BIRMINGHAM LETTER:Iain Duncan Smith has shown his understated approach has backbone in a contentious contribution to David Cameron's Big Society, writes MARK HENNESSY
IAIN DUNCAN Smith, the quintessential picture of the British middle class, is a man of hidden colour. He is a descendant of George Bernard Shaw and his great-grandmother was Japanese. In school, he played rugby alongside Clive Woodward, who later led England to World Cup glory. In his teenage years, he converted to Catholicism.
Unlike most Conservatives, he knows the pain of unemployment. In 1981, he was on the dole for months after he left the Scots Guards in the teeth of the recession then raging.
Seven years later, he lost his job as a manager in a building firm when the housing market fell after a stock market crash.
The memory of his sacking, which occurred shortly after he and his wife had their second child, remains vivid: “It was a shock – absolutely awful. I felt pathetic,” he told one interviewer. “I remember telling my wife. We looked at each other and she said: ‘God, what are we going to do for money?’” He made money subsequently, but he remains conscious about the family’s financial security.
Today, he lives in a Tudor farmhouse in Buckinghamshire and is worth £1.5 million (€1.7 million).
His wife Betsy, the daughter of Lord Cottesloe of Swanbourne, inherited the ancestral home after her father decided to move out in favour of the couple during Duncan Smith’s ill-fated time as leader of the Conservatives after William Hague’s term had ended in flames.
Known near-universally in politics as IDS, he had a torrid time as leader, mauled weekly by Tony Blair during prime minister’s questions in the House of Commons, mocked even by the Tory press as the party’s fortunes stayed mired, particularly after he told television viewers in a speech “not to underestimate the determination of a quiet man”.
Unusually, perhaps, Duncan Smith has become altogether a more interesting figure since he left leadership, especially after he experienced a form of epiphany when he visited a run-down estate in Glasgow’s Easterhouse district where locals derided his interest in their plight, complaining that he would quickly forget them once he had returned to London.
He did not. In 2004, he established the Centre for Social Justice think tank to “study the causes and consequences of poverty” in Britain and seek practical ideas to empower the least well-off – a body that has in just six years become one of the most influential of its type.
Since then, it has provided much of the intellectual underpinning of Conservative leader David Cameron’s pledge to build a “Big Society” in the UK – where charities, communities and business take more of a role in providing local services.
The key to many of Duncan Smith’s plans as work and pensions secretary is welfare reform, based on changes to benefit rules that would see the introduction of a single universal benefit, rather than the 51 that are currently in existence.
“Large numbers of claimants cannot be consigned to long-term worklessness by making it pointless for them to return to work. They must be given every incentive to participate in, and contribute to, future economic growth,” said a report co-authored by Duncan Smith.
Undoubtedly, the existing system is failing. Today, nearly 10.5 million people of working age are not working in the UK.
Income inequality is at its worst rate for 30 years.
Nearly 1.6 million children live in poverty. Efforts to get the young unemployed into jobs or training are particularly unsuccessful. More than £2 billion has been spent on a programme, but the numbers requiring such assistance have changed by one-tenth of 1 per cent in a decade.
“Not only are worklessness and poverty rising, but as a result, the costs of ‘social failure’ have not been reduced: last year £74.4 billion was paid directly to working-age adults and children, about 40 per cent of the total social security budget. It has outstripped inflation nearly every year since [Sir William] Beveridge’s post-war reforms,” stated Duncan Smith’s recently published report, Dynamic Benefits: Towards Welfare That Works.
“For many, the answer to unsustainable welfare bills is to introduce ever tighter rules for receipt of benefits, and to cut generosity for some claimants.
“However, this approach has never worked.
“It is not the particular levels and conditions that are at fault, but the structure of the system itself.”
Some of this is not new. Labour MP Frank Field tried to persuade Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to “think the unthinkable” in the early days of New Labour’s government, but his seniors baulked at the scale of the changes proposed by their maverick colleague.
Instead, Brown introduced tax credits – a system which has done some good, but one which has proved to be an administrative nightmare for the Inland Revenue.
Duncan Smith’s plans impose a multibillion-pound short-term bill – one that has already created considerable tensions between him and the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, as the British cabinet struggles to find savings.
For now, Duncan Smith has won the narrow argument with Osborne for funds for his dream; though housing benefits will be slashed under other plans. However, relations between the two have been poisoned, following a bitter shouting match last week in the treasury department.
The “quiet man” of British politics is not always quiet.