Through the Looking Glass? Labour and the One Nation Tory Tradition on Welfare

In 1950, a group of ambitious young Tory MPs got together to produce a pamphlet entitled One Nation: a Tory Approach to Social Problems.   The title was a nod to Disraeli – a politician famously (if rather inaccurately) remembered as a social reformer – and has since become associated with ‘progressive’ or even ‘compassionate’ Conservatism’s coming-to-terms with the post-war welfare state built by the Attlee government.

More recently, of course, it is Labour which has asserted a claim to be the UK’s One Nation party.  So is there any link at all between what Tory tyros Iain Macleod, Enoch Powell, Ted Heath, Angus Maude (father of Francis) were trying to say on welfare and what Ed Miliband plans to do?

On closer inspection, the answer has to be an emphatic no.  The Conservative One Nation tradition’s stance on health and social security is completely at odds with what the smart money seems to think Labour intends to do now, namely to work out how a relatively generous, redistributionary, risk-pooling welfare state can by put on a sound long-term footing by re-stressing the role of contributions.

True, unlike some of their fellow Tories back in the early fifties, the members of the One Nation group could at least see some good in the welfare state.  They weren’t simply swayed by its undoubted popularity among many of the voters that their Party had to win over in order to govern.  Their position – as Powell’s participation in the project attested – was also an acknowledgement by men who believed fervently in the market that it was bound to fail in certain crucial aspects of healthcare, social security and education.

However, their pamphlet went on to focus on what they argued was the ‘fundamental disagreement’ between the Labour and Tory approaches.  The former, they argued, was ideologically obsessed with redistribution and equality and naively bent on providing a premium service to everyone heedless of the cost to the Exchequer.  The Conservatives, they stressed, were concerned to maintain incentives, promote self-reliance, cut taxation, and focus on providing a minimum standard beyond which people would need to provide for themselves.

In their next offering, The Social Services: Needs and Means, published in 1952, Macleod and Powell, merely rammed home the point, making the case for much greater use of charging for goods and services in the NHS and – once again – warning that not everything could be provided to everybody: ‘The question which therefore poses itself’, they suggested, ‘is not, “Should a means test be applied…?” but “Why should any service be provided without a test of need?”.’ These ministerial-wannabees, then, were hardly soppy soft-centrists, let alone left-wingers.  Indeed, given the thrust of his reforms, Iain Duncan Smith can make an entirely convincing claim to be their direct descendent.

Presumably, Ed Miliband and his advisers are well aware that the Conservative One Nation tradition is, in fact, rather less cosy, consensual and ‘compassionate’ than many assume – which suggests (and this is not necessarily a criticism) that they are intending not so much to borrow from it as nick its name, benefit from its warm, fuzzy (if misleading) associations and then use it to badge what they want to do anyway.

In short, we’re through the looking glass here.  As Lewis Carroll put it in his book of the same name:

‘I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you’!”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”