Dominc Lawson: Bill Clinton saved people from a life of crime. Is Gordon Brown brave enough to follow him?

It was, we are told by Gordon Brown's friends, he and not Tony Blair who invented the classic New Labour slogan "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime." The new Prime Minister will therefore realise better than most that in its slightly panicky reaction to a spate of recent child-on-child murders, the Government has not begun to address the second half of that celebrated formula.

Rushing more policemen into inner-city trouble spots and turning such areas into CCTV arboretums might succeed in allowing ministers to say that "something is being done"; as an attempt to address the underlying problems it has about as much potency as homeopathy in treating a brain tumour.

The odd thing about the Government's consistent inability to see what needs to be done is that the man who inspired the creation of New Labour set them a wonderful example. I refer to Bill Clinton. Clinton declared that "the biggest cause of growth in inner-city crime is the breakdown of the family and the absence of work." Perhaps his New Labour admirers shared the President's diagnosis of the condition; but unlike them, he actually understood what the cure must involve. Eleven years ago this month, Clinton pushed through the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act – otherwise known as Welfare Reform.

Clinton's proposals were based on the knowledge – yes, the knowledge – that the increase in the extent and violence of youth crime was inextricably linked to inter-generational welfare dependency, which in turn was the product of fatherless families and the way in which the political establishment had refused to deal with it. Clinton was not simply concerned to reduce youth crime: his principal objective was to push poor families – especially poor black families – back into the workforce and thus on the road to respectability and self-respect: bourgeois values, if you like. As his adviser, William Galston, remarked: "You need only do three things in this country to avoid poverty; finish High School, marry before having a child, and marry after the age of 20. Only 8 per cent of families who do this are poor; 79 per cent of those who fail are poor."

Clinton replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children with the new Temporary Assistance for Needy Families: temporary, because no family (other than in medical or other emergencies) would have more than five years' unconditional income support from the state. This undeniably tough measure was clearly based on the view – hitherto associated with social conservatives – that knowing that the state would finance any number of illegitimate children had contributed dramatically to the growth in fatherless families. Indeed, it rendered the young male redundant in another sense: the state, in effect, acting as cuckold.

Arguably, that is what many young males had wanted: the action without the responsibility. Clinton had a nasty surprise for the feckless inseminators, however: mothers were compelled to name and identify the fathers if they wanted funds from TANF. Then the authorities could demonstrate to the fathers that their obligations went beyond the offering of a post-coital cigarette.

The most vigorous opposition to Clinton's Welfare Reform came from within his own party. Ted Kennedy declared his leader to be guilty of "legislative child abuse." Daniel Moynihan, one of the few qualified social scientists in the Senate, said Clinton's measures would lead to an "apocalypse". An Assistant Secretary at the Department of Health, Peter Edelman, quit, saying Clinton's measures would lead to "more malnutrition, more crime, increased infant mortality, increased family violence and abuse against women and children."

As things turned out, Clinton's reforms led to precisely the opposite. Over the following decades there was not just an unprecedented decline in the numbers on welfare: poverty among single parent families dropped on a scale never before seen in America. The most striking falls in poverty occurred among black families, exactly those whom Clinton had had most in mind.

The President had a further piece of evidential vindication: the rate of illegitimacy among black families began to fall after decades of uninterrupted growth. The fact that crime fell – and particularly crimes involving family violence and abuse against women and children – cannot simply be attributed to welfare reform, of course; but research by the University of Chicago based on FBI crime reports states that "rates of domestic violence fell with the passage of the welfare law, especially in towns most subject to the law's provisions... such results hold independently of the reform's effect on other personal crimes and crime in general." By 2002, even the New York Times, which had denounced Clinton's proposals as "not reform, but punishment", finally conceded that "Welfare Reform has been an obvious success".

The interesting question remaining is this: why should America's social scientists – of whom Senator Moynihan was only the most prominent example – have got things so spectacularly wrong? The unscientific answer would be that the people who in America are termed "liberals" were so offended by Clinton's almost Biblical strictures against illegitimacy that they refused to engage with the facts. In fact it was ludicrous to think that Clinton didn't understand that it was possible to do well coming from a non-traditional family: he was brought up by a single parent. To claim that there isn't a connection between fatherless families and profound social ills, however, is like a tobacco company disputing the connection between smoking and lung cancer on the grounds that most people who smoke don't develop the disease.

The more generous explanation of the American liberals' hysterical predictions would be that when the social science departments fed all the figures into their computers, they genuinely came up with very worrying forecasts about the likely effect of Welfare Reform. What their computers – and their own imaginations – failed to measure was the result of a politically-inspired change in personal ambitions and expectations.

Above all, the academics – who themselves tended to come from middle-class families – had sneered at "dead-end jobs" (the sort which eastern Europeans are now seizing in this country) without appreciating how much such a job could do for those whose families had known only idleness and degrading dependency. As Andrew Cherlin, one of America's leading sociologists, generously declared some years after his initial opposition to Clinton's reforms: "As a result of what I have seen I now think the term "dead-end job" is a label that doesn't often fit the perception of low-income workers. I won't use it again."

The last word, however, should go to Bill Clinton, when he was asked how he had the courage to override the objections to Welfare Reform of so many in his own party. "I've always known poor folks," he said, "I've just never thought they were helpless." Gordon: call Bill. It's urgent.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk