Imitation is supposed to be a form of flattery. It’s not when it’s practiced by Chris Grayling, the Conservatives’ welfare spokesman. He has managed to reduce what ought to be a bipartisan argument to a playground game in which, whatever the government does, he claims to have thought of it first.
Employment boot camps, stopping the clock when people leave benefits, requiring people to learn English if it’s a barrier to work: all Tory policy proposals, apparently, and all things that are already happening.
This was, in essence, the Conservative response to the recent green paper on welfare. The government commissioned the Freud report to lay out the next steps in welfare reform. Having received and digested David Freud’s proposals, the secretary of state decided to incorporate them in full into the green paper. Meanwhile, the opposition genuinely appears to have persuaded itself that it was all their idea.
If only the Conservative party could be persuaded to agree with the government before it acts, rather than afterwards, it might yet play a useful role as research assistants. And, if their strategy is belated agreement, is there anything to say about what they might themselves do if they were granted power?
Actually, there is. They would hardly do anything. We have become accustomed to a Conservative party that defined itself by disruption and change. We are used to trade union reform and privatisation and poll taxes and nasty economic medicine. For a long time the Conservative party no longer did what it said on the tin. Now it does again. It is a conservative party once more.
The defining trait of conservatism is that government ought not to do very much. When this idea is coupled with a defence of the status quo then an agreeable, quiet life beckons. But when methodological conservatism is applied to a major problem you end up with nothing of note.
The major problem is that, according to the Conservative party, society is broken. The claim is exaggerated, indeed hard even to make any sense of. But, even if we assume that society is broken, how do the Conservatives propose to fix it?
Well, by a nudge here and a wink there, by use of the bully pulpit and an invitation to pull your socks up. Here’s the real intellectual mess. Having diagnosed the country as broken, the Tories say they are powerless to fix it. Society is meant to somehow, rather magically, heal itself.
The Conservative party is content to pronounce on active welfare. It is comfortable saying that work is better than benefits. But it cannot summon the ideological nerve to will the means. As soon as the role of government is mooted it retreats back to its redoubt of charity and voluntary action.
Of course the voluntary sector has a big role in welfare. It should be bigger than it is. But to suggest that all can be well in the best of all worlds without a role for government is ideological wish-fulfilment.
The Tories get into this empty position because they have an ideological presumption against government. And so Grayling gets himself into a tangle on child poverty. He won’t accept the target to abolish it but wants to hedge his bets so describes it as an aspiration. On policy after policy he’s decided to be half-pregnant.
The right answer is almost always the government plus rather than minus the government. So the right answer is a welfare state in which the earnings link for pensions is restored but in which people are asked to save and work longer in return. Better support has been offered to those who are ill, but they are required to take up that help. Welfare payments point people back towards independence which is, in turn, the best guardian of welfare.
The Tories would no doubt agree with that statement – feigning consent is their strategy after all – but they are better judged by their deeds. My suggestion is that there won’t be any.
If we fear they will be overtly nasty we may be conjuring a phantom. It is far more likely that they will make a lot of noise but the vessel will be empty.
I’m struggling to distinguish Philip Collins (Mark 1) who says talks about the “deep, poisoned well of its Fabian tradition”, and Philip Collins (Mark 2) who says, in this posting, “the right answer is almost always the government plus…”
For Philip Collins to accuse the Tories of intellectual confusion is, I fear, a little rich when his own version of the state is far from clear. The Tory position is broadly: society is broken, but we don’t want a government solution. This, Collins says, is their “intellectual mess”.
But Collins’ argument is itself pretty messy. We must admit (he seems to say) society is a bit broken. Look at child poverty. Labour’s target for mitigating and eventually abolishing – falling a way short of realisation – acknowledges the depth of inequality in modern Britain. Inequality (and some Tories admit this) is a manifestation of brokenness. Does Collins acknowledge similarly that inequality needs fixing. And if he does, with what tools? Not, presumably, those toxic instruments of the Fabian statist tradition.
So what then does Collins propose when he, like the Tories, is antipathetic to strong government intervention in society? He criticises the Tories for the way they pray in aid the voluntary sector. But haven’t I read him waxing enthusiastic about the third sector expanding and substituting for state provision?
He starts his argument by accusing the Tories of playground games. But if he isn’t going to play in the sandpit, let’s have a bit more rigour, especially around the Collins theory of the state.