In another extraordinary development the pensions minister, Ros Altmann, has released a statement attacking her former boss Iain Duncan Smith. She reinforces the No10 line that Iain Duncan Smith “championed the very package of reforms to disability benefits he now says is the reason he has resigned” and accuses him of being very hard to work for. Her reaction is odd in that she said nothing about his departure for 24 hours, then at 9pm last night released a series of tweets culminating in her statement saying his attacks on the government can be explained by his position as a Brexiteer.
So was she encouraged by No10? Her statement is strikingly similar to No10’s version of events. But it says it knew nothing, that there was no communication with her and that she speaks in a personal capacity. Which, in itself, is fascinating: if ministers are now allowed to make ”personal” statements about government crises then politics in general will get a whole lot more interesting.
So what to make of her spirited j’accuse? The tension between Altmann and IDS is easy to explain: she is a pensioners champion; IDS loathes the ‘triple lock’ protections pensioners are offered. His resignation has threatens to open debate on whether these gilded protections for the pension-aged (winter fuel payments, the treble lock etc) are fair. She won’t welcome this discussion.
But she is is quite right in staying that IDS wanted to try to stem the increase in disability benefit. The below graph shows how its costs are soaring. Disability benefit is out of control – and that the aim was not to cut, but to control the rise.
The above graph, of course, reflects pretty badly on IDS: his reforms, aimed at reducing the cost of disability allowance, had actually ended up making it far more expensive. To the tune of several billion pounds. The number of accepted claims was intended to drop by 20pc; it didn’t. What’s more, the amount of the average award was soaring. No wonder the Treasury was furious and felt a degree of urgency- not to say exasperation with the DWP, which seemed to have lost control of the budget. And it would cost billions upon billions of pounds.
But IDS was right to say that it is very easy for a government (especially a Tory government) to lose the argument on disability reform, given that you’re dealing with the most vulnerable people in society. So he proposed a consultation, but he was adamant that this should not be included in the Budget. It was politically toxic, he thought, to cut disability benefit at the same time as cutting the top rate of tax
George Osborne didn’t listen, and whacked it in the Budget anyway (his decision was leaked to the press earlier). When the disability cuts exploded in precisely the way that IDS said they would, the Treasury sought to blame the DWP – and then IDS was asked to go out and defend it. He felt that he couldn’t. And when you feel you can’t defend government policy, it’s time to resign.
Now, back to Ms Altmann:-
“I simply cannot understand why he suddenly chose to quit like this when it was clear that Number 10 and the Treasury had told him they were going to pause and rethink these measures. I’m particularly saddened that this really seems to be about the European referendum campaign rather than about DWP policy.”
As she knows, when IDS resigned on Friday the Treasury was briefing that the reforms would go ahead – no matter what Nicky Morgan had said on Question Time. We only heard about the ‘pause’ after he had resigned. And, again, his resignation was not about disability reform but the way it had been presented – the damage had been done. Yes, you could scrap it and stage a humiliating u-turn, as per tax credits. But these things do the party a great amount of damage: you couldn’t reverse that. Also, the Treasury hadn’t budged the the amount of savings it sought from the DWP.
So where does Europe come into it? It doesn’t: if we left the EU then the Chancellor of any government would still be free to shoot himself in the foot like this by bungling tax credit reform, disability benefit reform etc. The EU is not forcing the protection of pension-age benefits, which is IDS’s main bugbear. And I very much doubt that all this will have much bearing on the EU debate.
But – and it’s a big ‘but’ – I do think that the European debate played into it. My hunch, and it’s no more than that, is that Osborne got too caught up in departmental warfare and whacked disability benefit reform in the Budget to stick it to the DWP (whose reform it was). It was an awful decision, and one that was taken against a general backdrop of civil war. The Treasury, I suspect, had tunnel visison: it wanted to win a battle over the DWP. Osborne had simply had enough of IDS’s moaning, so he socked it to him in the Budget. But he couldn’t quite see that the government’s reputation would end up being caught in the crossfire.
For his part, IDS was so cross that he issued the most explosive resignation statement since Geoffrey Howe quit in 1990. Back then, Howe had intended to take out a Prime Minister. So while I don’t believe that IDS intended to harm Cameron, he certainly wasn’t too concerned about the harm he could inflict. And in so doing, exposed himself to suggestions like Ros Altmann’s – that he had an ulterior, regicidal objective.
And I suspect that these tensions on both sides, always high, were heightened further by the EU debate and the strange situation where IDS and his deputy, Priti Patel, are fighting David Cameron and George Osborne over Europe. The DWP had become the Department for Brexit, at least in the eyes of Downing St, which perhaps created the conditions which led to this political car crash we have just witnessed.
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