There is no Cabinet rift on benefit reform

Here’s me about to go on holiday, and the welfare wars seem to be opening up. Neil O’Brien has a piece on it over at the Telegraph website. And Hopi Sen, one of the better leftie bloggers, has written a response to my post yesterday. Partly, he wants to stir: it’s not so much that the Treasury want to block IDS’s reforms, he says, but rather that they are following Osborne’s orders to reduce the deficit. And so it’s one part of the government at war with another. By contrast, the Whitehall wars I outlined are hangovers from the Brown days, where the Treasury set policy for all other departments and its instinctive reaction was to destroy any proposal it did not come up with. When Milburn proposed Foundation Hospitals, for example, the Treasury commissioned a 50-page report on why they were ‘unaffordable’ – the word for any project it dislikes – and Brown personally dropped them off to each member of the Cabinet.