By Will Horwitz
David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith have very successfully wrestled the poverty agenda off Labour in the last few months, and today David Cameron goes a bit further in fleshing out their vision. Apparently he’ll echo Labour’s commitment to ending child poverty (a commitment which should soon be enshrined in law anyway), will focus on incentives for people to get back into work (or maybe not), and will appoint Tomorrow’s People chair Debbie Scott as a backbencher in the Lords should he win.
Listening to Teresa May and Yvette Cooper discuss it on Today this morning, it struck me that there are two big questions and they’re being confused. The first is around what to implement – the changes to the welfare and tax credit systems, primarily. The Conservatives actually have some good ideas on this, focussing on the barriers to moving off benefits into work, the complexity of the system, and the need for wholesale reform. The devil is in the detail though, and we’d certainly want to see a bit more of that before getting too enthusiastic.
The second question is about how to implement these changes, a debate which the Conservatives try to portray as ‘big state’ vs ‘big society.’ Here I think there’s much less clarity. A lot of people would admit that Labour’s approach hasn’t been as successful as it might (although it’s important to remember it hasn’t been disastrous either), but I’ve never seen a convincing argument for why that’s a result of a big state, rather than just a not-very-effective big state. Cameron’s alternative – the ‘big society’ – doesn’t really seem to mean anything so far, beyond some vague mutterings about the importance of social entrepeneurs. Social entrepeneurs are a lovely bunch, but expecting them to sort out the entire welfare system seems a bit mean.
It seems like Cameron is arguing for a better state, which doesn’t seem too controversial, and dressing it up as the end of the big state to satisfiy his party. Until he tells us, in policy detail rather than in platitudes, what a big society actually entails, it’s hard to come up with a decent assessment.
I thought David Cameron’s speech was interesting, and more nuanced than his attack on ‘big government’ at the party conference (but then the audience was very different).
I’ve posted some thoughts on this in the context of tomorrow’s Chain Reaction event: http://bit.ly/31DxiE