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EXPRESS COMMENT

DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATH FOR ANY WELFARE REFORMS

Tuesday July 22,2008

IT TAKES a political party in its prime to bring about major and lasting changes to society.

Entrenched vested interests have to be fought and beaten and any administration requires a high degree of internal unity and a powerful popular mandate to perform that task.

But this Labour Government is far from being in its prime. In fact, it is way past its sell-by date.

Its mandate has shrivelled to nothing and many Labour MPs have returned to their socialist roots.

It is therefore frankly ridiculous to expect Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell to succeed in modernising the welfare state so that a life of fecklessness underwritten by the taxpayer is no longer an option.

Labour had 10 years of benign economic conditions to reform the benefits culture and instead allowed it to become more firmly established.

For most of that time the major brake on reform was the Treasury under Gordon Brown.

If Mr Brown would not allow a dismantling of Labour’s welfare fiefdoms while he was Chancellor he is hardly going to do so as Prime Minister.

As Labour’s former welfare reform minister Frank Field noted yesterday, the nation has lost count “of the
number of occasions the Government has published what it thinks are radical and tough proposals and for very little to happen”.

To ignore the case for welfare reform when jobs were plentiful and yet proceed with it at a time of rising unemployment is a startlingly perverse stance.

But this is what ministers expect voters to believe they are about to do.

It is, of course, all a sham designed to placate taxpayers infuriated at seeing so much of their money spent on the idle.

But the British public has been fooled too often by Labour.

Whatever smart soundbites Mr Purnell now devises it won’t be fooled again.