Advance warning

We can't say we haven't been warned.

David Cameron today threatened that if he is elected Prime Minister, he will be 'as radical a social reformer as Mrs Thatcher was an economic reformer'.

Thatcher, of course, was a radical social reformer herself. She blamed things like 'welfare dependency' and 'illegitimacy' for causing poverty. Eighteen years of this approach under Thatcher and Major had the effect of tripling the number of children growing up in poverty.

But Cameron's approach will be very different from Thatcher's. Like Thatcher, he believes that 'welfare dependency' causes poverty, but instead of talking about 'illegitimacy' and 'bastardy', he talks about 'family breakdown'. And one of the few concrete Tory policies at the moment is to adopt right-wing American 'workfare' policies which have been proved to increase absolute poverty, which Thatcher wanted to try but wasn't able to.

So the 'radical reform' involves warmed over Thatcherism with more politically correct language and nastier policies. In what way exactly is this a sign that the Tories have stopped being the 'nasty party'?