A thousand statistics go in one ear and out the other. Powerful stories, however, can change us forever and stir us to action.
In an article for a Sunday newspaper, David Cameron, the Conservative-party leader, reminded Britons of some of the horror stories that have put life in the U.K.’s welfare ghettoes at the heart of political debate:
There was Baby P, a tiny boy beaten by lower-than-life thugs. Before him, there was Shaun Dykes, a suicidal teenager taunted by a gang of yobs to end his own life. Before him, there was Rhys Jones, shot dead as he cycled home from football practice.
The biggest story of all, however, has been that of Karen Matthews. A serial welfare abuser, Karen Matthews used her seven children from five different fathers as cash generators. Her ultimate money-raising scam was to arrange for one of her daughters, Shannon, to be kidnapped; while the child was supposedly being held hostage, her mother sold the story to the tabloids.
The Conservatives are blaming Britain’s welfare ghettoes for breeding these horror stories. David Cameron has worried that all social norms have broken down in the communities where millions of children are raised:
Raised without manners, morals or a decent education, they’re caught up in the same destructive chain as their parents. It’s a chain that links unemployment, family breakdown, debt, drugs and crime. Breaking that chain means recognising the scale of the problem and taking serious, long-term action.
Both of Britain’s main political parties are now competing to be the most serious champion of welfare reform. Earlier this week, the U.K.’s secretary of state for welfare, James Purnell — the man who might well be the ruling Labour party’s next leader — set out the government’s action plan. Much of what he proposed has been imported from the United States. Purnell promises U.S.-style “work-fare” schemes for every person in receipt of state benefits. The private sector will take charge of finding work for the long-term unemployed and all those on sickness benefits will be subject to robust medical assessments. Many of the ideas are stolen from the Conservative party’s spokesman, Chris Grayling, but in some areas Labour is proposing to be even tougher. They will require, for example, single parents with children of just 12 months old to get work or attend training courses — a provision Conservatives will oppose.
We can be sure that most of these reforms will be enacted. While Labour’s Left will resist many of the tougher proposals, the Conservatives are offering bipartisan support for the bulk of the Purnell program. Twelve years after U.S. president Bill Clinton signed the welfare reforms enacted by the Gingrich Congress, Britain will finally begin to catch up. The great difference, of course, is that the economic climate could not be more different. Requiring single parents to take jobs when vacancies were plentiful is a very different proposition from today’s, when Britain is facing the deepest recession of all the major economies.
The biggest differences between the Labour and Conservative reform platforms is not their work requirements, however, but their attitudes to the family, drug addiction, and education. Gordon Brown’s Labour party continues to oppose the obvious conclusion from mounting empirical evidence that a two parent family, bound together by marriage, is far more stable than the alternatives. Labour has crafted a benefits system where it is financially disadvantageous for poorer couples to live together. When David Cameron launched his bid for the Tory leadership in 2005, he promised to recognize the importance of marriage in the tax system. He has since promised to end Labour’s couple penalty. On drug and other poverty-creating addictions, while Labour remains committed to harm-reduction forms of treatment like methadone and needle exchanges, Conservatives want more funding to go to treatment programs that seek to free people from their addictions. On education, the Conservatives are proposing a voucher program in all but name.
The Conservative party’s social-reform agenda is being incubated within the Centre for Social Justice. Not even five years old, the CSJ was founded by former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith and is now one of London’s most influential think tanks. One of the key reasons for its success is its deep roots in successful poverty-fighting groups. It has brought together an unrivalled network of not-for-profits who are succeeding in tackling social problems that have defeated the agencies of the state.
In many respects, David Cameron’s Conservative party is timid but on social reform it is groundbreaking. The Tories understand that the only way of reducing the size of the state is to cut the demand for government services by strengthening civil society. They understand, finally, that the Left has lost the war on poverty. And they are rediscovering that conservatism is at its best when politicians support and never supplant the Burkean little platoons of family, voluntary organization, and local school
– Tim Montgomerie is editor of ConservativeHome.com.