Leadership Quote by David Cameron

Conditional compassion is doing the heavy lifting here. Cameron’s line wraps austerity-era welfare reform in the language of reassurance: “we will” repeated like a drumbeat, a promise of competence and benevolent state capacity. But the promise comes with a gate: “if you can work, and if you want to work.” The syntax creates a moral sorting mechanism before any policy arrives. Help is available, the sentence implies, but only for the deserving.

That’s the subtext driving the rhetorical warmth. “Training,” “support,” and “advice” sound like investment, not cuts; they shift the welfare state’s role from provider to coach. It’s a neat cultural pivot: unemployment becomes less a structural problem (a weak job market, regional decline, precarious work) and more a matter of employability and attitude. “Get you going” carries a faint parental note, implying inertia that needs correcting. “Back at work” presumes work is the natural resting state, a return to order.

The context is modern British politics’ obsession with being tough and tender at once: reassure anxious middle voters that welfare won’t be a blank cheque, while claiming the moral high ground of helping people help themselves. Cameron’s “everything we can” is deliberately vague, expansive in tone and elastic in meaning; it can cover real services or justify tighter conditionality and sanctions. The line works because it sells discipline as care, turning enforcement into a form of kindness.