Iain Duncan-Smith former leader of one of the most Right wing Conservative Parties in opposition has published a report that he hopes the new centrist Conservative Party will adopt. In the report IDS attributed most of societies ills to the development of an underclass. This underclass was created, he believes, by the breakdown of the family and of traditional moral values.

He identified a number of key elements that he believed disproved the old Tory theory that overall wealth and wellbeing, even that of the poor was improved by general increases in social wealth. He suggests that the underclass was never going to get better of its own accord and that it needed a helping hand up.

For example he suggested that alcohol tax rises by 10% in order to cover NHS treatment costs for alcohol abuse (a problem he associates with the underclasses). Furthermore he believed that prisons should build drug-rehab wings, that local health authorities should stop handing out free clean syringes to drug addicts and that methodone treatment for Heroin addiction should cease and that the addicts should just go ‘cold turkey’.

But his overall commentary was on the ‘family’ and the ‘welfare state’ he believed that more should be done to deny freebie handouts to the idle (not his words I must emphasise) and that the state must reward marriage with tax-breaks and welfare benefits as opposed to cohabiting partnerships or single-parents.

This bizarre attempt at compassionate conservatism is alarming because of two things. Firstly most people who are comfortably well off will agree with his diagnosis of the underclass and his prescribed solutions. Secondly he appears to be harking back to a ‘Golden era’ where society was better off. The so called age of ‘Victorian values’.

Yes there is an underclass, I call them the have nots. No not everyone that he and others believe to belong to this underclass truly do. But more importantly wake up politicians and people there never has been a golden era of social values. Social problems such as drug addiction, alcohol addiction, teenage parenthood, the breakdown of marriage, crime, the unemployed, the unemployable… these things will not be solved by tax-breaks and tweaking the welfare benefits system.  Where there are exceptions to the rule (i.e. tax-breaks) there are the scrupulous who will manipulate it to their favour. For every person who cheats the benefit system or who is a ‘burden’ on society for refusing to work there is a seemingly respectable law-abiding person shafting the state or their neighbour for everything they can get.

A recent example has been the managers of private equity firms who have bought large companies, stripped them of their assets and then sold them on for huge profits. Thanks to a loophole and a tax-break system not meant for them, they have escaped paying 100′s of millions of pounds. They pay less tax on their earnings (percentage wise) than domestic cleaners do.

So lets stop harking on about golden eras and social collapses and a return to good old traditional values. Lets re-make our cultural values, cut our cloth accordingly and finally realise that a fair society with oppurtunity for all can only be created when those who can, those who belong to the upper social strata ‘the haves’ pay their proportional way in society.