Iain Duncan Smith's proposals will take years to make an impact. George Osborne's benefit-slashing will not.
F Scott Fitzgerald believed: "There are no second acts in American lives." In British political lives, there can be. Iain Duncan Smith was the least successful Tory leader in many decades; his contribution to history seemed to be making William Hague and Michael Howard look impressive. At the nadir of the brief and humiliating period when he was nominally in control of the Conservatives, cruel colleagues like to joke that IDS stood for In Deep Shit.
Yet he then reinvented himself as a social campaigner. That second act reached its zenith in the House of Commons on Thursday when he unveiled his white paper on welfare. It was received with a fanfare of headlines and editorials which have hailed him as the cabinet's boldest, bravest and biggest reformer. The much mocked "Quiet Man" has even been compared with Sir William Beveridge, the Liberal founding father of the welfare state. That is hyperbole, but it is flattering hyperbole none the less for a man once so ridiculed.
Why has such a fair wind filled his sails as he embarks on the notoriously treacherous seas of welfare reform? It helps that few question that Mr Duncan Smith is a serious-minded man genuinely moved to try to release people from the welfare dependency which impoverishes those trapped in it and their country. Even those who criticise his means tend to accept that his ends are well-intentioned. Unlike most of the cabinet, the work and pensions secretary has experience of what it is like to be jobless, having suffered a period of redundancy in the 80s. When I interviewed him recently, he spoke passionately about the feelings of rejection and dejection that accompany being made unemployed and told a story about wanting to rip the throat out of a Tory MP whom he heard pontificating about the jobless being work-shy layabouts.
He has also received a generally warm reception because there has been a growing, but until now rather covert, cross-party consensus that welfare dependency is a terrible social and economic sickness. The fundamental problem with benefits in Britain is not that they are lavishly generous. The last government allowed housing benefit to balloon out of control, but on the whole British welfare payments are quite stingy by western European standards. The trouble is that too many people are on benefits. Roughly 5 million working-age Britons are benefit-dependent. Approaching 1.5m of them have been receiving benefits for nine of the last 10 years.
Both Labour and the Tories feel guilt – or certainly ought to – about this national tragedy. The first big surge came under Margaret Thatcher in the 80s, a fact which has been largely overlooked in pieces marking the 20th anniversary of her fall. When unemployment shot up to 3 million, her government tried to make the figures look less horrendous by shunting hundreds of thousands of the jobless on to disability benefits. The long period of prosperity between 1997 and 2007 would have been an ideal time to provide the incentives and training to encourage the jobless to rejoin the world of work. New Labour made some attempts to reform welfare, but the effort was fitful and compromised by divisions at the top of the government. So there is a political market for reform to welfare. There is also a voter one. Polling conducted both before and after Mr Duncan Smith unveiled his plans found majority support favouring his approach.
Responding for Labour, Douglas Alexander has been a model of sensible opposition. He eschewed the temptation to spit venom about the proposals and instead did the smart thing, which is to support many of the general principles of reform while asking pertinent questions about how it is going to work in practice. That keeps Labour with the grain of the public mood while preparing the ground to be critical when and if things go wrong.
Mr Alexander's most salient point is his most obvious one: "Welfare to work requires there to be work." The number of long-term unemployed has more than doubled since 2008 to 800,000. This is not because all those people suddenly decided they would rather stay at home and watch daytime TV. It is because the recession has destroyed their jobs. That is not an argument against change. There is a powerful case for getting on with reform as rapidly as possible so that the currently workless might have a better chance of participating in the economy when the recovery is complete. But Mr Duncan Smith's promise to make work pay cannot be redeemed by those for whom there is no work available. He himself acknowledges that, with the country limping out of a painful recession and the government introducing a severe spending squeeze, this is "a dreadful period to try and do any of this".
Another reason to be cautious is that these reforms have been oversold as a revolution when much of it is a slow-cooking evolution. A lot of misleading headlines have suggested that this is a "year zero" for welfare. The government's propagandists have cleverly exploited two weaknesses of political journalism when it comes to reporting welfare. Most of the Westminster media do not understand the benefit system, which is not surprising when many of those who administer it or draw the benefits get lost in the labyrinth. Newspapers of both left and right are also suckers for stories about "crackdowns" on benefit claimants, the right because they want to applaud assaults on the idle and the left because they want to be outraged by attacks on the defenceless. Some reporting has suggested that Mr Duncan Smith will have every "feckless scrounger" thrown out of bed to join chain gangs picking up litter. In fact, these sort of "workfare" programmes already existed under the previous government, which is one reason you haven't heard Labour condemn them. Requiring people to do a few weeks' labour in return for benefits may have value in reintroducing the long-term jobless to some of the disciplines of work. But experience suggests that these schemes do little to assist the unemployed into real jobs because they don't equip the jobless with the skills that employers want.
The coalition affects to despise all things New Labour, especially its spin. Yet they appear to have been thumbing through an old propaganda manual left behind at Number 10 by its previous occupants. The government's spinners achieved domination of another morning's news coverage with headlines screaming: "Three strikes and you're out": the threat of a new range of tough measures against the work-shy, the most severe of which would penalise those who three times fail to apply for or accept work by removing all their job seeker's allowance for three years. By the end of the very day that those headlines appeared, Nick Clegg was on the airwaves predicting that this sanction would be used only "for a tiny, tiny number of people who really are systematically abusing the system".
Iain Duncan Smith's ambitions to be the great reformer are located in the centrepiece of his proposals. That is to replace many existing benefits with one universal credit. This has huge theoretical attractions because it has the beauty of simplicity. The complex tangle of current benefits encourages fraud and propagates errors. Billions are lost to both: more than £3bn in overpayments and an estimated £1.6bn in fraud last year. Many claimants need a degree in mathematics to work out whether or not they'd be better off in a job. A universal credit ought to reduce confusion and disincentives against working.
The work and pensions secretary is far from the first reformer to have this dream. Those who have gone before him then had nightmares finding a way to do it which did not either cost vast sums of money to introduce or create an angry army of losers. There is a huge number of questions left unanswered by Mr Duncan Smith's white paper, a document with many of the key figures missing. His assertion that there will be "no losers" is just that: an assertion. That can only be true if welfare rolls fall very dramatically or the government spends a lot more than the £2bn allocated to introducing his universal credit.
He has made the very big claim that the long-term effect will be a dramatic reduction in both adult and child poverty. What he can't or won't say when pressed is whether poverty levels will be lower or higher at the end of this parliament than they were at the end of the last one.
His centrepiece reform will only start to be phased in from 2013 and will not have a meaningful impact on significant numbers of people until after the next general election. The changes which will have much more immediate and painful effects are the £18bn of benefit cuts announced in George Osborne's budget and spending review.
In the play that Iain Duncan Smith has written for himself in his head, the fourth act will see him introduce his reforms and the fifth will climax with a standing ovation for the hero who finally cracked welfare dependency. Before any of that can happen, though, he must perform the third act, defending the benefit cuts already scripted by the Treasury.
Source: Guardian
www.www.guardian.co.uk
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