He believes that the passage of time has made it possible to
He believes that the passage of time has made it possible to revere her legacy without being overshadowed by it. He has been happy to listen to her without feeling obliged either to agree with her or to repudiate her; her views are her views, his views are his.He has now given the fullest account yet of those views. In one crucial respect – and despite his comments on Europe – they owe more to John Major than to Margaret Thatcher. One of Mr Major’s animating passions – even though he never succeeded in conveying it to the public – was his anger at the way the social services failed the poor. As a youngster, trying to organise help for his parents, he experienced the clumsiness and rigidity of welfare bureaucrats, who seemed more interested in administering a kind of council-estate feudalism than in helping the poor to secure a full ration of human dignity.
After his recent travels around Britain, Mr Duncan Smith is also aware that the welfare state is often an illfare state. He also tells us that he wants to empower people and their communities; to emancipate individuals from Whitehall’s centralised authoritarianism. So did Mr Major, but all his radical and generous impulses carried him no further than the Citizens’ Charter. Though Mr Duncan Smith may not realise it, he is picking up Mr Major’s fallen banners.In so doing, he is also committing himself to resolving the greatest paradox in modern British politics: the public services.
They spend vast sums of the public’s money, yet few of the public feel well served. The problem is easy to summarise: how to ensure that the taxpayer receives anything like the same value for money for each pound spent on his behalf by the so-called public services as he does from the pound that he spends on himself in the supermarket.Tony Blair also thought it would be easy to deliver. In Opposition, he handled the politics brilliantly, persuading the British electorate that the Tories had virtually abolished public spending – when in fact they had spent like social democrats on a sailor’s spree ashore. So the Tories bemoaned their misfortune; how could they spend £300bn a year and receive so little political credit?Mr Blair reached a different conclusion.