Return of the nasty party?

David Cameron is at his best when circumstances force him to be bold, or so the thinking goes. With his government floundering and the wounded media baying for blood, the prime minister has counter-attacked with radical welfare reform plans. Yesterday heard rumours of reduced rent subsidies for the under-25s. Today comes news of proposed cuts to jobless families’ benefits: specifically, the withdrawal of dole payments after 2 years, lowering the housing benefit cap, and stopping income support and additional child benefit if a couple have more than three children.

Those with a sense of irony will recall the outrage over Lord Flight’s view that the welfare system encourages the very poorest to ‘breed’. Does David Cameron still disagree with Flight’s analysis or merely with his terms? Cameron, the compassionate conservative, is alive to the risk he is taking, and his language is cautious in consequence. The Mail reports that he will say:

‘Quite simply, we have been encouraging working-age people to have children and not work, when we should be enabling working-age people to work and have children. So it’s time we asked some serious questions about the signals we send out through the benefits system. Yes, this is difficult territory. But at a time when so many people are struggling, isn’t it right that we ask whether those in the welfare system are faced with the same kinds of decisions that working people have to wrestle with when they have a child?’

This scheme (devised, as Fraser noted yesterday, by No.10’s strategist, the pollster Andrew Cooper) is designed to win over working people with children, or those who want to have children. It contains a further political calculation: the Mail reports that Cameron plans to stand by his commitment to protect universal pensioner benefits, (free bus passes, winter fuel allowance and free TV license). Cameron’s political opponents will point out that the nasty party isn’t quite nasty enough to take on the grey vote — a constituency which, as Nick Cohen has pointed out, tends to vote in large numbers.

Cameron’s position on pensioner benefits is at odds with Iain Duncan Smith and Nick Clegg, who have argued that those handouts must be cut before more burdens are placed on the poor. Duncan Smith muddied his position somewhat when talking to the Today programme this morning. He said that it was difficult for pensioners to adapt when their income is inflexible. He then said that ‘the whole government accepts that we need to find more welfare cuts’, adding that the prime minister’s proposals had started a ‘reasonable’ debate about ‘things we could implement’.

IDS stressed, as Cameron has also, that this is about fairness and honesty for those who provide and use welfare, not just savings for the exchequer. Politicians had created this flawed system, he said, it is for politicians to amend without passing judgment on those who use it.