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IDS reaches Treasury deal over his budget

Michael Crick | 17:23 UK time, Friday, 1 October 2010

The Times reported today that the Welfare Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has reached a deal with the Treasury over his budget, and secured a large pot of money (clawed back from bigger savings) to pursue his welfare reforms.

The story will look rather old hat to readers of this blog and viewers of Newsnight, though the Times has come up with more detail.

Relations between the DWP and the Treasury were terrible over the summer. IDS's problem, I'm told, wasn't so much George Osborne himself, as with Treasury officials.

IDS has told people he felt they showed an arrogance and a bullying manner which he felt they picked up during the decade working for Gordon Brown. At one point relations between the two departments got so bad that IDS banned his staff from talking to Treasury officials.

IDS was ultimately rescued by David Cameron. The prime minister could not afford prolonged fights with two prominent right-wingers who might prove dangerous on the backbenches. He could perhaps afford to see the Defence Secretary Liam Fox go, but not IDS as well.

Comments

  • Comment number 1.

    the quiet man is turning up the er, heat.....

  • Comment number 2.

    WELL - THAT'S THE MONEY SORTED, THE REST SHOULD BE EASY.

    What IDS doesn't know about welfare, er, how does it go . . .

    And we have all seen what money can do for humanity (that word used advisedly) just look at the NHS - better still, sample it.

    The odd thing is, warfare has been starved of cash yet we are winning!

    New Generation - New Success.

  • Comment number 3.

    The last government failed to resolve welfare ending up spending more on it annualy than the entire take from income tax. This can't go on.

    Either the coalition sorts this out or we will all end up on handouts.

  • Comment number 4.

    The most pathetic thing I've heard this week is that in response to the final confirmation that ´óÏó´«Ã½ news, the TUC and their puppet party Labour, fellow co-conspirators in attempting to turn our country into a one-party socialist third world state, the strike threatening ´óÏó´«Ã½ news journalists and technicians actually tried to say the choice of dates for their 'strike' (act of blatant political repression more like)coinciding as it did with the conservative party conference was just a coincidence!!!!

    The strike has been called off but may still go ahead for 4 days (I wonder what 4 lol). Don't worry Jeremy you don't need to worry about what the strike could have done for the public perception of the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s political impartiality. After the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s coverage of the last election we already knew that ´óÏó´«Ã½ News is totally infested with politically biassed Labour militants. Actually we didn't need the strike to confirm it but hey, more people might see you for what you are.

    IDS is a decent man trying (in my opinion somewhat tragically) like King Canute to do something about what cannot be undone). Still, he's a Conservative so get stuck right in Michael. The full support of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News Labour movement will be right behind you.

    Now, how do I go about stopping my TV licence?

  • Comment number 5.

    '4. At 02:33am on 02 Oct 2010, Trout Mask Replica wrote:

    Now, how do I go about stopping my TV licence?


    Interestingly, for a 'service' that could hardly be deemed 'essential', you can't.

    Even getting a say, as one does with those who lead the land every few years, is not an opinion.

    Uniquely.

    Now, whose dosh went to buying off this next market rate management problem?

    Maybe it would be more honest just to call the licence fee the ´óÏó´«Ã½ staff protected pension fund?

  • Comment number 6.

    4. Trout Mask Replica
    'IDS is a decent man trying (in my opinion somewhat tragically) like King Canute to do something about what cannot be undone). Still, he's a Conservative so get stuck right in Michael. The full support of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News Labour movement will be right behind you.'


    I don't see the problem with this entry, looks pretty impartial to me.
    The change in government may be 'mellowing' MC.
    The second last para is interesting. Understandable when one party has been in power for so long, I'm sure Labour faced similar issues in '97.

  • Comment number 7.

    DOES IDS KNOW THE JOB MARKET IS COLLAPSING?

    Doesn't he know that mundane jobs get filled by incomers? Or are these changes going to take so long to implement, we will have a new government before they take effect?

    One might be forgiven for seeing the whole 'initiative' as bogus. After all, we have all lost count of the number of high-profile government schemes that come - expensively - to nothing.

    Nature does not do welfare. It follows that while welfare supports those who CANNOT work, it seduces into fecklessness many who - however reluctantly - would work IF THEY HAD TO. Generations of fecklessness become a reinforced sub-culture. I suspect Nature would apply the blunt stick of starvation rather than carrot-flavoured complexity.

    Should IDS triumph, it will only mean a lot more genuine job-seakers qualifying for welfare, unless recovery becomes reality.

  • Comment number 8.

    This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

  • Comment number 9.

    As what I have only recently discovered I am, namely a positive non-interventionist, I see everything IDS, the coalition, and if anything even more-so the Labour based government that might follow aspire to as being the exact opposite of what this country needs to survive.

    Positive non-interventionists believe in nothing less than the dismantling of the welfare state cash taxpayer cash bonfire and the concommitant slashing of taxes. Sounds like blasphemy no doubt but it's a fact that it works, and paridoxically, you might think, because the state makes more money from more people paying tax even if the rate is lower that those that the carpenter's son said we would have with us always even end up being looked after better!

    The fact that the world economy is so out of balance in favour of the Far-East, as recently observed by our Prime Minister is because JJ Cowperthwaite's concept of positive non-interventionism was listened to and implemented there (especially by the PRC) but ignored here.



    Too late now I fear though. How ironic - he was British!

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