On 24 April 2008 Iain Duncan Smith addressed centre-right think tanks in the United States. Speaking at the Heritage Foudation's Resource Bank in Atlanta, Georgia, the CSJ Chairman presented a case for a centre-right approach to social justice.

A copy of the speech in full:

Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP
Speech to Heritage Foundation’s Resource Bank, Atlanta, GA
Thursday April 24 2008
Conservatives and Social Justice
Good for Me, Good for My neighbour

When I mention Social Justice Conservatives respond in two ways. The first is that conservatives don’t do society that is the preserve of the Left. Apart from wondering why a politician should want to cede territory anywhere to their opponents, I think of our history. I think of Wilberforce and the anti slavery movement. I think of Lord Shaftesbury and the Ragged School movement in the 19^th Century and I think of President Lincoln. Three of the greatest social reformers and they were Conservatives. If we don’t do society and social justice, when did we stop?

The second response is that Hayek showed us the phrase is contradictory for social is collective and justice is individual. I respond that of course they are right, Hayek was of course right. But I also know that most of the public haven’t heard of Hayek and those who have probably didn’t read much of what he wrote. For them the words social justice have a real and positive meaning. They are warm words; they speak of decency and compassion. Here the Left understands something the right could learn from. Political language needs to convey a sense of who you are not just where you are.

Most people consider core Conservative beliefs – patriotism, low taxes, crime-fighting – to be good for them and their families.

Rather, they disliked what they perceived as a nastiness and indifference to others.

Because we valued wealth creation, we were seen as indifferent to the poor.

Because we valued stable families, we were seen as hostile to lone parents.

Because we valued independence from the state, we were seen as hostile to the old, sick and disabled who relied on the state to survive.

So whereas many – if not most – voters thought that Conservative policies might be good for them, not enough thought that they would benefit their neighbours.

Without abandoning the appeal to each voter’s decent self-interest, I knew the Conservative Party must demonstrate how our policies would help those left behind.

In short, I was convinced we must re-assure voters that voting Conservative would not just be good for them, but good for their neighbour too.

And the public is clear about the subject. When we polled floating voters they picked social justice as the most important issue for the Conservatives to convince them they were electable. They defined social justice as help for those who genuinely need help and help for those who deliver help.

Lest you think these were all left/liberals, the second item they picked, by a small margin was tax cuts.

The Welfare Society v the Welfare State

Therefore, behind this set of words, social justice, lies a real debate, as important as the big economic debates of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Conservatives won those debates and ushered in a return to the free market and private enterprise boomed. But this was grafted on to a post war society becoming more and more addicted to big government and centralized poverty programmes which were too often narrowly based. This in turn has created that strange phenomenon, growing economies and growing welfare bills.

Britain has deep-seated social problems with more than five million people of working age who every day, do no work, dependent on state handouts. Too many children grow up without fathers and live in families where no one goes out to work. Not just boys lose out girls do to, for it is more often from their fathers that a girl will learn about unconditional love between a man and a woman. Instead too many engage in very early sex with disastrous consequences. It is small wonder that the UK has the highest levels of broken families, drug and alcohol abuse and such high levels of dependency.

To take one figure among many, half the children in inner London are living below the official poverty line – and this in the sixth richest city on earth.

Here in the USA I know you have similar problems of social breakdown, albeit on a larger canvas. This I believe therefore also applies to you.

We have allowed the Left to make all the running in this area, with serious consequences. They have made two important decisions about the issue.

First, the Left says that alleviating poverty is all about money. Whilst money is important, I believe it is far from the only factor. I think of the drug addict with a family. If the state gives that person more money, and by so doing gets them above the poverty line, they and their family will still be in poverty: for unless they reform the way they live their lives and come off drugs, all the money goes on drugs and the family will struggle to find food and clothes.

They nature of your life has a huge bearing on your condition. That is why I have defined the five pathways to poverty as: family breakdown; drug and alcohol addiction; failed education; debt and the fifth, worklessness and dependency. All of these areas interact. For example we know from the evidence that the children of a broken home are 75% more likely to fail at school, 70% more likely to become drug addicted, 50% more likely to become alcoholics, 40% more likely to be in debt and 35% more likely to become unemployed. But we also know from the report that debt is the biggest cause of family break up and that educational failure leads to worklessness which in turn also leads to higher levels of family breakup.

Second, the left has also made everyone believe that welfare is about the state and what it does. As a result, all the debates have been about reducing the size and scale of the welfare state, (tough action which for the most part has failed) characterised by shriller and shriller rhetoric. Yet Conservatives should know that the delivery of welfare is about much more than the welfare state. It is about the welfare society which dwarfs the state and without which the state would not be able to function.

By the welfare society, I mean that which delivers care beyond the state.

At the welfare society’s heart is the vast army of people who, for love of family, neighbour and community, shoulder a massive burden of care. I think of the daughter caring for a sick mother, the volunteer in a children’s hospice, the ex-addict helping others escape drugs. Within our welfare society nearly all forms of need are being overcome by somebody, somewhere. Underpinning the welfare society are shared norms and values including responsibility, obligation and duty. But these virtues have been undermined in the post-war period.

Our welfare state’s indifference to the norms and values that underpin healthy nations has hollowed out British society from the core. It’s as if successive governments have been saying to their citizens: ‘Don’t worry too much about fulfilling your responsibilities; whatever you do, the state will pick up the pieces’.

Thus for the last sixty years Britain has relied on a massive growth in the welfare state to compensate for the weakening of society’s free institutions and shared norms. It is that breakdown which has caused the huge growth in welfare dependency.

I was convinced also that unless we understood at the Centre for Social Justice how governments in their attempts to direct targeted aid at specific groups have perversely created the incentives for the welfare society to break down faster, we wouldn’t produce anything relevant.

I think of Britain’s system of tax credits. Targeted at lone parents they were meant to raise them above the poverty line. However they have created a situation now where if you are out of work you are far better off becoming a lone parent. As a result we have more lone parents claiming benefits in the UK than we have lone parents living in the UK. This is of course because they are tempted to lie about their family status and very soon this lie becomes reality as this group suffers the highest rates of family break up. For the most part we have encouraged them to realise that the father is redundant in financial terms. Thus the state encourages instability even as it seeks with good intentions to stabilise. "Ah," I can hear you say, "the road to hell…."

Limited government is impossible without renewing the forms of behaviour and social structures that prevent poverty and create community. You cannot have a smaller state unless you have bigger, more responsible citizens.

Of course, this all has a huge bearing on taxes, as Adam Smith said; "But there is no country in which the whole annual produce is employed in maintaining the industrious. The idle everywhere consume a great part of it."

Conservatives have historically believed in the capacity of people and communities to resolve their own problems. The social justice I committed my party to simply meant:

• helping people help themselves;
• fairness; and
• ensuring the most vulnerable were not left behind.

From Breakdown Britain to Breakthrough Britain

From January 2006 to July 2007, the Centre for Social Justice hosted the Conservative Party's Social Justice Policy Commission with the aim of formulating effective poverty fighting policy. I was determined that the Group’s work should be rooted in a deep first-hand knowledge of the problems we were addressing.

Over 18 months we consulted in excess of 2,000 individuals and organisations, held around 3,000 hours of hearings and, through YouGov, accessed approximately 50,000 demographically selected people on the key issues.

We spoke to drug addicts and people who grew up in broken homes, taking evidence and costing our findings.

Our interim ‘state of the nation’ report Breakdown Britain detailed the nature and extent of social breakdown, and our analysis of its causes.

From the outset, I expected that our proposals would call for a decisive shift from the failed orthodoxies of recent decades. And I was determined that our policies should seen to be founded on a solid base of empirical evidence.

In advocating measures to strengthen marriage or help addicts get clean, no-one was going to be able to accuse us of being guided by personal prejudices or religious convictions instead of the facts. The evidence was in the reports.

Rather we had to exhaustively document the social harm caused by accelerating family breakdown and spiralling rates of addiction.

The Left's criticism was muted and confused, for they could not dispute the facts we presented, which laid bare their failure to Britain's poorest communities.

In July last year, the Policy Group published our final, 670 page report, Breakthrough Britain, which contained 200 policy proposals.

Of course I’m biased, but I believe the policies we have set out could play a key role in reversing the social problems that especially blight Britain’s hard-pressed areas.

Encouragingly, the Conservative Party has already adopted much of Breakthrough Britain – 27 proposals and counting.

The party’s policies on welfare-to-work, abstinence-based drug rehabilitation, support for marriage and Pioneer schools (similar to charter schools) are all based – more or less – on the work of the Social Justice Policy Group.

Even Gordon Brown has borrowed from our work, such as in his efforts to make up the ground he has been losing on welfare reform.

I believe we have helped shift the terms of the debate and challenged the implicit assumption of many that accelerating social breakdown is inevitable and irreversible.

Conclusion

I was invited here to talk to you about this unusual agenda. For too long Conservatives have seen caring as soft and unconservative, they have let the Left dominate and we can see the results; rising levels of social breakdown, rising welfare bills and rising dysfunctionality. Caring isn’t soft. Anyone who has worked in a drug rehabilitation unit or a rough sleeper's home will show you how tough it really is.

We must demonstrate that Conservatives have answers to the acute social problems that blight the lives of many citizens in our respective nations.

A conservative compassion agenda does not have to be expressed in religious language or by a favouring of faith-based groups. Our vision of social justice should appeal to the values of personal responsibility and concern for others that most of us share, whether we have faith or not.

Neither should social justice conservatism be conflated with big government conservatism. Britain is already taxed to the hilt, and I have no desire to add to that burden. However for a very modest investment of resources, much could be done to help people help themselves and reduce the demand for government intervention.

Most of our proposals would begin to pay for themselves very soon after being implemented. Just think of the costs of crime. If you look at those in prison, two thirds come from broken homes; over two thirds are drug and alcohol addicts; they have a reading age of 11 and a numerate age of 11; and at least a third have been in local authority care. Oh yes and 95% of them are men. Improving these areas of breakdown would do more to arrest the growth in the number of prisoners than any of our tough rhetoric.

In charting a path for the future of conservatism, we should remember and be inspired by a conservative history in social reform. It’s now time to unashamedly champion social justice. In doing so, we will demonstrate that we are both capable and deserving of serving all our fellow citizens in government.

In Britain, the Conservative Party is waking up to this challenge. Our leader David Cameron is putting social justice at the heart of his programme for government.

British Conservatives are coming to see that mending the broken society as a mission to compare with the broken economy that we fixed in the 1980s. It is not an easy quest and my party needs to do more and, to that end, I am even taking Conservative MPs and putting them for a week in voluntary sector poverty projects so they can see for themselves how turning around these broken lives is critical and yet so very challenging.

It is the voluntary sector marking out that territory between the private and the state, which has so many of the solutions. I have seen first hand how they try to get someone back on their feet after the state has given up. They, the awkward squad, are the antidote to big government and the one size fits all welfare programmes. This is the area that the over intrusive hand of the welfare state has almost crushed yet which offers the third alternative to an over mighty state or a profit motivated private sector.

To the Left welfare is delivered by the state. Yet Conservatives know that welfare in society is more than that. We should understand that reducing the scale of the dependency culture cannot happen unless we work to strengthen families and the extended network of support and care that surrounds them.

I hope that conservatives in the USA and elsewhere will also decide it is time to claim back the term social justice and deliver a more cohesive and balanced society, able to function in a free market and without which no truly free market can exist.