John Major's attack on universal credit shows how far the Tories have moved from compassionate conservatism

Once written off as the grey man of politics, designer of the infamous ‘cones hotline’, John Major’s legacy as a humanitarian is taking shape. It is furthered this week by his damning remarks over the Conservative government’s core welfare policy, universal credit. Commenced under David Cameron’s leadership and pursued with dogged conviction by Theresa May – despite growing evidence of not just its failure, but its capacity for harm – its full effects are finally starting to be felt.

Whispers of concern are now to be heard in the offices of Conservative MPs, particularly those in marginal constituencies, who are seeing the victims of this cruel benefits overhaul turn up in their weekly surgeries. They have no answers for them, as the poor and vulnerable list the ways the government is making their lives, day by day, harder and increasingly impoverished.

Major has no seat to lose: he is free to speak truth to Conservative power, just as he already has over the risks of Brexit, and of the risks of buddying up with the DUP, in the recent past. Though he agrees in the principles behind universal credit – putting individuals in charge of their income, attaching rights to responsibilities, and encouraging more people to return to the workforce – he knows that removing hundreds of pounds from the wallets of poor families will have a devastating impact on family life, on communities and on local economies.

“In order to introduce something like universal credit, you need to look at those people who in the short term are going to lose, and protect them, or you will run into the sort of problems the Conservative Party ran into in the late 1980s,” he said – warning that the policy could become an albatross around the neck of the prime minister, the poll tax of the modern political era.

And he acknowledged that evidence shows the policy is unlikely to achieve its aims: “The argument that it is to encourage people to get into work isn’t an argument that runs, to me, on something of that sort,” he said. “I do think we need to look very carefully at how it is introduced, and when it is introduced and what the circumstances are and the resources there are available to assist its introduction.”

His concerns are not solely motivated by the heart – he knows, and openly speaks of, the reputational damage it is already doing to his party. By next summer, almost 4 million people will be claiming universal credit. That’s a lot of people to anger and that’s before you’ve added the frustrations of all those the policy will touch – from small business owners to social landlords, from charities to disability activists.

“If you have people who face that degree of loss, that is not something the majority of the British population would think of as fair, and if people think you have removed yourself from fairness then you are in deep political trouble,” he remarked.

But his comments reveal that it is not only political trouble the government is likely to find themselves in: it is economic, it is social – and, indeed, it is moral.

Major, by alerting us to his concerns about the lack of fairness and the logistical flaws built into the design of the universal credit system, also draws us to make another significant observation: look just how far the modern Tory party – in particular its leadership, and those who would challenge the leadership from the right – have moved from the ideals of compassionate Conservatism.

If the aim is to improve the general welfare of society – to ease the unemployed into fruitful and rewarding employment, and create the conditions for a productive life for those who cannot work due to disability or other factors – then universal credit is designed to fail. It removes choice from the individual by reducing their already limited spending power; it encourages the free market to act against the interests of poorer citizens, for example by pushing private landlords who fear losing their income stream out of the market; it pushes the very poorest to extremities of desperation, leaving new claimants with absolutely nothing but a foodbank for support for up to five weeks.

The cumulative effect of this is to entrench, not ease, dependency on state agencies and welfare schemes. It is the antithesis of both compassion and traditional Conservatism.

In 1992, John Major won an election he was expected to lose by showing that he understood the needs of ordinary people living through the effects of recession. He believed in a meritocratic society. Today, he sees that the policies of his party are acting to undermine those ideals.

This is hardly the first time the prime minister or her cabinet have been warned about the damage that welfare reform will do to the country, or to her party. The sad thing is that, despite mounting evidence that the critics are right, the government does not seem to care. Iain Duncan Smith, the architect of universal credit, still claims it is “functioning well”. It’s a collective moment of fingers-in-the-ears.

Universal credit is unlikely to survive in its current form. When every single benefits claimant is moved onto the new system, which the government intends to achieve by the middle of next year, emergency amends will be made to the policy to keep it afloat. Housing associations will, I predict, be able to claim their rent direct from the DWP rather than claimants managing their own payments. The expectation for some disabled or sick people to find work will be reduced when – once critical mass is reached – it becomes clear that employers will not make the adjustments needed to welcome them into work: a sobering but likely reality.

Perhaps John Major is right, and the political fallout will be so severe that the policy is killed off altogether – though the National Audit Office, itself critical of the scheme, warns that that may not be possible either. The question we are left with is whether the Conservatives will rediscover their own moral compass and kill it off first, or whether Theresa May or her successor (one Jacob Rees-Mogg?) will dig in their heels and allow Jeremy Corbyn to do the job for them.