Benefits

The longer the row over the benefit cap goes on, the better it will be for the Tories. The cap chimes with the public’s sense of fairness. Polls show massive public support for capping benefits at £26,000 a year for non-working households (the cap won’t apply to the disabled or war widows), and if Labour oppose it, they’ll be handing the Tories a stick with which to beat them. Chris Grayling has already declared that tonight’s vote in the Lords is ‘a test of Ed Miliband’s leadership’. Those who argue that the cap isn’t fair because it will force people to move out of their house are missing the point.

Today’s polls make grim reading for Labour. Even three months ago senior Labour or Tory people wouldn’t have thought that the Tories would be five points ahead at this point in the cycle. Part of Labour’s problem is that its positions require too much explanation. As one Number 10 source jokes, ‘Ed Miliband can do a Rubik's cube in less time than it takes him to explain his position on the cuts.’ A prime example of these overly complicated policy positions is Labour’s approach to the benefit cap. The leadership says that it is in favour of a cap in principle but against this one in practice.

During the leaders debates before the last general election, David Cameron declared that he wanted to make immigration a non-issue and he would go about it by reducing immigration numbers from hundreds of thousands a year to tens of thousands a year. He hasn’t succeeded in the second objective — more than half a million people arrived here in 2010, only 30 per cent of whom were from the EU — and he most certainly hasn’t succeeded in the first. At least if the reaction to today’s revelations about immigrants on benefits is anything to go by.

If I’d said that an MP had accused the Church of England of being too obsessed with gay marriage and women priests — and not worried enough about how God can keep young boys out of harm’s way — you’d probably imagine that a Tory had gone nuts. But this is the David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham, who has gave an interview to our Books Blog. In it, he elaborates on the theme of his new book: that his colleagues are so keen to help single mothers that they’ve lost sight of what really helps working class boys. Amongst the contributing factors, he mentions two things that may cast him out as a heretic in Labour’s secular religion: fathers, and God.   Lammy’s book, Out of the Ashes, was released yesterday. On Monday.

I spent this morning with Ed Miliband on a trip to a factory in Sunderland. Miliband was visiting the Liebherr plant there, which manufactures cranes. The centerpiece of the visit was a Q&A with the workforce. Now, a factory in the North East is not the toughest venue for a Labour leader to play. But Miliband appeared far more comfortable in this setting than he does when giving a traditional speech from behind a podium.   Unlike Miliband’s Q&A at Labour conference, the questions were not softballs or traditional left-wing fare. One set of three questions were: why don’t we close the borders, bring back national service and do more to clamp down on benefit cheats.

Freed from the shackles of elected office, Steve Norris remains an electrifying speaker. He is also refreshingly honest. So, when I met the 66-year-old former mayoral candidate at a Tory conference fringe on the future of London, he was only too happy to admit how spent his Winter Fuel Allowance: "I'm amazed by the Chancellor's annual gift. I spend it on Claret," he said. In fact, he said that when paid to the wealthy, the allowance is "a complete waste of money" and "a bribe to older voters". I mention this only because the Allowance was referred to again in a different context this week: during David Cameron's own address.

At 6pm this evening, I'm interviewing Iain Duncan Smith at a Conservative Party conference fringe meeting. He is fighting a war on at least three fronts: the welfare-to-work programme, the creation of his Universal Credit (ie, rewriting the benefits system), and producing a government response to the riots and the conditions behind them. I may put questions to him from CoffeeHousers, so if you have any please leave them below. IDS is surprisingly candid for a Cabinet member, perhaps because he wants this to be his last job in government. He isn't watching his words, worried that he'll say something to damage his promotion chances.

Finally, a good idea from the Labour conference. In his speech tomorrow, Ed Miliband will say he'd give workers priority over the jobless for social housing. This is the dividing line he was reluctant to draw when asked to by Andrew Marr on Sunday. It's a clever move, and one that recognises the resentment felt by the strivers against the welfare dependent. He will say: "The hard truth is that we still have a system where reward for work is not high enough, where benefits are too easy to come by for those who abuse the system." So councils dolling out housing should not only take need into account, but whether applicants "are working, whether they look after the property and are good neighbours." I can't see why IDS would oppose this, and perhaps consensus can be reached.

When Michael Howard offered David Cameron the pick of the jobs in the shadow Cabinet after the 2005 election, Cameron chose education. Howard was disappointed that Cameron hadn't opted to shadow Gordon Brown but Cameron argued that education was the most important portfolio. A sense of that commitment was on display today in his speech on education, delivered at one of the new free schools that have opened this term. His defence of the coalition’s plans to make it easier to sack bad teachers summed up its refreshing radicalism. He simply said, "If it's a choice between making sure our children get the highest quality teaching or some teachers changing career... I know what I choose.