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.