Bruce Anderson: Duncan Smith has got it right... family breakdown is at the heart of social ills

Iain Duncan Smith is one of the most admirable men in public life. In 2001, he became leader of the Tory party, entitled to dream of power, glory, Downing Street. Two years later, he was execrated out of his post (this writer did some of the execrating).

When politicians lose high office, especially after brutal treatment, they usually also lose their appetite for the hard-graft aspects of politics. They feel entitled to a bit of glamour and prestige, not to mention a decent salary. Some of them also lose interest in their former political party, seeing no point in loyalty when there is no longer an outlet for ambition. Michael Portillo is an extreme example of this, with his weekly flounces of pique and petulance and envy.

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Unlike Mr Portillo, Mr Duncan Smith would have been justified in feeling bitter. But if he had such feelings, IDS rose above them. He had not only entered politics to be something. He wanted to do something. Even when he was Tory leader, he had concerned himself with social breakdown and the underclass. At the time, this was occasionally derided as a gimmick. That was a misreading. The interest was heart-felt, as he has demonstrated over the past four years.

Soon after losing the leadership, IDS set up the Centre for Social Justice. The name made many traditional Tories wince, for obvious reasons. "Justice" implies the resolution of a dispute or the punishment of a crime. "Social Justice" was a socialist concept, used by those who believed that the current organisation of society was criminal, and that social dissatisfactions could only be dealt with by egalitarian outcomes. But IDS had not become a socialist. He was merely signalling his intention to take the war to the socialist enemy, by a cheeky theft of their rhetoric.

One question oppressed him. Why did so many people in Britain live such wretched lives? We are the fourth largest economy in the world. The City of London is one of the greatest economic dynamos in history. Yet a few miles from the City, an underclass is trapped in sink council estates. In some postal districts of Glasgow, life expectancy is lower than in Gaza.

So IDS set out to expose the failures of the so-called welfare state and to find solutions to the crisis of social breakdown. He started by studying the origins of the modern welfare state and arrived at the conclusion which ought to strike anyone who reads the Beveridge Report, the welfare state's founding document. Our current welfare arrangements bear little relation to Beveridge's plans, and are a betrayal, both of the tough-minded idealism which animated him and of the welfare state's client.

Lord Beveridge was writing at a time when children were still brought up with rickets in Dickensian slums and when unemployment had recently been a way of life for whole communities. Beveridge believed that his proposals would eliminate the five giants of the social apocalypse: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. He thought that it was possible to achieve a complete victory over the giants and he assumed that once they were gone, the annual welfare bill would fall. There should be arrangements for the elderly and the disabled. There ought to be a casualty clearing station for those who have fallen temporarily on hard times. For the able-bodied of working age, however, welfare would merely be a safety net.

Instead, it has become a spider's web. Beveridge would be horrified to learn that many decades after the giants ought to have been banished, welfare has become a way of life - indeed, a hereditary entitlement - for a sizeable section of society. Much of the welfare state has turned into an ill-fare state.

Aware of IDS's pioneering involvement in social breakdown, David Cameron put him in charge of a Tory policy group. Later this week, it will produce a document with radical solutions. Nor will it simply appeal to the finer feelings of the wealthiest social groups. IDS's report will argue that the social and moral decay of the underclass is costing the rest of us more than £100bn a year. That does not include the fear and the heartache caused by the murders, rapes, assaults and burglaries committed by the feral products of the ill-fare state (IDS's language is somewhat more compassionate).

There is one overriding reason why Beveridge's optimism was confounded: the decline of the family. From the 1960s onwards, the UK's divorce rate rose rapidly. The crime rate followed closely behind it, as did the growth of the underclass. While the better off may be able to afford the self-indulgence of the permissive society, the poor need families. This becomes apparent when we examine the histories of immigrant groups. The family is a social multiplier. Where families held together, difficulties were surmounted. Where families disintegrated, difficulties grew. Broken families produce a broken society. Britain has the highest rate of single-motherhood in Europe, which is why we also have the highest prison population.

David Cameron has made it clear that a Tory government would ensure that the tax system recognised the importance of marriage. This is not intended to stigmatise single mothers but to rectify a ludicrous anomaly, under which a single mother receives more favourable tax treatment than a married couple.

IDS is not only interested in the macro issues of tax and welfare. On the contrary: he signalled his initial involvement in these great questions with a visit to the Easterhouse estate in Glasgow, an expensive municipal housing development with a world-class record in creating social problems and breeding criminals. Although Easterhouse ought to be demolished, a small part should be preserved as a monument to the failures of the post-war welfare state. IDS went to Easterhouse in search of little points of light. He was looking for community groups which were helping damaged people - people who had long ago lost hope - to recover the will to find their way to their own bootstraps, so that they could begin to pull themselves up. The Centre for Social Justice has been in contact with such groups all over the UK.

By now it ought to be clear that top-down initiatives can only help to solve social problems if they connect with an ethos of self-help. Beveridge may have underestimated the cultural barriers to self-help which arise from the lack of self-confidence that poverty breeds. Since Beveridge's day, the decline of the family has made the problem infinitely greater. But Jesus Christ and Norman Tebbit were right. No system of welfare will work unless it encourages its recipients to take up their bed and walk and to get on their bike.

When IDS was Tory leader, he was known as the "quiet man". The "quiet man has turned up the volume" he once famously said. That may not have been true then. It is now. His report will start a debate which will have a crucial effect on British politics and on electoral outcome. Who knows? It might also help the underclass to escape from misery.

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