Such a swift u-turn on such a major Budget measure is without precedent
in living memory. This humiliation for Osborne follows last years slow
motion retreat on tax credits. It happened because enough Tory MPs let
Osborne know that they would vote against the PIP cuts to make him
realise that if he pressed on, he would lose the parliamentary vote and
face an even greater humiliation. And in significant part, the actions
of those Tory MPs were due to Twitter.

PIP is a benefit that helps people with some of the extra costs caused
by long-term ill-health or a physical or mental disability. It is
designed to help with such things as preparing food, washing, getting
dressed, communicating with other people and with mobility. If the
proposal had become law more than half a million people would have faced
cuts of up to £150 per week.

Osborne had reasons to feel confident that the cuts to PIP would be
voted through without much fuss, except among those who “do not vote
Tory anyway” – to borrow a phrase used by IDS.

The PIP cuts, explicitly said to be in order to fund tax-cuts, had been
trailed in the press at the weekend before the Budget, without much
reaction to concern Osborne.

Above all, only a couple of weeks previously, Tory MPs had loyally
supported the government to override defeats in the Lords to force
through a reduction of £30 per week for sick and disabled people
receiving Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).

The ESA cuts apply to sick and disabled people who are not considered
fit for work but are considered fit for activities such as training to
prepare them for work. The reason why they had been receiving £30 more
per week than other claimants was that, due to their illness or
disability, it was recognised they would incur additional costs to help
them in their task of preparing for work.

The ESA cut had gone through in the teeth of powerfully expressed
outrage by sick and disabled people, disability charities, members of
the Lords, Jeremy Corbyn, Owen Smith (Labour’s shadow DWP) and others.
It barely registered, however, in the billionaire-owned press or the
flagship BBC news programmes, Today and the news bulletins.

Only three Tory MPs defied the party whip and voted against the cut to
ESA.

So, Osborne would have felt confident about passing the cuts to PIP.

The evening after the Budget and the next day, the press and the BBC
showed as little interest in PIP as they had to ESA. Given the number of
people affected and the sums involved, the Today programme might have
given airtime to a disabled person who would be personally affected by
the PIP cuts. There was nothing like that. For the mainstream media, the
Budget story was the Sugar Tax.

But the agenda was different – and far more democratic – on Twitter
(and other social media).

For those who do not know, on Twitter, anybody can set up a Twitter
account and then they can send out their own messages (called tweets)
and they can receive the tweets of anyone else they decide to follow.

Almost all MPs have a Twitter account.

On the evening after the Budget, a succession of well-designed tweets
started to appear on Twitter. Each one featured a picture of one of the
Tory MPs who had forced through the £30 cut to ESA , together with their
constituency and any other relevant information, such as their expenses
claims and whether they were associated with disability charities. In
some of the pictures the MP was seen posing with disabled constituents.
The text varied but typically it said “XX MP claims to care about the
sick and disabled but not enough to stop them voting to force through a
£30 per week cut for sick and disabled people on ESA”.

Most of these Tweets were retweeted hundreds if not thousands of times.
Each time that happened the MP named would receive a copy. The tweets
would soon be picked up by people in their constituency.

There were complaints. One Tory MP allegedly threatened legal action.
Some people objected to the “trolling” of MPs. The tweets, of course,
were simply repeating facts already in the public domain. All these
nonsense objections were retweeted in their turn.

Osborne had first described the tax-credit and the PIP cuts as
“necessary”, but he later conceded, when forced to drop them, that they
were not necessary at all but political choices.

Twitter highlighted how MPs had passed one shameful, unnecessary
measure, attacking the sick and disabled, and were on the brink of
passing another.

Twitter did what the press and the BBC had conspicuously failed to do.
It performed a democratic service.

Tory MPs felt the democratic heat. Osborne did the counting of votes and
withdrew the PIP cut.

Last week, Duncan Smith came in for fierce criticism after he accused Enfield council of failing to adequately manage funding cuts when it faced a backlash to plans to cut youth services. In what Doug Taylor, the leader of Enfield council, describes as an incredibly ill-informed and inappropriate intervention, the minister told the Enfield Independent:

“If you look at the successful local authorities, they are the people who have worked out what the vitally important things are that they do, and have managed to get through this process without savaging the things that really matter. My only advice to local council[s] is that if you get the balance right, you should be able to manage this in a way that is not headline news – doing it with better efficiency. It is like any company, you always face the issue of whether what you spend outweighs what you earn. Headline cuts are not the way to go.”

That such a senior and high profile member of the cabinet – with no official brief for local government – has ostensibly suggested that councils could avoid gruelling financial situations if only they were better at managing budgets, has understandably angered local politicians.

In the case of Enfield, which has had to make savings of £118m since 2010 – 49% in real terms according to a council spokeswoman – Duncan Smith’s proclamations are an affront.

Taylor insists that Enfield, like councils all over the country, has gone to great lengths to increase efficiency before even contemplating cuts to frontline services. He says the annual funding the council receives from central government has been cut by an average of £700 for every household in the borough in the past five years, and that efficiencies are no longer enough. “The £56m we need to find [as a result of the last spending review] is more than we currently spend annually on cleaning the streets, collecting the bins and lighting our streets,” he says.

Local MP Joan Ryan is particularly scathing of the secretary of state’s statement. “Iain Duncan Smith knows nothing about Enfield – that much is clear,” she says. “IDS should get his facts right, given his local authority – Waltham Forest – has also made substantial cuts. I recommend less sermonising and a better understanding of his own policies.”

Enfield’s population is rising, like many other parts of London, pushing up demand for local services and making the financial juggling act of delivering more with fewer resources even harder. Duncan Smith’s ill-informed pontifications, Taylor says, are an exercise in power without responsibility; it will be interesting to see if the MP takes Taylor up on an open invitation to visit the council and see for himself what is actually going on.

It’s bad enough that Duncan Smith is using his position to hammer councils on efficiency when he hasn’t discussed the facts with them, but let’s also not forget the impact of welfare reform. Benefit policy upheavals, for which he was architect-in-chief, have contributed immensely to the increased demand for support from local authorities just when they’re least able to provide it.

Oh, and don’t forget either that when Cameron needed to avert a backbench rebellion and magically found a £300m pot of cash to chuck at Tory councils, there were no assertions that they should improve their budget management skills instead.