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Universal Credit was the centrepiece of Iain Duncan Smith's reforms at the Department for Work and Pensions between 2010 and 2016. It has been widely criticized and its delivery beset by problems. To understand the policy, though, and how it might be reformed by a left-wing government, we must understand the Thatcherite thinking that shaped it.
In 2002, as the Conservative Spring Forum approached, the floundering Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith, announced a newfound concern for the most vulnerable people in society, a conversion supposedly provoked by a visit to the Easterhouse estate in Glasgow a month earlier. To many, it seemed a contrived and unconvincing change of heart. A favourite of Margaret Thatcher, an ally of Ann Widdecombe, and undoubtedly a 'rocker' rather than a 'mod' under William Hague, IDS won the party leadership with a reputation as a right-winger against the centrist Europhile Ken Clarke. Duncan Smith's ill-fated leadership of the party was confused and contradictory. Despite seeming to have discovered the necessity of 'modernising' and a desire to see the left's monopoly on 'social justice' broken apart, he was prone on occasion to right-wing outbursts.1
The year after his Easterhouse 'conversion', Duncan Smith was deposed, and he busied himself while on the backbenches with setting up a think-tank, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ). This would go on to set the agenda for much of the social policy of David Cameron, a leader more committed than Duncan Smith to 'modernising' the party. The CSJ's emphasis on tackling social problems with traditional values, and its hostility to 'welfare dependency' seemed to provide Cameron with material that was both compassionate and authentically Conservative.2 Little surprise, then, that following the formation of the Coalition government in 2010, Duncan Smith was given control of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). At the party conference of that year he announced plans to revolutionise the welfare system with the introduction of Universal Credit. For Duncan Smith, this was a very personal agenda, something to which he became firmly ideologically committed.
This article examines the intellectual, ideological and political background to Universal Credit. Far from being part of a new 'compassionate conservatism', the background from which the policy emerged, in particular the work of the Centre for...