This extract from Alwyn Turner’s A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s takes us back to the first big rebellion faced by Tony Blair’s government.

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Gordon Brown’s pledge to stay within the spending limits previously announced by Kenneth Clarke had to be observed, even though Clarke himself was later to say that he wouldn’t have done so. To meet those targets, Brown decided to implement a proposal made by Peter Lilley – social security secretary in John Major’s government – to remove a benefit paid to single parents, mostly to single mothers. It was a comparatively small sum in terms of government expenditure, but at £6 a week made a considerable difference to the lives of some of the poorest in the country.

More than a hundred Labour MPs signed a letter urging him to reconsider, and polls showed the public to be against the cut, but Blair and Brown and their advisers assessed that it would look like ‘weakness’ if they gave in, deciding that their image was more important than any other consideration. Harriet Harman – Labour’s social security secretary and its minister for women – was cast in the role of fall guy, and sent to the Commons to push the measure through.

Forty-seven Labour MPs rebelled against their government, and many of those who voted in favour did so with deep uneasiness. ‘For the first time, I voted for something I strongly disapproved of,’ wrote Clare Short, several years later. There was though no question of defeat, since it had been a Conservative idea in the first place and opposition support was therefore available. Peter Lilley stood in the voting lobby, cheerfully welcoming in Labour MPs with a call of ‘This way for the cuts.’

When Brown appeared in front of the Commons treasury committee to talk about welfare reform, noted Michael Spicer, it was not a particularly lively session. Tory members were ‘reticent to ask questions because we like what he is doing’, while Labour members were ‘silent because they don’t like what they think he is doing’.

Not present for the Commons vote was Tony Blair. He was busy hosting a showbiz party in Downing Street, where the guest list included the radio disc jockey Zoë Ball, actors John Thaw and Kevin Whateley, and actress Liz Dawn, who played Vera Duckworth in Coronation Street. Another to attend was the broadcaster Chris Evans, who had that morning signed a contract with Channel 4, worth £3 million a year, that made him Britain’s highest paid television star. The reception was no one-off event; the government had recently been revealed to be spending £1.5 million a month on hospitality.

Buried deep under the benefits cut had been an awareness that there was a particular issue in Britain with lone parents. ‘A quarter of all mothers under twenty-four in the United Kingdom are single, and have never been married,’ the former education secretary, John Patten, had noted the previous year. ‘This is compared with only about ten per cent on average over the rest of the European Union.’ A connection had been made between this fact and the supposedly high level of available benefits, and over the last few years the expression ‘single-parent family’ – originally coined as a euphemistic alternative to ‘broken home’ – came to be seen in political circles as a term of abuse.

The reform was intended by the Tories to be a first step towards rectifying the situation. In Labour hands, however, it came across as simple penny-pinching, and on that criterion it was singularly unsuccessful. The outrage that greeted the measure forced a rethink and a rejigging of other benefits that ended up costing more than the original system. But at least it was all sufficiently complicated that it generated no headlines.

Meanwhile, Brown was calling on Harriet Harman to make £1 billion worth of cuts to disability benefits. This time there was a definite policy objective. The numbers claiming disability benefit had increased sharply over the last decade, partly – it was suspected – as a way of reducing the headline rate of unemployment, and there was a belief that people were being encouraged to rely on state support even when it wasn’t necessary.

David Blunkett reported an occasion when he was a guest on a radio phone-in in 1998 and spoke to a 42-year-old caller who had had a heart bypass operation; having now recovered, the man objected strongly to having his disability benefits threatened. ‘The fact that we had enabled him to become independent,’ marvelled Blunkett, ‘to take responsibility for his life and to contribute to his own well-being for the rest of his life – when hopefully he had as much of his life before him as behind – seemed to have passed him by.’

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Even so, Blunkett, who was both blind and the child of a single-parent family, objected to Brown’s proposed cuts, saying that they would ‘make a mockery of our professions on social exclusion and the construction of a more just society’. Others too made their voices heard. ‘It is no use being tough with the poor,’ insisted Michael Cashman. ‘Be tough with the people who are breaking the rules, close up the tax loopholes, and then you will be able to balance the books.’ Most damaging of all, a group of disabled protesters overturned their wheelchairs outside Downing Street and threw red paint on the railings, in an uncomfortable echo of the demonstrations in 1994 against Nicholas Scott.

Tony Blair continued to insist, in a characteristic attempt to play to popular culture, that he was prepared to ‘go the full monty’ on welfare reform, but he wasn’t proof against that kind of negative publicity. Having come into office with the determination to transform for ever the British attitude to the welfare state, he now discovered that it was a much tougher challenge that he had been expecting.

The immediate casualty was Harman, who had taken most of the flak over single parents and, never loved in the Labour movement, was plumbing new depths of unpopularity. Janet Jones, wife of Ivor Richard, recorded a joke then circulating in which Sleeping Beauty, Tom Thumb and Saddam Hussein boast about their claims to be respectively the most beautiful, the smallest and the most hated people in the world. Consulting the Guinness Book of Records to check their claims, Sleeping Beauty finds herself listed as the most beautiful, and Tom Thumb as the smallest, but Saddam is disappointed: ‘Who’s Harriet Harman?’

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