The new Tories will stop class becoming caste

As the camera pans around the Conservative Party conference hall in Manchester today, the traditional stereotypes are guaranteed their 15 minutes of TV fame. Women wearing Thatcher blue with pearls; aged and angry country squires in tweed; and vaguely frightening young men in City suits and alpha male haircuts will be portrayed as the party’s rank and file.

Appearances can deceive. Modern conservatism can no longer be viewed through the lens of the 1980s. Far from there being no such thing as society, our broken and dysfunctional society is now the central concern of the party. Critics like to pretend this social concern is a cover for rampant advocacy of self-interest and future attacks on poor people — but this is to miss the point entirely: the new Tories want a war on poverty, not on the poor.

In the contemporary Tory pantheon, poverty sits alongside localism, the fostering of civil society and the development of a decentralising Tory economics as a key goal of any new administration. This agenda marks out a wholly distinctive, radical new Toryism; one that empowers people rather than the State and one that makes the condition of British society its central concern.

The Tory transformation has its origins in the visit by Iain Duncan Smith, a former party leader, to the Easterhouse estate in Glasgow in 2002. Two years later in 2004, he and his former chief of staff, Tim Montgomerie, founded the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) along with Philippa Stroud, its current director. The think-tank is specifically concerned with the bottom 20 per cent of society and the ways and means by which they could break free from a cycle of permanent deprivation. With its pro-family stance and ground-breaking work on “Breakdown Britain”, the organisation has driven its social agenda deep into the Conservative Party.

For the Left, welfare is how you fight poverty, for the Right welfare causes poverty and embeds social division. For Conservatives, welfarism compounds and extends deprivation as it comes with a whole host of factors that destroy social stability and eliminate life chances The social and economic costs are enormous; a quarter of those living in Liverpool and Glasgow are dependent on benefits, and a fifth of those in Manchester, yet their needs are widely ignored. Partly this is because Labour concentrated on those earning just below 60 per cent of the average in order to push them above the poverty line. This hardly transformed the lives of families who benefited, but also ignored those at the very bottom. With the United Nations placing British children at the bottom of its well-being index, we clearly need new and richer matrices to capture the true condition of our society.

Just how central this issue has become to the Tories is shown by a recent episode involving Fraser Nelson, recently appointed editor of The Spectator magazine and often accused of being to the right of Genghis Khan. It was he who broke the story that life expectancy in the poorest area of Glasgow was 54 (lower than the Gaza Strip, North Korea and even Sudan). It was he who revealed that the bottom 10 per cent were getting poorer under New Labour and it was he who supported attempts by the Liberal Democrats to take the lowest earners out of income tax altogether.

Similarly, the Tory attempt to put the family back at the centre of life is not a reactionary move, but a response to evidence. Children from lone parent families are 75 per cent more likely to fail at school, 70 per cent more likely to become drug addicts and 50 per cent more likely to become alcohol dependent. They constitute 70 per cent of all young offenders and their numbers are increasing all the time (40,000 new lone parent families a year).

The answer for the Tories is that the State must encourage behaviour that it currently penalises, namely work and staying together as a couple. As Philippa Stroud says: “It remains financially pointless in many circumstances to take up employment, due to the cost in lost benefits.” Far from withdrawing benefits when someone first gets a job, the CSJ argues for a taper to kick in much later, so even those working only a few hours can see real reward.

These ideas tackle income; but the really transformative agenda lies in assets. Leaving aside property, the bottom 50 per cent of the population own just 1 per cent of the wealth. A real game changer would be to generate assets, and therefore businesses and entrepreneurship, at the bottom of our society. Take the £1 trillion bank bail-out. When these assets are returned to the private sector a portion of the money could fund investment vouchers for which the public would compete in a form of Dragon’s Den. Groups of mothers could pitch for money to set up a socially useful venture such as a food co-op on their estate.

A whole new asset class for the poor could be opened up by capitalising various welfare streams. Child benefit should be means-tested and the savings applied to children’s trust funds. If the Government matched the contributions presently made by the poor, then at 18 their children would have savings at the national average of £10,000.

By removing the regulatory barriers to worker buy-outs of failing firms we could generate wealth and ownership among the low-waged, and stop firms from going to the wall.

New conservatism is all about preventing class from becoming caste.

This article appeared in "The Times" on October 5th 2009
The Times