses, correctly, that Labour has ended up on the wrong side of the debate — but the Tory posters depicting ‘shirkers’ are deplorable. If the British government paves the way to welfare dependency, is it any wonder so many millions walk down that road? There is nothing wrong with the British national character, and it ought to be beneath any politician even to hint otherwise. As Iain Duncan Smith has made it clear throughout, the blame lies not with the people who followed the government-created incentives, but with the architects of the system.

Britain has become Europe’s capital for children living in workless and lone-parent households. Given that the family is the single most effective provider of health, wealth and education, the results of this social breakdown are all too easy to predict. The effect will be compounded by a state school system that still tends to corral, rather than educate, the poor while allowing the pushy middle classes to get their children a better bargain. And those who fail to finish school then face competition from the world’s workers when looking for jobs. It is a formula for social decay, and the blame lies not with the people but with the government.

The Conservatives are right to reform welfare, and right to want to become the new workers’ party. But this message would be more plausible if the Chancellor actually cut taxes for the poor. Raising the tax threshold is worth a mere £3.26 a week, a sum easily eaten up by the inflation he tolerates. The Tories can only become the workers’ champion by taking measures to help workers, not just by inflicting pain on non-workers. The Chancellor should be careful before seeking to insert himself into the debate and join those drawing a dividing line.

This week, the government has kept public opinion on its side. But it is worrying that Mr Duncan Smith seems almost alone in being able to strike the right tone and convey the sense of mission. The Chancellor ought to learn from him. The word ‘shirker’ has no place in the vocabulary of the modern Conservative party. Welfare spending is to rise every year of the parliament. Mr Duncan Smith has always made it clear that his main objective is to save lives, not save money. If welfare reform is to stand a chance of success, his colleagues must remember that message too.

The post Welfare that works appeared first on The Spectator.

Unlike Christmas, it’s a story that doesn’t lend itself to much commercial fuss: no kings or presents. Easter is a story of sacrifice, torture, abandonment and death — and, through it all, triumph over that death. Even in the 21st century; despite all the chocolate eggs, Easter gives us pause.

And it’s Easter, not Christmas, that makes Christianity such a radical religion. In a world where we are invited to worship strength and power, the symbol of churchgoers is a man on a cross: defeated, despised and rejected. The story of the Passion and Resurrection is one of pain as well as joy, the worst suffering before the greatest jubilation. If you’re not a believer, there’s no story which has more to say about the hope and despair of being human. If you are, it’s the most important event in history.

The Resurrection is the still centre of the Christian faith. For in the hours between the utmost dejection and abandonment on the cross and the ultimate triumph of the resurrection lies the central force and propulsion of the Christian message. The miraculous transformation of the darkness of Good Friday into the joy of Easter morning has created and renewed worshippers for 2,000 years. There’s a beauty in this truth. As Roger Scruton writes further on in the magazine, ‘The beautiful and the sacred are connected in our feelings.’ The Resurrection has inspired our greatest artists, thinkers and musicians. It’s been the foundation stone of the great buildings of Christian civilisation.

Bach expressed the moment in his B–minor Mass, when the desolation of the ‘Crucifixus’ give way to the ecstatic outbursts of the ‘Et Resurrexit’. This triumph of life over death has been the subject of almost every major artist from the earliest icon-workers through Piero della Francesca and Titian to Stanley Spencer.

The unexhausted force of that narrative still haunts artists and thinkers today, though they may consider themselves irreligious. Cormac MacCarthy’s Catholic sensibility shines through his fiction and the films made of his work. Go to Crosby beach in Merseyside and look at Antony Gormley’s figures staring out to sea; remember his ‘Ecce Homo’ Christ figure perched on the fourth plinth.

But for all our spiritual instincts, Britain is now the least religious country in the western world. The British Social Attitudes Survey shows that 64 per cent of us never set foot in any place of worship over an average year. Between the 2001 census and the 2011 one, the number of people identifying as ‘Christian’ fell by 10 per cent. Our secularism was summed up by the BBC’s coverage of the conclusion of the Papal Conclave: when Pope Francis said the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, the translator was utterly thrown, as if hearing them for the first time. The gap between the religious world and the secular is growing all the time.

Christianity only really punctures the media bubble when there’s some scandal to be picked over or a priest’s sexual misdemeanour to feel outraged about. People have become used to seeing Christian leaders either apologising or grandstanding — doing anything other than preaching the gospel to the believers or finding ways to tell this most extraordinary of stories to those who are not.

Our society is poorer as a result. In fact, the worse particular priests behave, and the worse the reputation of any Christian church, the louder the rest should proclaim the gospel.  In a society which often seems ever-increasingly unforgiving of people when they let themselves down – as human people do – the memory that the Christian God even sacrificed his own son to redeem mankind through divine forgiveness is something which still has the power to shock and inspire.

In the last month we have seen a new Archbishop of Canterbury and a new Pope installed. Both have the opportunity — and have expressed the desire — to renew their churches and to preach the gospel. This means, in Britain these days, taking the word of God to people who may only have the shakiest idea of who Christ was, or that He existed at all — but this is the job which Archbishop Welby and Pope Francis both entered the clergy to do.

As certainties that have guided our country and our continent for years begin to shake, and as the distractions of our age forever tempt us towards the shallow and the ephemeral, Easter is an opportunity to think once more of greater, older and deeper things. Beginning with an empty tomb and a stone rolled back.

The post Happy Easter appeared first on The Spectator.

Yet the proposed raid in Cyprus is really only different in perception from what is being imposed by stealth on British savers. In his Budget, George Osborne admitted how badly his plans are going: he’s spending far more than he intended and receiving far less. The national debt has risen by a full 38 per cent since the election and will have risen by £10,000 in the time it takes you to read this sentence. What began as a crisis in the banking sector is now a crisis of government: it has run out of places from which to find money. So politicians are using ever more imaginative tools to extract it, including lowering borrowing costs at the expense of British savers.

As always, the moves that Osborne did make were in the right direction. Extending his planned corporation tax cut to 20 per cent in two years’ time will perhaps be the single most effective proposal in his Budget. There is also a holiday for employers’ National Insurance to encourage smaller companies to hire. This is well-intentioned tinkering, but it will make those on the minimum wage only 4 per cent a year cheaper to hire — that’s not likely to dent our scandalous youth unemployment rates.

A 1p cut in beer duty is also welcome, but what would be more welcome would be a 1p cut in the basic rate of income tax. The Prime Minister boasted before the Budget that it would bring ‘tax cuts for 24 million people in the country’ but he didn’t say — and never says — the amount. It adds up to £1.51 a week, barely enough to fight off the impact of inflation. We need a shift: away from policies that sound good in speeches and towards those which make an economic impact. Best of all would be a serious tax cut for the low-paid, one which amounts to an extra month’s salary every year. With enough savings in the government budget, this would be eminently affordable.

The Budget was, as we expected, an empty Budget. That is not to say that the Chancellor had no policies; he announced plenty to excite and annoy the press. He was right to justify his refusal to give tax cuts to stay-at-home mothers by saying his priority is to help workers. The problem is that he’s not doing enough for either. His adjustments will make no almost impact on the pitiful trajectory of the economic recovery — this was the official verdict of the Office for Budget Responsibility. The OBR’s figures also showed that, rather than eliminating the budget deficit in 2015, we will be shouldering the worst deficit in the western world. Rather than cutting the government down to size, the Budget revealed that total spending is not even 3 per cent down from its peak.

Smoke and mirrors, of course, emerge from every budget box. But it is depressing to see Mr Osborne rely on them after only a few years. The most telling part of his speech was his cryptic reference to ‘monetary’ reform. And this, of course, is where most of his hopes are placed. The assumption is that Mark Carney, who starts as Bank of England governor in June, will keep the Bank’s printing presses rolling as much as they have been under Sir Mervyn King. The cheap debt party will continue.

It is hard to remember now that early on in the crisis Sir Mervyn made the term ‘moral hazard’ his own. In September 2007, in the immediate wake of the Northern Rock crisis, he wrote a ten-page letter to the Treasury Select Committee explaining why it would be wrong to advance emergency loans to the banks. Do that, he warned, and their appetite for risk would only increase, as they counted on always being able to come back for more. But Sir Mervyn went on to demonstrate exactly the same addiction. At first, we were all told to expect a one-off round of QE, printing £80 billion. Then it rose to £200 billion. As of this Budget, the expected sum is £400 billion.

Four years after the worst of the banking crisis, it is hard to identify any measure which will prevent another feast of reckless borrowing in future. We are still living in the bubble — as is evident to anyone who is offered a mortgage at a rate below that of inflation. This means the bank is paying us to borrow — a far stranger policy than the 110 per cent mortgages now blamed for the crash. Far from eliminating boom and bust, as Gordon Brown promised to do, the effect has been to supercharge boom and bust.

The Chancellor’s future now stretches out to reveal deficits as far as the eye can see. His plan to balance the books has been abandoned. It was a low-key Budget because there is not much he can do to varnish a basic truth: that Britain’s economic recovery has stalled and the government has run out of ideas about how to start it again.

The post The empty Budget appeared first on The Spectator.

It is understandable that the new archbishop felt obliged to sign the letter: this peculiar way of viewing child poverty has been woven into the Lambeth creed under Rowan Williams. It is an old trick. An arbitrary poverty line is drawn, and if a family’s income is £1 below it, then their children are said to have fallen into poverty. If tax credits put them just above this threshold, the children are deemed to have been ‘lifted out of poverty’.

One can search the Bible in vain for such a definition — the Good Samaritan hardly stood on the roadside with a calculator and a tax credit application form. But over the years, the Church of England’s interventions on social policy have been reduced to stone-throwing, easy protests and signing themselves up to the fashionable orthodoxy of the day. This is a great pity given the vast extent of the Church’s own social outreach — volunteers who are, in hundreds of ways, improving the lives of the poor.

But it was encouraging to see that when the archbishop spoke on his own terms, in a blog, he showed a keen understanding of the problems created by the welfare system as well as a respect for the man charged with sorting out the mess, Iain Duncan Smith. The nub of the issue, Dr Welby recognised, is that the welfare system is a trap. Try to escape by getting a job and you may be penalised, which in turn will put you back on welfare dependency, which in turn will have corrosive effects on the ambitions of your family. Welby, unlike many senior Anglicans, has first-hand experience of dealing with the families caught in this trap.

He recounted conversations with parishioners during his time as a parish priest: when they tried to take on extra work they found themselves in receipt of less money. This was — and remains — an outrage. This explains why foreign-born workers account for most of the rise in employment that David Cameron likes to boast about. Our own people are still paid to do nothing. This is not just an economic failure but a moral failure, as Welby pointed out. The welfare state is not a safety net but ‘a system that most people admit is shot full of holes, wrong incentives, and incredible complexity’.

Conservatives in recent years have frequently been accused of following a free-market ideology which is at odds with Christian teachings — but only by those who make a greater mistake. That is, to judge a policy by its intentions, not its results. However well-intentioned the last Labour government was, it failed to make serious progress on poverty because it consigned so many to a life of welfare dependency. A theme of self-reliance runs through the Bible, too. Universal credit, hinted Dr Welby, is a noble reform — even if he cavils at a real-terms reduction in benefits.

With his background in business, Dr Welby brings a very different outlook to the Church of England to that of Dr Williams, an aloof academic whose interventions in public debate were often diminished in their effect by dry and plodding prose. Not only is Welby’s understanding of economic reality much greater, he communicates in terms which are understandable to people without a degree in theology.

With the Catholic church struggling to make its voice heard above the child abuse scandals, Welby has an even greater opportunity to seize moral leadership. He cannot take a partisan stance in political debate, but neither should he shy away from speaking on subjects such as taxation, crime, defence and all the other issues which make up the business of the state.

Western churches were not born as obscure sects catering for a religious fringe, but as institutions at the heart of government. It is much to the benefit of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards that it has the Archbishop of Canterbury sitting on it. If ever there was an example of how modern society occasionally loses its moral underpinnings, it is the parts of the banking system over the past couple of decades where greed was allowed to block out any kind of responsibility towards others.

In Justin Welby, David Cameron has an intelligent, clear and independent critic of government policy who is prepared to debate, not just deliver lofty sermons. His enthronement presents a chance for the relationship between Downing Street and Lambeth Palace to be better than it has been for a generation. A more positive relationship with the Church of England is an important part of the process by which the Conservatives can make themselves once more a party which can reach across the whole country.

The post God and taxes appeared first on The Spectator.