IDS has made the family a frontline issue again, but John Hutton is ready to fight back

Iain Duncan Smith must have dreamed about the moment he would stun the Blair government into silence. Derision was the government’s main response to his interventions when he was Conservative leader and, even a year after his ‘quiet man’ conference speech, Labour MPs still amused themselves by saying ‘sshh’ when he rose to speak in the Chamber. Now, after three years spent thinking and rebuilding his political identity, he has returned to the front line with a report on social breakdown — and one to which Labour seems quite unable to respond.

IDS’s Social Justice Commission was set up to address the break-up of families, a social trend which has vastly accelerated under Labour. Remarkably, no one seems to have programmed the government computer to answer this line of attack. When responding to Mr Duncan Smith, ministers simply say that they have created new jobs and increased child benefit. All this is true — and still violent crime, teenage pregnancy and youth unemployment are higher than they were in 1997.