Alex Massie: UK says yes to benefit cuts

IAIN Duncan Smith has been vilified for his welfare reforms but evidence suggests the public wants to see big spending reductions, writes Alex Massie

There are two types of government minister: those worth hating and those who are not. In the latter camp fall such eminences as Michael Moore, William Hague and Theresa May; in the former George Osborne, Michael Gove and Iain Duncan Smith. If it is facile to argue that the importance of their work may be measured by the extent of the opprobrium they attract, it remains the case that these three men are, after David Cameron, the Queen’s most consequential ministers.

In their different ways, each challenges power and vested interests. Osborne’s tenure at the Treasury has not been a happy one as he wrestles with the burdens of Labour’s mistakes and the financial crash. For his part, Gove is not in the business of taking prisoners as he battles an often complacent and arrogant English educational establishment. Iain Duncan Smith (IDS), meanwhile, dares to suggest welfare dependency is a blight upon the most hard-pressed communities in this country, amounting to a moral failure that should shame such a wealthy country.

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Education reform (in England) and welfare reform (across the UK) are the two best reasons for maintaining some faith in this UK government’s ability to live up to its initial promise. Gove and IDS are hated precisely because they dare to challenge past failures and suggest not only that Something Must Be Done but, more ambitiously, Something Can Be Done.

It is true that IDS’s handling of the latest controversies afflicting his department has been every bit as assured as his leadership of the Conservative party. There is a reason this man never threatened to become prime minister. Nevertheless, maladroit communication skills should not be taken as an excuse to play the man rather than the ball.

Contrary to what seems to be believed, IDS did not say it would be easy to live on £53 a week, far less did he suggest doing so would be some kind of picnic for which the welfare recipient should be grovellingly grateful. He said, instead, that if he “had to” live in such pressed circumstances, he “would”. It will be no consolation that Marie Antoinette was similarly misunderstood. In the absence of bread, she suggested, the people might wish to make do with cake. The difference may be subtle but it is real.

Reforming welfare is an appallingly complicated business. It is inevitable that there will be some injustices. Implementing the Universal Credit is not, however, chiefly a means of reducing welfare bills. Rather it is a means to an end, both simplifying the system and making it easier to move from welfare into work. The ends matter more than the means, but it is impossible to have a good faith argument about the means if you assume the government’s ends are principally motivated by a desire to punish or humiliate the poorest members of society.

The image of IDS as a callous “toff” hellbent on whipping the poor into submission is in any case a laughable caricature. Few British politicians – and no Conservative ministers – have thought longer or more deeply about welfare reform. His answers may prove mistaken but he cannot sensibly be accused of failing to address the question.

Despite the hysterical reaction to this week’s benefit changes, no-one actually proposes eliminating the safety net. The Treasury might wish to sharply reduce spending on social protection but, including pensions, the government will still spend more than £220 billion on welfare payments of one kind or another this year. The overall welfare bill is not falling. Indeed, IDS has long argued that some payments might, at least in the short term, need to rise to help move claimants from welfare into work.

Moreover, despite what the BBC, Guardian and other bastions of conventional, left-wing opinion might have you believe, the government’s welfare proposals are its most popular policies. Politically speaking, this is a simple question: who wants to increase welfare spending and who wants to reform a system everyone knows is no longer “fit for purpose”? We know where the Conservatives stand; it seems that Labour is likely to fight the next election as the party of increased welfare payments. The Tories are not unpleased by this.

Despite what you may have been led to believe, the public hates spending money on welfare. According to a YouGov poll released in January, 77 per cent of voters favour stripping child benefit payments from families containing one earner making more than £60,000. More significantly, 76 per cent support removing benefits from claimants who refuse to accept offers of employment. And while 28 per cent suspect the government is being “too harsh towards people on benefits”, some 47 per cent fear the government is “not being tough enough” on benefits.

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Similarly, limiting the annual increase in benefit payments to 1 per cent in each of the next three years is approved of by 45 per cent of respondents, while 51 per cent also think it is “unfair” for benefits to rise “when many people in work are seeing their wages rise by less than inflation”.

Three in four voters also support IDS’s benefits cap. Most voters are, I think, appalled to discover that it is at present possible to claim £26,000 or more a year in benefit payments. Granted, only a small number of families find themselves receiving such extraordinary largesse, but the fact that some people do receive such remarkable disbursements from the public purse appals most Britons. Defenders of the status quo have trapped themselves in the position of defending the indefensible.

Nor is this a matter of mean-spirited English people hammering the poor, while generous “community-minded” Scots take a different line. Though the Scottish sample size in YouGov’s UK polls is small and should therefore be treated with some caution, it seems evident that, broadly speaking, there is no great difference between opinions north and south of the Border.

Indeed, Scots may take an even tougher line on welfare than voters elsewhere in the UK: 82 per cent support a benefits cap while 81 per cent agree benefits should be removed from those who decline a chance to work. An overseas observer contemplating this data might be tempted to conclude that Scotland and England could almost be part of the same country.

Visit any working-class pub in Scotland and you will hear opinions that make IDS seem like Polly Toynbee. Perhaps, as Ms Toynbee is wont to suggest, the public has been gulled by right-wing newspapers or hoodwinked by a false dichotomy between “shirkers” and “strivers”. Be that as it may, a majority of Labour voters also think the welfare bill is too high and would like to see something done about it.

The so-called “bedroom tax” (which is not a tax) has been handled ineptly, not least because its twin goals are mutually exclusive. It can only save money if claimants are persuaded to move, but it can only make more efficient use of social housing if claimants are able to move to smaller, more suitable properties. Alas there is no abundant supply of such houses.

That conundrum highlights how difficult reforming welfare really is. But at a time when it sometimes seems our politics has become desperately small, it is perversely typical that those ministers – most obviously IDS – who dare to take on large, difficult and complicated reforms are the ones most likely to become hated.

Shirking these issues is a cop-out, however, and as Iain Duncan Smith is discovering, the price of big ambitions is hatred. So be it.