Iain Duncan Smith's new think-tank, the Centre for Social Justice, offers a timely reminder that the overwhelmingly important issues of moral and social breakdown which underpin modern poverty and deprivation are simply being ignored by all major political parties, including his own. Anyone who carefully followed what IDS said about these issues while he was Conservative party leader knows that he experienced a Damascene moment on his visits to pockets of dire poverty, such as Gallowgate or Easterhouse, where he discovered that the most effective fightback against such degradation was the moral certainty and tough-love choices that fashionable opinion so relentlessly decries.

Accordingly his new centre -- situated with powerful symbolism in a building once occupied by the great Victorian social reformer Lord Shaftesbury -- is not going to be just another vehicle for great and good handwringers and earnest but conformist policy wonks. In supporting and promoting a specifically moral agenda which takes a firm view in favour of, for example, the married family and zero tolerance of drug use, it is attempting to drag the Tories onto territory that most of them find entirely foreign -- social reform -- in a way which directly challenges the fallacy that now passes for orthodoxy in the party.

This is that, to be 'relevant', the Tories have to go along with the 'cultural change' that defines modern Britain. In other words, they must tolerate and connive at transgressive behaviour and the moral blackmail of victim culture, joining the socially destructive chorus that 'authority' is 'authoritarian' and 'discriminatory'. IDS understands well that this approach leaves a trail of victims in its wake, particularly among the most disadvantaged and vulnerable. In this he is backed by those tough-minded community workers he has met in the slums of Scotland. So this centre offers the delicious prospect of a group of Tories, backed by the realistic and Labour-voting working class, in passionate opposition to the irresponsible metropolitan smoothies within their own party.

Those who make the egregious error of assuming that social reform means going with the flow of moral collapse don't get this at all. Thus the Guardian finds it baffling that IDS -- a 'right-winger' (ugh!!) -- should now apparently be going in for some ideological cross-dressing. The Telegraph, however, is more sensitive to the nuances here. Pointing out that the Tories under Michael Howard are still failing to make the breakthrough they need, it observes:

'Last month Mr Howard was warned by Lord Tebbit, the former party chairman, not to adopt a "bland, centrist, politically correct agenda" in an attempt to win new voters. Today Mr Howard will face calls from Mr Duncan Smith to go further by developing policies aimed at the inner-city poor. The deposed Tory leader, who will launch his new think tank, the Centre for Social Justice, will urge Mr Howard not to look for votes by being "all things to all people". He will urge Mr Howard to match the daring shown by Mrs Thatcher, who campaigned for working-class votes by introducing the right to buy council houses, by reaching "beyond the safety of familiar constituencies" because it was both morally right and electorally advantageous to do so. Mr Duncan Smith will say: "Nothing socially just will result from a renunciation of conservative beliefs in the family, in zero tolerance of drugs, or in high expectations of schoolchildren of every background."For too long the metropolitan establishment have announced and imposed policies that look right but don't do right. The people who suffer most from Westminster's political games are those who can least afford to. Politics has become a source of despair for many of Britain's poorest communities." '

If the Tory party has a working brain, it will listen closely to what IDS is saying. But it doesn't; so it won't.