Lilley lulls the masses

Peter Lilley MP, the Secretary of State for Social Security, visited a meeting of the Imperial College Conservative Society last Wednesday.

In an uninspired speach, he denied that his party’s divisions are any worse than those of the Labour Party. He also insisted that he had failed to notice the Tory infighting exposed by Teresa Gorman’s recent attempt to force a referendum on the European Union. Ms Gorman, the maverick MP for Billaricay, tabled the motion to hold a nationwide vote under the Ten Minute Rule. He also spoke of his plans to trim the expenditure of the Department for Social Security, (which accounts for a third of all government expenditure), and now supports twice the number of people as it did in 1979, when the Conservative Party first came to power.

With a third of this budget being spent on pensions, control of this sector is crucial to overall stability, and Mr Lilley emphasised his "success" in persuading two-thirds of those eligible for state pensions to "opt-out" and use private sector companies. He added that the UK is in the best position of any European country to deal with the world-wide problem of ageing populations, pointing out that "We’ve invested Ł600 billion to pay for pensions, which is more than the rest of Europe put together."

Mr Lilley, Member of Parliament for St Albans, defended his attempts to cut the money spent on housing support for young people, single parents and asylum seekers, insisting that the measures did have a significant effect on his overall spending.

It appeared that the Secretary of State’s proudest achievement is in cutting benefit fraud, claiming that since his appointment in 1992 his department has saved Ł1.5bn, with another Ł3bn to come. Mr Lilley emphasised that none of his predecessors had established a way of analysing the level of fraud, but that "We invented a system to measure it."

He expressed the opinion that it had been, and would continue to be successful at measuring fraud, allowing it to be better combated. The telephone hotline for benefit cheats, "Squeal on a rat", was cited as a particular example of succesful anti-fraud campaigning.

Turning to the current political situation, the diminutive Minister admitted that his party had "done our best to shoot ourselves in the foot from time to time." Ignoring suggestions that the recent Private Member’s Motion on the EU had once again emphasised divisions, Mr Lilley expressed his hope that "that is all behind us", and pointed to a group of "50 Labour MPs led by Denzil Davies" with similarly Eurosceptic views.

With the Labour Party pledging to keep to Conservative spending plans, if elected at the next General Election, the Minister denounced Gordon Brown’s promises as "not credible". Mr Lilley admitted that his preferred General Election date is 1 May, but the possibility of a Labour victory does not appear to overly worry the MP with a majority of 16,404. Speaking exclusively to Felix after the meeting Mr Lilley refused to deny that he would be a candidate for the Conservative Party leadership in the event of John Major’s resignation.