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Andrew Selous (pictured) was elected as MP for South West Bedfordshire at the 2001 general election and became Parliamentary Chairman of CCF in October 2001. In October 1998, Andrew interviewed Iain Duncan Smith, then Shadow Secretary of State for Social Security. Key points from this interview:
· Individual people have a natural instinct to build communities, businesses and families. The state should encourage them in that, not intrude
· Welfare reform should focus on encouraging those instincts, rather than adding to the enormous and remote state system of provision.
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Iain Duncan Smith, Shadow Secretary of State for Social Security, was first elected to Parliament in 1992 and is the MP for Chingford and Woodford Green. He is married to Betsy and has two sons and two daughters. He was well known for his Eurosceptic views in the last Parliament and impresses his colleagues with his integrity and the sincerity of his convictions.
His first real experience of politics was working with Lord Soames and General Acland as a serving army officer in the then Rhodesia in 1979 to 1980, helping to bring the newly independent Zimbabwe into being. Mr Duncan Smith's father was a highly decorated wartime RAF officer and he inspired in him a readiness to stand up for the things he believed in. His mother's strong Christianity was also a key formative influence.
Individuals build communities
Mr Duncan Smith began by saying that his conservatism was grounded "in a belief in the freedom of the individual. This was not the image of a nihilist, selfish individual that we allowed to be abroad, but the natural instinct of people to build and construct. The vast majority of people who are free to make their own decisions, make constructive ones. They get married, they have children, they build communities, they start businesses.
They may not realise it but they are trying to improve the lives of those around them, be that extended family, other members of the community, church groups or political groups.
"What destroys that is if government takes away the power to make those decisions through bad laws, or takes away the money that is necessary to make those decisions. If this happens you end up with groups of people looking to the state as their family structure and not to their natural family. That is a key problem. Conservatives know too, most importantly, that when people's actions become selfish and obsessive governments must frame laws to protect the weakest."
I asked Mr Duncan Smith how his faith influenced his politics. "Church provides a natural order of right and wrong. The church should give a lead as to what is morally right and morally wrong. It gives you a sense that you are not the most important thing in the world and that there are other more important and powerful forces that you are part of."
We moved on to the question of whether the Conservatives had become the economics party, focusing too little on social issues, and whether this had contributed to our defeat. "When the Conservatives took over in 1979, everything was affected by the bad economic state. So the first thing was to sort the economy out which we did.
State intrusion
The problem was that, having reestablished the free market which is a bulwark against tyranny, we didn't then move onto the next set of important issues which were to do with the involvement of the state in other aspects of people's lives and this includes things like welfare."
"The big welfare debate started but we never really seemed focused on what we were trying to do with welfare. Too often we seemed simply to dwell on the financial effects of overall welfare spending and we didn't deal enough with the effects on people's lives and the way they take decisions. So we should have moved on to that agenda and talked, for example about the effect of the state on families."
Families need support
We then moved on to William Hague's commitment to the family and marriage following his speech in January this year. Mr Duncan Smith was warmly enthusiastic about the party leader's position on these issues. "It is time that we did start to talk positively about families, not in this rather glib way that Conservatives have been talking in the past, when in actual fact so much of what we were doing was being quite anti family. The tax system was a classic example. What married families need is fairness.
What we have seen over the last forty years is that the state has actually had a negative view about families, particularly in relation to the tax laws. It is time for us to reinvigorate that debate by asking how far the state should now be rolled back from the lives of families, which would ironically be a positive measure."
"We should no longer talk about families as if this was some strange relationship which defies definition. The truth is that marriage is vitally important because if we are talking about looking after those most in need like children and elderly relatives, there is no other unit that is as powerful as the married family.
There are a huge number of surveys coming in now, most interestingly many of them from the great liberal left, which are saying that marriage is the critical component in the care and nurture of both children and elderly relatives and in laws. Women such as Sarah Maclanahan in the USA and Melanie Phillips here are both saying that marriage is critically important to stable family relationships.
Many commentators have spoken of the pressures that the modern work place puts on family life. Mr Duncan Smith thought that these pressures had always existed to some degree whether parents were at work or looking after children.
"The trouble is that the state takes so much money off married families with children in taxation, particularly if they are single earner families, that the pressure from the state is to go out to work because if there are not two earners the family gets punished in the tax system. Swinging the pendulum back again will reduce the pressure on families so that both parents do not have to go out to work. Labour has a very unnatural view of the family. You never hear Mr Blair talk about marriage.
A commentator that knows him well was saying that Mr Blair doesn't look to shape policy on the family. So we have had a very piecemeal, incoherent approach to the family from this government. We need to offer constructive policy. You recognise what we have to do and present policy that works. Then you say this is who we are and what we believe in. For too long we have been saying it the other way round and had nothing behind it"
Mr Duncan Smith thought that Frank Field's resignation from the government would be a big blow. "They used and abused a good man. This is the sort of cynicism that the public look at in politicians, which has done us no service at all, and which I believe, bit by bit, will begin to haunt them."
I asked Mr Duncan Smith what he saw as the main challenges ahead for Social Security. "I think the real challenge is to understand to what extent, just like the economy, the state has an active and a negative force in the process of welfare. At the end of the war we saw a huge lurch where the state nationalised caring. As a result the public turned to the state more and more as their first port of call, and less and less to their natural relationships of family, friends and local institutions.
Insurance, Friendly Societies and self help groups that offered an alternative were all squeezed out of the system..."
"I talked to a group of Trades Unionists the other day and wrote an article in 'Tribune', pointing out that trades unions should look more to their roots, which were essentially self help. They were about helping members get through bad periods. So why don't unions use their money to look after people in that sense, rather than constantly saying the state must pay."
"It is very difficult for the state to focus on the everyday needs of different individuals. The state takes these huge positions and people change their lifestyles to match the money available, rather than the state matching the original need. It is far better for smaller groups, much closer to people to be involved. People need to recognise that much of what they do in their lives is their responsibility. Over the last forty years the sense that life is a risk free venture has become more prevalent.
There is a sense of fault shifting here and I believe that part of the process of reform must be to build a system which relates to people's natural instincts of construction and responsibility. The moment the system cuts across all of that, it destroys it."
Related links
Read more about Iain Duncan Smith
Read about Andrew Selous' reasons for getting politically involved
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