This is not a moral crusade
Afortnight ago we urged David Cameron to raise his game after Gordon Brown's impressively bold start as Prime Minister. In his response to the report by lain Duncan Smith's social justice policy group, the Tory leader has done just that. Mr Cameron has sounded focused, impatient to improve the state of the nation, and visibly determined to take on the new PM and defeat him Although the proposed £20 per week boost to married couples has inevitably dominated the headlines, it is only one of many sensible recommendations to emerge from Mr Duncan Smith's 671-page report. In its analysis of family collapse, substance addiction, education underachievement, debt and crime, this document is the most comprehensive analysis of social breakdown published for many years. This is crunchy, bold stuff, rooted in sleepless empiricism: in the past 18 months Mr Duncan Smith's group has organised more than 3,000 hours of public hearings and received submissions from over 2,000 organisations. Those, such as the Guardian's Polly Toynbee, who dismiss the findings as 'reactionary mood music' reveal more about their own immutable prejudices than they do about the report and its content.
In this area of policy, Mr Cameron has pursued a shrewd strategy. Just as he and his colleagues have had to work hard to correct the bitter legacy of Black Wednesday — the Tory party's devastating loss of its reputation for economic competence — so the Conservative leader has had to deal with the folk memory of John Major's preposterous 'Back to Basics' campaign in 1993. While the former prime minister has always maintained that his intention was not to moralise, the briefing that accompanied the campaign did just that — a message that was quickly undermined by a string of minor scandals involving the private lives of Tory ministers. Stunts such as Peter Lilley's 'little list', including 'young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing list', reinforced the impression of a shrill, hypocritical oligarchy pointlessly trying to impose ethical standards upon the most vulnerable.
One of the reasons that Mr Cameron has devoted so much of his energy to the theme of 'social diversity' — praising civil partnerships as well as marriage, for instance — is to correct this resilient impression. He has earned the right to talk about social policy by demonstrating his credentials as a tolerant and broadminded leader, a man of his generation. But, as he put it on Tuesday, enthusiasm for social diversity should not make us 'tolerant of social failure'. Quite the opposite: having forced his party to confront the complexity of modern society, Mr Cameron is now — no less fearlessly — starting to address the dysfunctions of that society. The fact that this is perilous political terrain is no argument for avoiding it, and the Tory leader deserves praise for his courage in marching towards gunfire.
On Wednesday Mr Brown said, 'I don't think, if I may say so, that politicians should get into that position of trying to moralise or lecture.' But what Mr Cameron grasps is that this is an entirely practical mission rather than a moral crusade. What drives his campaign is evidence, not priggishness or puritanism. And, as Fraser Nelson and Andrew Neil have shown in these pages, the evidence is compelling: a Broken Society has emerged in which the poorest fifth of the population now receive more than half of their income in state benefit, in which 26 per cent of children have taken drugs, in which violent crime and antisocial behaviour are rife. According to an Institute of Fiscal Studies report last year, less affluent families actually pay a financial penalty if they stay together: if one spouse earns £5,000 a year, and the other adult £15,000, they will lose more than £5,400 in benefits if they continue to share a home. Research by the charity Care has demonstrated that many couples are worse off by more than £50 a week if they remain together, rising to £100 in some cases. Witness, therefore, an incentive scheme that is perverse to the point of insanity: the taxpayer is subsidising social structures that have been shown to produce unhappiness, crime, educational failure and addiction.
It is perfectly possible to admire the heroism of many lone parents, while recognising the indisputable reality that marriage is the framework which gives children the best start in life. There is indeed a strict limit to which the state can or should dictate the private behaviour of citizens. Equally, the tax and benefit system is never, as some claim, 'neutral' in its attitude to personal behaviour and 'lifestyle' choices. How could it be? As presently arranged, the system is actively hostile to marriage — with the single exception of the rules for inheritance tax — and actually provides incentives for parents to live apart. What the Tories now propose is not a swingeing attack on lone parents, or an evangelical campaign to force people to marry, but to level the playing field. In his masterly work of revisionism, The Subversive Family, Ferdinand Mount shows that — contrary to the claims of many historians — the nuclear family is not a 20th-century invention doomed to obsolescence, that it has deep and resilient roots, and that 'a way of living which is both so intense and so enduring [as marriage] must somehow come naturally to us, that it is part of being human'. It follows that a tax-and-benefits system such as ours which dissuades marriage goes against that which is best in the human grain.
Labour's response has been pitiful. On Tuesday's Today programme Ed Miliband, the minister for the Cabinet Office, said that 'I don't think it's right for politicians to come on and preach' and refused to 'make a judgment'. Andy Burnham, the new chief secretary to the Treasury, dismissed Mr Duncan Smith's report as 'a series of unfunded spending commitments'. If this is the best that the government can come up with, the Tory leader has reason to be cheerful. Round Two goes to Cameron.
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