SHORTLY AFTER HIS ELECTION, British prime minister Tony Blair proclaimed welfare reform his “big idea.” He intended to recreate incentives to work, reestablish family values, and thereby free resources for the struggling health-care and educational systems. All this seemed unexceptionable in the broad; but it has proved terribly contentious in the particular.
In Britain, the state gives all parents about $ 17 per child per week (more precisely, returns to them $ 17 of their own tax money). The duke and the dustman (trash collector) get the same check. Everyone is equal. Well, almost. Until now, so-called “lone parents,” primarily nevermarried mothers, received an extra helping of benefits, to the tune of about $ 7-10 per week, plus preferential access to public housing.
Blair decided that this discrimination against poor married couples should end. Henceforth, lone parents applying for benefits would no longer receive a premium. Those already receiving it would keep their extra payment, though they would no longer see it rise with the cost of living. Surely, a modest reform. But to the prime minister’s surprise, all hell broke loose in his party.
He had expected about a dozen on the hard left to oppose him. Not a bad thing, his savvy political advisers told him. It would further distance him from the crowd that had managed to keep Labour in the minority for 18 long years and show that he meant it when he said his New Labour party intended to reform welfare as Britain knows it. It might even provide him with an opportunity to read the dirty dozen out of the party, if he felt the timing right for such a purge. And it would lop more than $ 100 million per year from the burgeoning welfare bill.
That’s not the way things worked out. With the support of the Tory opposition, and the grudging acquiescence of a majority of his own party, Blair pushed his bill through Parliament, with 457 ayes against 107 nays. Blair won the battle but may have lost the war: 61 members of his own party rebelled, 47 voting against him and another 14 abstaining in what the tabloid Sun headlined as “Single Mums Cash Fury.” “It was not a price worth paying,” concluded the generally conservative Economist.
Yet Blair is unrepentant, even though the rebels included a handful of former allies who resigned from his government in protest. Indeed, Blair says that he is sticking to his plan to continue paring back the welfare state by reducing disability benefits. That fraud-ridden, $ 38 billion program, allows 2 million people to collect more than their usual welfare checks, many thousands of them by producing the flimsiest of evidence that they are unable to work. But the prime minister is said by some insiders to be wavering, clearly shaken by the intensity of the revolt on the lone-parent benefit. What went wrong?
Blair wanted to send a signal that Britain’s government should not be indifferent as between the two-parent family and single-motherhood. He well knows that the children of lone parents are more prone to criminal and other anti-social behavior, and to being sucked into permanent dependency on welfare. Besides, unlike many of his advisers, Blair has a religious and moral devotion to the traditional family.
The prime minister is also committed to the notion that work is ennobling and welfare degrading. In an attempt to recover lost ground after the storm broke around his reform proposals, Blair laid out what he considers to be the country’s choices: “We either carry on . . . paying out more and more and more money on social security . . . or . . . we spend the money necessary . . . to get [people] off benefit and into work.” His home secretary, Jack Straw, put it more succinctly: “Work has to be the centerpiece of the creation of a genuinely inclusive society.”
But Blair wasn’t willing to fight on the elevated ground of the traditional values of family and work, lest he be accused of imposing his moral views on others. This, from a prime minister who is quite willing to ban cigarette advertising; who would prevent consumers from buying meat on the bone because of the very, very tiny probability (lower than that of being struck by lightning while at dinner, I am told) that it might result in disease; who wants restaurants to post signs warning of the potentially lethal effects of peanuts on those allergic to them; and who presides happily over a Parliament that, in Roger Scruton’s phrase, consists of “suburban prudes” animated by ” censorious passion.”
So Blair was left to defend his action on the grounds of fiscal prudence, although the $ 100 million annual saving won’t make a noticeable dent in the $ 480 billion that the government spends every year. This budgetary argument didn’t prove to be much of a defense against MPs who charged that forcing unmarried mothers to work “at cleaning or shelf filling” — forget that the removal of an extra incentive not to work is different from compulsion to take a job — would put them at the mercy of employers who would not adapt to their special needs.
“Suppose there is a mother who is young, reckless, and feckless — is she going to be a better mother by making her go to work?” asked Labour MP Audrey Wise. “I feel ashamed of what we are doing,” chimed in Labour’s Ken Livingstone, a man proud of his “Red Ken” sobriquet. If this is the first step in forcing single mothers into work, added Alice Mahon, MP, “it would be a piece of social engineering that Stalin would be proud of.”
Add to that the inevitable tales of widows struggling to raise their children, and divorced women with no work experience, and you have an assault that would — and did — melt many hearts. Against that, Blair chose to defend his “big idea” in terms of mere money. The Tories added to his discomfort by stationing their most right-wing member in the lobby of the House of Commons to congratulate all the Labour members who were voting in support of the benefit reductions.
All is not lost for Blair, however. He has forced the first change in the benefits scheme in many years. And he showed the dissidents that they could not deter him from his chosen course. Many observers were reminded of the early days of Thatcher, who faced similar defections from her soft-left Tory colleagues and used those victories to consolidate her hold on the party and to marginalize those Tories who were not prepared to back her revolutionary policy of privatization and lower tax rates.
Blair is a not-so-covert admirer of Thatcher, a feeling that is known to be reciprocated by the Iron Lady. If he moves from arguments based on money to arguments based on principle, he may yet duplicate her successes and continue Britain’s evolution from egalitarian welfarism to capitalism with a human face.
Irwin M. Stelzer is director of regulatory policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
