Politics & Power Quote by Patricia Hewitt

Policy nostalgia is doing a lot of quiet work here. Hewitt’s sentence is built to sound like a modest bit of institutional memory, but it’s really an argument about legitimacy: today’s “welfare reform” isn’t a harsh new turn, she implies, it’s the responsible continuation of Labour’s own modernizing tradition. By anchoring present policy to “the Labour Government in the eighties,” she reaches back to a period often framed as pragmatic, fiscally disciplined, and reform-minded - a useful shield when welfare changes risk looking punitive.

The key phrasing is “helping lone mothers come into work.” “Helping” softens coercion; “come into work” presents employment as an almost natural destination rather than a forced reclassification of caregiving as idleness. “Lone mothers” is emotionally charged but politically strategic: it invokes a sympathetic group while also positioning them as a workforce not yet fully activated. The subtext is the familiar Third Way idea that social justice should be delivered through labor-market participation, not primarily through cash support.

Hewitt also narrows the battlefield. She doesn’t argue whether work requirements are good; she reframes the question as continuity versus novelty. If these measures were “very new” once but are now normal, then opposition can be painted as backward-looking. That temporal move - innovation then, common sense now - is how governments sell contentious reforms as overdue updates rather than ideological choices, especially when “reform” risks being read as cuts by another name.