Explaining the IDS vs Osborne split on welfare

‘Do you know what they used to call us?’ asked Theresa May ten years ago. ‘The nasty party.’ No one used that phrase, but ‘they’ had a point. The Conservatives seemed to be a group of efficient mercenaries, useful for fighting the economic war that broke out in the 1970s. But in the good times they seemed robotic, Spock-like and heartless. The message was: if you work, we’re with you. If you shirk, you’re the enemy. This was summed up by Peter Lilley’s infamous ‘Little List’ skit, above. ANd again in George Osborne’s 2012 Tory conference speech, where he invited his audience to imagine the anger of a worker passing “the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits”. It was the same idea: conjure up a demon. And this revived the danger of the ‘nasty party’ returning, as I say in my Telegraph column today.