How does the secretary of state's conceit, that in-work benefit claimants are essentially fraudsters, serve the public interest?
It's been said that the reason the coalition is so shambolic is that it's not two parties but four: economic liberals and social liberals, more different on a moody day than Labour and Tory; and Tory "modernisers" against the Tory old guard. It would explain a lot – the way their internal battles look so much more painful than anything the opposition ever inflicts. But it is increasingly difficult to pin down these two types of Tory. Unless you think gay marriage is the central issue facing the nation and that it's possible to construct a political strategy from the dislike of foreigners, "modernisers" and "traditionalists" makes no sense as the fault line. Conservatives themselves sometimes like to divide into "nice" and "nasty", as if mimicking a fifties marriage will somehow confer on them the authority that their policies alone cannot inspire.
An interesting division has opened up recently that, for brevity, we can call "toff Tories" versus "all the others". The Blue Collar Conservative movement was set up by Carlisle activist Clark Vasey, with the intention of giving Tory candidates a chance in seats outside the south-east. One third of Tory MPs have already signed up to its core beliefs, though how much that differs from clicking "Like" on Facebook, I don't know. That core consists of a simple message: the Conservative vote doesn't have to narrow down to rich people and those who think they will become rich. It can appeal to regular, modestly paid people, but only if it shows some awareness of the cost of living, and accepts that just because you're claiming benefits – in or out of work – it doesn't mean you're scum. These two principles, two and a half years ago, would have seemed self-evident, the kind of anodyne statement that politicians sometimes make to keep their face moving in a slow conversation. Nowadays, it actually counts as a sticking point for this radically unpleasant party.
The architect of this kind of thinking – that the poor are kept so by state handouts, and if only they were left to sink, they would find it in themselves to swim – is, of course, Iain Duncan Smith. Possibly trying to create some diversion around the impending disaster of the universal credit, he wrote a column about in-work benefits at the weekend, blaming Labour's payments to supplement working families' income for the fact that public finances are "at breaking point".
But there we part, IDS and I, because he attributes the problem to in-work benefit "fraudsters". This is another move that would once have seemed bizarre but is now a cliche – a system is deemed "unaffordable", the culprits are identified as a small core of liars, but since the unaffordability, by their terms, outstrips the dishonesty by such a huge margin, we are left to make the tacit leap that really, all of them are committing fraud. The very act of receiving money from the state constitutes a fraud. Amusingly, in Duncan Smith's article, they're not just fraudsters, they're foreign fraudsters – a piece of baroque nastiness ungrounded in any evidence. The number of foreigners claiming tax credits has never been calculated by the Department for Work and Pensions.
Anyway, let's not split hairs when the whole article was wrong. Channel 4 News did a fact check on the claims and found them wildly out. Tax credits went up by 8% over a period when Duncan Smith had claimed 58%; he had refused to distinguish between error and fraud, which drops to 0.7% once error is stripped out. It was wrong to the point that if he weren't such an unreadable, contradictory man – cantankerous but easily wounded, obsessed with the deficiencies of the poor but superstitiously afraid of them – you would assume he was being wrong on purpose.
And this, I think, is the true division of the Conservative party – the ones who are mistaken versus those who are wrong deliberately. Some of them are simply out of their depth, do not understand the benefits system or a government's realistic prospects of controlling the economy, don't get why well-meaning guys who are prepared to suck up to enterprise and clobber the unemployed wouldn't, on that basis alone, be enough to instil confidence and growth and convince a ratings agency.
Others take the Fox News approach: if you can just get enough misinformation out there, enough people who were only half-listening might half-believe you. Competing claims don't need to relate to facts, their validity will be judged on the manner in which they're delivered. You may have to retract later, but what does that matter? Does it even count as humiliation when the only people talking about it are the ones who disagreed with you anyway?
This is politics at its most cynical, its most rebarbative; this is politics pursued purely for personal advancement and for the game, in defiance of the public interest and the long term. I have a feeling that the first type of Tory would despise this second type even more than I do. The trick now is to tell them apart.
Twitter: @zoesqwilliams
