It is a decade since Iain Duncan Smith first entered parliament, replacing his hero Norman Tebbit as the MP for Chingford. In that time, the singular feature of his political career has been his consistency. It is the consistency of the ideologue. Duncan Smith has always been buttressed by the zealous certainty of his beliefs a virulent anti-Europeanism, a yearning for the minimalist state, and an ideological affinity with hard right American neoliberals.
Iain Duncan Smith has not wavered from these core principles and it is through the prism of these beliefs that his first year as Tory leader must be viewed. Over the last year, a view that has gained some ground is that Iain Duncan Smith has turned out not to be the dry right-winger he had been depicted as and even that he is moving the Tories to the centre-ground. There seem to be three main contributions to this thinking: Duncan Smith s attempts to make the Tories more inclusive; Tory silence on Europe in favour of an emphasis on public services; and the peppering of Tory speeches with the word vulnerable .
However, a look at the detail of what Iain Duncan Smith has been doing and saying in these areas reveals not a Damascene change in personal direction on his part but rather a pursuit of the totems of the Tory hard right, in which he has always believed.
It is worth taking each of these three areas in turn. First, Duncan Smith s efforts at party reform, where he has voiced an ambition to be intolerant of intolerance . A change in Tory language and attitude is to be welcomed and applauded. But for their conversion to prove genuine, the Tories must move beyond the tokenistic. Here, the signals are mixed. It must be a cause for concern that, at the time of writing, of the 22 Tory candidates selected in winnable seats, none have been from ethnic minorities. Tory resistance to recent gay adoption proposals was as strident as ever and support for the scrapping of Section 28 is a Rubicon yet to be crossed.
Significantly, former Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, John Bercow, was demoted in the recent Tory reshuffle after criticising his party for still not understanding that, on all these issues, the test is respect for fellow citizens and not a nominal or symbolic tolerance of minorities. (It says something about the state of your party when John Bercow is the voice of moderation).
Indeed, a wider look at Iain Duncan Smith s frontbench belies his rhetoric. It is stuffed with figures who were regarded as being on the extreme fringes of the Conservative Party only five years ago. Throughout his career, Duncan Smith has been umbilically linked with this sect-like faction and his promotion of them shows he has little inclination to cut the cord.
The point is made by the presence of Laurence Robertson and Gerald Howarth in senior frontbench positions. Robertson was the MP who gave his fulsome support to former Tory MP John Townend s views on Commonwealth immigration and its challenge to Britishness .
Among the choicest of Gerald Howarth s views from the past two years alone are that all race relations legislation should be repealed, that people should not give to the NSPCC due to its support for equalising the age of consent, and that people who come here should accommodate themselves to homogenous, white Anglo-Saxon culture. Duncan Smith can lay small claim to be intolerant of intolerance whilst men such as these, and many others like them, act as the national spokesmen for his party.
The second key feature of Duncan Smith s leadership has been his virtual silence on Europe and a greater focus on public services. This is not surprising, given William Hague s dismal 2001 campaign. But it would be wrong to think Duncan Smith s focus on health and education is driven solely by electoral logic. For Duncan Smith and his ideological bedfellows, public services represent the, as yet unwritten, final chapters of Thatcherism. Schools and hospitals are the last citadels to be stormed in their quest to reduce the share of income taken by the state to below their oft-quoted holy grail of 35 percent of GDP.
Whatever strained formulation they may eventually come up with at the end of their policy review, the Tories have said enough on these issues since the last election for us to know where they are headed. Duncan Smith and shadow health secretary, Liam Fox, have certainly made it very clear where the Tories stand on health. Fox has even spelt out the four phases of the Tories strategy to break the NHS.
The first phases of this plan have been evident enough. Speech after speech condemns the NHS as Stalinist . The Tories have broken with their 2001 pledge to match Labour s investment in schools and hospitals and they have tellingly voted against the Budget and Comprehensive Spending Review. The endgame is also clear people paying for their own healthcare. Fox says the Tories want to move to a system where we get money, raise money, from people through tax, by certainly health insurance… and even more so it means from self pay .
Duncan Smith said in an interview in January that, under his plans, people will have to pay less taxation but they will have to spend more on the services they choose. More than this, he says he wants to adopt a system of healthcare vouchers that can be topped up an ancient rightwing hobby-horse that is a recipe for a two-tier health service, where the privileged few who can afford it pay for their own healthcare, with a rump NHS left for everyone else.
The same principle is also driving his schools policy. It may not be something he dares utter again before the election but you can guarantee that the choice mechanisms the Tories do eventually put forward in education will be seen by Duncan Smith as a gateway to the top-up voucher scheme he proposed during his leadership campaign.
Behind all this, the overarching goal is for the state to withdraw from public services as much as possible. A crucial element in helping Duncan Smith achieve this aim is the compassionate conservatism agenda he is now rigorously pursuing. It is a strategy he has adopted wholesale from the American right and it is what is driving the use of the word vulnerable in almost every Tory speech and press release. The phrase compassionate conservatism and the couching of an electoral strategy in the language of aid to the poor was a successful cover for the programme of those who devised it in the US. It was always a gross deceit. The programme has very little to do with compassion and everything to do with the withdrawal of government from welfare and public services.
Its gurus heroes to the Tory right are American thinkers Marvin Olasky and Myron Magnet. For them, the tolerance engendered by 1960s liberalism and the emergence of Johnsonian Great Society welfare programmes are the big sins of postwar US politics. Driven by a religious fervour, they believe the state should withdraw from the provision of welfare, which should instead be placed in the hands of churches, faith-based groups and charities. This is applied not just to social security, but to whole swathes of education, healthcare and even prisons.
This is the template Iain Duncan Smith is working to. His new-found concern for the poor and vulnerable masks his desire for the state to abrogate its responsibilities to them. This agenda has nothing to do with protecting the vulnerable or encouraging tolerance and it is grotesque to think it does. Even less does it represent a move to the centre ground.
Lord Tebbit need not worry. Iain Duncan Smith is an ideologue he believes this stuff. Genuine Tory moves to the centre ground won t be happening on his watch.