I have a brief comment at Independent Voices on Iain Duncan Smith’s speech in Washington yesterday, in which he warned the Conservatives to avoid “finger-wagging” at the poor and unmarried lest the party be thought “uncaring”.
His speech, to the Heritage Foundation, was called “Conservative Values, Contemporary Challenges: 21st Century Welfare Reform”, and extracts from it are below:
Conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic has survived because it is not based on ideology but on unchanging values.
This has always allowed the Conservatives to accept change where necessary, shaped, however, by the unchanging values which underpin our politics: strong families creating strong communities, grounded by personal freedom whose boundaries are governed by democratic consent and arbitrated by the rule of law.
When I came into Government, nearly a quarter of the working age population was economically inactive.
Such growing dependency would, I believed, not only go on to cost taxpayers huge sums of money… but worse, perhaps, render these people dependent on state hand-outs and trap their families in dependency, incapable of escaping the net for generations to come.
This in turn, had helped to create a demand for foreign workers to fill the jobs that British people could be doing themselves.
In a modern nation like Britain I felt it could not be right that such pockets of deprivation should continue to exist.
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Yet for too long, Conservatives had allowed themselves to be defined by a narrow number of policy areas: taxation, immigration, and law and order.
At the route of this problem was that Conservatives had abandoned the subject of poverty to the poverty lobby and the liberal Left.
Perhaps our main contribution to the subject was that whenever Conservative politicians did speak about poverty, they did so with fingers wagging and harsh punitive language.
My party, the party of Wilberforce and Shaftesbury, seemed to have forgotten that we had always had a historic mission to help people improve the quality of their lives, not just sustain them in dependency whilst taking the easy option of attacking them.
So I set up the Centre for Social Justice to challenge the accepted wisdom of the Left, that poverty is only about money and that more state money would cure it.
But the CSJ was also to do something else; it was to show that Conservatives cared about people trapped in dependency. That far from wanting to punish people we were on a mission to save them, to put hope back where it had gone and to ally aspiration with hard work.
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In Government, the challenge has been to act on this work and make changes, and in the last three years, the Conservative-led coalition has embarked on the largest set of reforms in modern times.
We know that where people are able, work is the best route for them to lift themselves out of poverty.
That is why welfare support for those out of work should be seen as no different from work itself.
Our reforms are about achieving this seamless process, introducing a number of elements so that being out of work resembles being in work.
Universal Credit. Universal Jobmatch. The Work Programme.
All of these act as the ‘pull’ into work – encouraging, incentivising and supporting individuals.
Yet at the same time, the process of moving individuals from dependence to independence requires a ‘push’ – without it, you risk that money and support is given out, but without any expectation that individuals do anything in return, nor any mechanism to put pressure on those who could be doing more to help themselves.
For just as those in work have obligations to their employer, so claimants have a responsibility to the taxpayer: in return for support, and where they are able, they must do their bit to find work.
Our reforms make this contract unequivocal. We are requiring everyone to sign up to a Claimant Commitment as a condition of entitlement to benefit – it is deliberately set to mimic a contract of employment.
Those who can work but are unemployed will be expected to engage with us, treating their search for work as a full-time job.
If someone fails to do so without good reason, the Commitment will also spell out the robust set of sanctions they face – losing their benefit for 3 months for the first offence, 6 months for the second and 3 years for the third.
This is what we in the UK call conditionality: setting clear requirements and making sure that if someone fails to meet their responsibilities, they face the consequences – in the welfare system, just as for those in work. No longer just out of work but rather ‘in work to find work.’
With the Conservative-led Government leading the way on tightening up our conditionality regime in the UK – and as an observer of what Republicans here in the US are trying to achieve – my suggestion is that this is one area you might look at again, in order to strengthen the statutory connection between benefit payments and work search levers within your own system.
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As we modernise our work practices and create a more flexible and responsive economy, it is important that this is underpinned by social change.
After all, we forget at our peril that the greatest resource we hold as nations is not the raw materials lying under the ground but the human capital that populates our countries.
When I think of Great Britain, I think of William Wilberforce and slavery, Adam Smith and the free market, habeas corpus and the right to own property. I think of Crick and Watson and the double helix, of Fleming and Florey and Penicillin, of Churchill and Thatcher and freedom.
I could go on. It is not the size of your land mass but the size of your people you should be measured by.
That is why we as Conservatives need to ensure the welfare system is aligned to the task of helping people succeed in a modern world and not trapping them in dependency.
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Yet to re-engage as political parties and become relevant again change is necessary – but not any change.
For example, there are those who say Conservatives should change by abandoning key beliefs which sound out of date.
Marriage is a good example of this philosophy of change.
Because, they argue, more children are born out of wedlock we should stop speaking about the importance of marriage, as people are choosing to abandon it and go with the flow of cohabitation. After all, they argue both relationships are the same thing.
How wrong they are. This is because the value of a strong and stable family lies at the heart of our Conservative values, and at the heart of that lies the most successful man-made institution of marriage.
It’s not that other people don’t agree, it’s that Conservatives too often make them feel uneasy when they justify their belief by attacking selected groups of people whose lifestyles don’t fit.
After all the public we know, generally have a low regard for what they see as political cynicism that targets people to make a political point.
Instead they respond to the politician who is sincere in his or her belief, and clear about their commitment to make the changes required in order to improve such outcomes. In short, less finger wagging, more arm around the shoulder.
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Language matters as much as policy and belief.
For example, too often, Conservatives lecture everyone about the need for small government.
Yet most people think that when a Conservative or a Republican speaks about ‘small’ government it is a code for no government.
No government frightens people, for most understand that they need some government to ensure fairness and the rule of law.
Instead we should speak of ‘smaller’ government for I believe that most people recognise that ‘big’ governments are inefficient and expensive for taxpayers.
What we all really want after all is good, efficient government which costs less but governs wisely. Conservative purists would be hard pushed to tell you what they actually mean by small, but we all know what we mean by smaller.
In our hearts, we want a government which is on your side but not on your back.
Change is part of Conservative philosophy – but change against a value set that marks us as Conservatives and keeps us in touch with modern society.
Most of all, we need to remember that we want to improve the circumstances of people not leave them trapped in dependency without hope. As Oscar Wilde said: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
Eagle Eye 