Governments are plagued are by short-sightedness. The recent years of building the best budget for today at the expense of tomorrow’s have left Britain in a mess. The way to clean up the damage of this extravagance, however, is not austerity for austerity’s sake. Some spending builds a better Britain for years to come, saves vast sums from future budgets, and ultimately makes the Coalition into a brave success. The risk is that by sidelining Iain Duncan-Smith’s welfare agenda, a promising entrance to the limelight might well fade too quickly.
The obvious reason to pursue welfare reform is that the current system is just undeniably awful. No benefits programme should incentivise unemployment by paying people more for doing nothing than for doing something. Such madness inevitably leads to a warped society, where people have no real share in the country in which they live. Economically too it is prima facie dreadful. The longer someone’s out of work the harder it is to get them back in, and soon this persistent unemployment builds up to rob the economy of its full potential. £3 billion now is a small price to pay for bringing to a halt the culture of the right to not work.
Yet there’s a deeper, more tactical motivation for the Tories. The most successful governments are the ones which build for themselves an electorate who share not only in their leader’s goal, but are dependent on their continued victory. Thatcher’s Conservatives were never going to lose for as long as Labour opposed the right to buy, as doing so stamped all over the aspirational working class – a new breed of voter Thatcher singled out and crafted during her tenancy at Number Ten. New Labour too went about buying the votes of middle class families by giving away a whole raft of benefits and allowances. Their skill wasn’t in giving people something to gain by voting Labour, but in ensuring that by voting Conservative they had something to lose. Fear of loss is enough to make an emotional mountain out of a policy molehill.
The Tories have a chance to cut this dependence on the state. It will be infinitely harder for any future government to reintroduce such daft measures as we currently have than it is for Labour to pledge to defend them. Now they have power, the chance exists to break the link between Labour and dependency that has won them so many votes in past years. If IDS can bring people out of the benefit system, Osborne should be happy to put up £3 billion. Only this way can the Tories begin building their own electorate of privately employed, aspirationally opportunity-seeking voters to return them in 2015 – with or without the Lib Dems.
