Leader: Ring-fencing the NHS is only making matters worse

According to popular wisdom on the left — and even among some in the Conservative party — this ought to have been a tough week for the government. On Monday, the new £26,000 cap on benefits came into effect and with it a new principle: that no one on welfare should receive more than the average working family. Such a move, it was said, would expose the Conservatives to what is supposed to be their weak point: that they are the ‘nasty party’ who care about money, not people.

Yet something remarkable has happened. Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare cap is turning out to be not just the boldest but the most popular reform undertaken by this government. Rather than being punished in the opinion polls, the Tories appear to have been rewarded: the latest ICM survey puts them on a level pegging with Labour. A YouGov poll finds that 79 per cent favour the latest welfare reform. Amongst Labour supporters it is 71 per cent — in spite of Ed Miliband’s making a great stand against it.

The public reaction to the benefits cap turns recent political theory on its head. Ever since the 1997 election debacle, many Conservatives have been under the impression that in order to win office it is necessary for them to avoid doing or saying anything which might conceivably be interpreted as kicking away the crutches of the poor and the ill, such as cutting spending on any public service. Hence the promise to freeze spending on schools and hospitals, and the panicked reaction by the Conservative leader Michael Howard when a candidate in the 2005 election, Danny Kruger, talked of ‘creative destruction’ in the NHS (by which he meant undertaking serious reform to make it work better, not dismantling it).