Daily Mail, 8 November 2010
There is a rough rule of thumb that if the wrong kind of people are opposed to what you are doing, then you must be on the right track.
By those lights, the reaction from the usual suspects on the Left to Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms indicate that he has hit the bull’s eye in the most satisfactory way.
For even before he actually unveils his proposals this week, the air is thick with screams of rage and lurid claims of ‘slave labour’.
So what is he doing to provoke such fury? Why, making the outrageous proposal that instead of sitting at home on benefits doing nothing, people who are out of work should actually give something back to society in return.
According to advance reports, IDS will be requiring the unemployed to undertake community service projects such as gardening, clearing litter and other menial tasks.
Following the example of U.S.-style ‘workfare’, they will do such jobs for 30 hours per week for four weeks at a rate of £1 per hour, under the threat of being stripped of their Jobseekers’ Allowance for three months if they fall short.
Shock horror! Such is the outrage on the Left, you’d think IDS was proposing to send little children up the chimneys.
All he is doing, however, is responding to the patently obvious fact that unemployed people don’t just suffer from an absence of work but also — more lethally — from having settled into a way of life which saps their ability to work.
The driving aim of his entire welfare reform package is to ensure that it always pays to work rather than stay on welfare.
For IDS has understood that welfare dependency quickly leads to demoralisation and the institution of permanent poverty.
True to their Pavlovian knee-jerk reflex, however, the Left have exploded. In their foaming rage, they don’t even realise that their own claims don’t add up.
They whine, for example, that the unemployed can’t be expected to find work, as there are no jobs to be found. At the very same time, they splutter that having to do such community work will give the unemployed no time to look for work.
Well, which is it? If there aren’t any jobs, what’s the point of looking for them?
The fact is that much worklessness results from people calculating they are better off on benefits than in low-paid jobs. It’s that calculation that IDS is trying to reverse.
Trying to paint him of all people as some kind of cruel Dickensian workhouse overseer is particularly imbecilic. IDS is, indeed, the one person against whom that particular smear of ‘heartlessness’ cannot be made to stick.
The patent decency of the man is plain for all to see. He is motivated by the highest possible concerns to rescue the poor not merely from material poverty, but the moral and spiritual degradation which keeps them trapped permanently in disadvantage.
Using his own enforced unemployment as a junked Tory leader to turn himself into an unrivalled expert on the lives of the poor, he grasped one of the most shocking facts of all — that under the guise of ‘compassion’, the Left traps people in permanent poverty through treating them as less than human.
For what drives ‘progressives’ absolutely wild is the moral concern at the heart of the IDS project — to encourage the poor to take some responsibility for themselves and for others.
But it is an article of faith on the Left that the poor are helpless tools of circumstance; and so it is outrageous to expect them to behave as anything other than victims, who accordingly can only ever take rather than give.
This is tantamount to saying that the poor are a breed apart — incapable of displaying the same human dignity as the rest of society.
Their resulting entrapment in permanent poverty then gives the Left their own meal ticket for life through the enormous industry they run to manage the lives of the poor.
It is against this odiously hypocritical parasite culture of welfarism that IDS has set the Coalition’s face. For which we should be cheering him on.
But is it actually enough? For the screams of heartlessness mask the fact that his proposals appear not to bite on certain particularly toxic bullets.
It is said that the Coalition has been much influenced by the U.S. welfare revolution under President Bill Clinton — effectively forced upon him by a Republican Congress — which got a lot of people off welfare and into work.
But there was one important element of the U.S. scheme from which the Coalition is flinching. It set a cut-off point for benefit payments if the claimant hadn’t found work by the end of a set period.
At the time, this was greeted by the American Left as being on a par with Pharaoh’s slaying of the first born. Thousands would starve in the streets, they predicted.
Did you hear about such a monstrous development? Of course not. It never happened.
But it seems that the IDS proposals will not contain that crucial welfare cut-off point. So one might say that, far from being unprecedentedly harsh and cruel, these proposals don’t go far enough.
Perhaps even more important, restoring the work ethic is only a partial remedy for welfare dependency.
For one of the key factors behind permanent poverty is the growth of lone parenthood and mass fatherlessness.
The Left subsidised this catastrophic pattern of behaviour through heavy welfare subsidies for lone parents. To address this, American welfare reformers pushed lone mothers off welfare and into work.
This certainly reduced welfare dependency among lone parents — but it failed to bring down the rate of out-of-wedlock births which create poverty in the first place.
That’s because, whether their income derives from welfare payments or employment, if women are economically independent from their babies’ fathers there is no disincentive to going it alone in bringing up their children.
This is the trap into which the Coalition is inevitably falling. Properly addressing the scourge of mass fatherlessness means acknowledging that poverty is not the biggest problem lone-parent households face.
Far worse is the emotional harm done to children by the absence of their fathers; the abuse of women and children by transient boyfriends; and the fact that such endemic disadvantage is passed down through the generations because there is no awareness of any other way of life.
To address this would mean tackling the assumption that it is every girl’s right to bring a baby into the world regardless of whether it will be born into such multiple disadvantage. And that would mean measures like substituting a place in a mother-and-baby home for giving a young lone mother a council flat.
Given the lifestyle-choice ideology of both the spin-conscious Cameroons and the family-busting Lib Dems, there is probably precious little prospect that the causes of family breakdown will be addressed.
Indeed, if work is offered as an antidote to lone-parent welfare dependency, this may paradoxically merely further entrench that particular route into permanent poverty.
Nevertheless, the best cannot be allowed to become the enemy of the good. If IDS were to break the idea that welfare means getting something for nothing, that would, in turn, start to break the hitherto impregnable culture of self-righteous infantilism that fuels family breakdown and other destructive behaviour.
And that would be a tremendous achievement. So we must hold our breath that he succeeds in reforming welfare — and that the Coalition holds its nerve to allow him to do so.
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