Cameron means business on welfare: the Tories are the radicals again

There is something about impending doom which focuses the mind. That is why the Tory conference in Blackpool was perhaps the most effective brainstorming session in the party’s history — albeit inadvertently. David Cameron arrived facing an election. He left the northern seaside resort having scared Gordon Brown away from going to the polls — and, in the process, launched a policy strategy more radical than he had ever dreamt he would be pursuing. The proposal to raise the inheritance-tax threshold to £1 million grabbed all the headlines and seems to have struck a chord in the Labour marginals that worried the PM very much. Much less attention was paid, however, to a much more radical proposal: namely, to bring the ‘Wisconsin welfare revolution’ to Britain.

He first slipped this out in a television interview in Blackpool, and then repeated it for good measure in his conference hall speech. The invocation of Wisconsin — a state in America’s upper Midwest — would have passed over the head of most people in the Winter Gardens, let alone in the country. The word triggers few images, if any: snowploughs, badgers and perhaps bicycle lanes. But to policy wonks, it is the home of the most aggressive and successful welfare reform programme the world has ever seen — which became the template for Bill Clinton’s federal reform. And this was what Mr Cameron seemed, quite explicitly, to sign up to.

Even now, members of the shadow Cabinet are not entirely sure if he misspoke. Didn’t Tony Blair try all this in 1999, and wasn’t he forced to drop the strategy after disabled people chained themselves to the No. 10 railings in protest? Isn’t welfare reform so toxic an issue that even Baroness Thatcher didn’t dare to touch it? And why, precisely, would the famously risk-averse David Cameron, who does not dare touch the health service, decide to go straight for the root canal of the British welfare state?

Yet the debate on welfare has changed fundamentally since Mr Blair threw his hands up in despair.