Bernard Ingham: History repeats itself as the welfare culture saps our fibre

Indeed, one of my laws of politics is that the Tories, in their quest on coming to office to balance the books, are fated to be characterised as cold-hearted, cruel slashers, taking bread out of the mouths of infants and even milk-snatchers.

This is what Margaret Thatcher had to say about the nation she found in May 1979: "Welfare benefits, distributed with little or no

consideration of their effects on behaviour, encouraged illegitimacy, facilitated the breakdown of families and replaced incentives favouring work and self-reliance with perverse encouragement for idleness and cheating".

So what did she do? To tackle the "Why work?" syndrome she taxed short-term benefits. She also cut unemployment, sickness, injury, maternity and invalidity benefits by five per cent and eventually abolished the earnings-related supplement.

Then social security, including pensions, represented 25 per cent of all Government expenditure. Today it is 28 per cent. So we have George Osborne wielding his axe, aiming to slash the welfare budget by 11bn a year as part of total cuts of 113bn over four years.

Meanwhile, Iain Duncan Smith, at Work and Pensions, worried about the incentivisation of idleness rather than employment, seeks to secure a more mobile workforce, if not quite echoing Norman Tebbit's "Get on yer bike".

Like death and taxes, the welfare state, it seems, is always with us. It presents a formidable problem for politicians in a democracy. The easiest – and most irresponsible – thing in the world is to go on doling out benefits. That is what Labour was good at. Housing benefit, for example, doubled in the last ten years and at 21bn a year exceeds spending on the police.

The hardest thing is not just to pare the welfare budget but also to abolish some benefits altogether. Once introduced, they seem inviolate and grow like Topsy.

So, 30 years on, we see history repeating itself. Again we have a Government – this time perhaps helpfully a coalition if it can bear the welfare strain – trying to bring some common sense to the nation's conduct and financing.

Not many from whom the medicine is withdrawn will think they feel better. The coalition will get more knocks than ha'pence from its opposition both in and out of Parliament. There will be much outrage among lobbyists who proliferate on the back of benefits. And some

unions might even strike at seeing the gravy train de-railed.

That is, if it is well and truly halted and the gravy ceases flowing.

I enter my reservation because, notwithstanding her blood-curdling reputation, Thatcher cannot be said to have ended the problem of professional single mothers, killed work disincentives, discouraged sick notes or generally weaned the nation off benefits.

Nor can it be said that she slashed public expenditure. As I explained in my book, Kill the Messenger, her signal contribution to the management of Britain's finances was to control, as distinct from cut, public spending. Indeed, over time she was spending more, not less, of our money. She was able to do so and contain public spending because she brought Britain out of recession into years of continuous growth.

Incidentally, all this caused me to redefine the verb "to cut" to mean "not an actual reduction in expenditure but something less than people demanded, desired or arbitrarily thought necessary".

Nothing much has changed in the last 30 years except that the bill has got bigger, the problems of financing it grown and the benefits lobby has waxed larger and more whiningly vocal.

Perhaps the only major difference is the size of the overall budget deficit. Consequently, the big question is not whether the coalition can bring some order to public finances – as it must if it is to survive – but whether, in the process, it can end the benefits culture that is sapping the nation's moral fibre and sustainability.

All we can say so far is that it made a promising start with last week's Budget. But curbing public expenditure – and welfare's cost – demands stamina, perseverance and political courage, not to mention longevity.

Let us hope we have these qualities in David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Otherwise by 2040 – and probably much sooner – we shall be fashionably bankrupt.