There’s been plenty political drama in these past few weeks, but the most crucial agenda – and by some margin – is Iain Duncan Smith’s proposed overhaul of welfare. It doesn’t deserve to be categorised as just another political tussle. As I say in the News of the World today, it is easily the most important issue in Britain, and it is overlooked because of an affliction which most of our political class suffers: that of moral long-sightedness. No one wears wristbands for the British poor, Prime Ministers pledge to “eradicate illiteracy” in Africa yet are strangely indifferent to the illiteracy on our own doorstep. The plight and lives of people on benefits, and the one-in-six children who live in workless households is somehow a deeply unfashionable one.
Jo Moore, the former Labour spad, had a point when she said “there are no votes in the poor”. Sorting welfare comes at a political cost – and for what? Helping a bunch of people who
tend not to vote. Far easier to shovel money at the poor, and leave them in decaying council estates. For too long, the Tories thought that poverty was somehow Labour’s territory. Labour had
its own blindness: pouring money in the welfare ghettoes, as if this would solve the problem. Both overlooked the essential Beveridge insight: that idleness (as opposed to claimant unemployment) is
a “giant evil”. This is the key insight behind the “broken society” agenda that David Cameron has adopted.
The IDS agenda, as developed by the Centre for Social Justice, is the most thought-through solution to this problem. When he was sent to the DWP, it created perhaps the best chance we will have to
sort this. Welfare reform is exhausting, but in IDS we Have someone for whom welfare reform is his last job in politics: he’ll either do what’s necessary, or resign.
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