Why can’t Ed Miliband accept that Labour voters want welfare reform?

David Cameron, it has been argued this week, has become detached from the views of Conservative voters on Europe. Amid the noise on the EU referendum, however, comes more evidence that it is Ed Miliband who has the greater problem of detachment from the views of his party’s supporters. While the Labour leader continues to battle on against welfare reform, a report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reveals just how far his voters have moved away from the idea of a redistributive welfare system as a force for good.

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.