Portillo keeps up attack on cost of welfare state
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Your support makes all the difference.THE TORY right sought to consolidate its grip on the party yesterday with a warning from Michael Portillo, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, that today's welfare state will not be financially possible in the next century.
In direct conflict with last week's call by Douglas Hurd, the Foreign Secretary, for an abandonment of the 'permanent cultural revolution' and the decrying of the state, Mr Portillo predicted that, without change, the state would do 'many, many things extremely badly'.
'I don't think that we're going to be able to provide a proper standard of living to all the elderly in the middle of the 21st century unless we make some changes in the near future between the balance of what individuals provide for their old age and what the state does.
'I think that people should have as much health care as they want and as much education for their children as they want.'
But in a reference to the expectation that individuals should increasingly make more private provision, Mr Portillo told BBC 1's Breakfast with Frost: 'We want to control what the state spends but we don't want to control what the people can have in terms of education and health.'
In a separate interview, Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, said the welfare state was invented 50 years ago. 'We need constantly to examine the extent to which the principles . . . can most effectively be applied. One of the things . . . is to see whether there's more scope for targeted benefits, for encouraging individual responsibility.'
Meanwhile Bryan Gould, Labour MP for Dagenham and former Shadow Cabinet member, says in BBC 1's Panorama tonight that paying state pensions to the well-off is a waste and that the better-off should have pensions taxed.
Michael Heseltine, President of the Board of Trade, in his first television interview since his recent heart attack, also warned of the dangers of extreme wings of the party feeling they could pull things their way. 'The danger is that the bits at the other end will snap.' Warning against overblowing the principle of 'self- help', Mr Heseltine, who returns to work part- time this week, said: 'What does the language of self-help mean to a 70-year-old living on a state pension in a council house? Unless you answer that question, you're just pandering to people's emotions.'
Thatcher denounced, page 2
Donald Macintyre on the memoirs, page 19
Tax rise risks, page 20
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