On Friday evening, Iain Martin from the Wall Street Journal broke the news that the Chancellor and Secretary of State for Work and Pensions were close to agreeing a compromise on welfare reform.

“Under the proposals, If IDS can deliver the multi-billion savings that the Treasury demands, close to £3 billion of the savings will then be ring-fenced for him to use for his welfare reform programme.”

Welfare reform is an important indicator in signalling how the Coalition will square the circle of having to deliver both budget cuts and long lasting reform. In one corner you have the Treasury, focused on cutting state spending. In the opposing corner is IDS, the ‘quiet man’ who has spent much energy contemplating how to end state dependency. In the middle there is a £110 billion annual spend, which has failed to deliver opportunity, respect or engagement.

It is an open secrete that IDS threatened to resign if George Osborne had announced a benefits freeze in June’s emergency budget. That IDS is being an iron-willed Secretary of State should not have come as a surprise to anyone. This is his chance to implement the vision he has been working so hard on in the last four years, through his think-tank, The Centre for Social Justice. It is understandable if IDS believes that David Cameron appointed him because our leader wanted IDS to ‘CSJ’ the system.

But, having said all that, we are not in 1997. There isn’t an over-heating financial sector that the Government can use as a never-ending cash machine to fund projects. Politics is the art of the possible and at the moment it is not possible for a non-ring fenced department to ignore its budget tightening responsibility. The state of the economy cannot be ignored otherwise the long-term consequences will be negative for all of us.

Compromise is key, and the news that IDS and George Osborne are close to agreeing a deal is important as it signals a possible path for the inevitable other disputes that will arise. Cuts without reform will not resolve the problems this country faces. Reform without cuts is pointless because if the state continues to head towards bankruptcy all the good work will eventually be undone.

As The Times (within the paywall) reported this morning, Trimdon Labour Club has poured its last pint.  The club where Tony Blair repeatedly popped along to when he wanted to connect with traditional working class voters closed yesterday.  It is a shame that Mr Blair couldn’t put his hand in his pockets to help the venue that helped him so many times.

The closure is just the latest chapter in the sad decline of British working men’s clubs.  In the 1970s, there were over 4,000 working men’s clubs.  Now, there are little more than 2,000.  The decline of working mens’ clubs creates a shell in the community of towns and villages across the country.

The Working Men’s Clubs organisation is one of the most important organisations in the country. It provides an important glue to help hold our towns and villages together. They provide great community facilities, an excellent social setting, great banter and excellent value drinks. At the same time as other pubs are ripping their dartboards and pool tables out to make way for sometimes dubious claims to ‘gastropub’ status, the CIU constitution ensures that each club must have a board and a pool table. Ever since my Dad took me to some of the Working Men’s Clubs around the County Durham area for a pint or two, I have been a massive fan of the Working Men’s Club movement.

The sad truth is, unless the decline is arrested, working men’s clubs will become an increasing rarity.  In an age where politicians talk about cooperatives and community involvement, the working mens’ clubs, the living breathing embodiments of such ideas, are in steep decline.  They surely embody a lot of what the ‘big society’ should be about.  Communal meeting places, run by enthused local volunteers and often acting as the beating heart of communities.  The removal of a working me’s club often only serves to atomise communities further and diminish community spirit.

There are many factors that have caused the decline of the movement.  Some of these factors are irreversible and societal. Some are connected with the tragic deindustrialisation of the the 1960s, 70s and 80s that hollowed out too much of working class life and, all too often, removed the vital glue from communities.

But other factors can be changed.  Clubs are suffering because they cannot afford to pay the extortionate fees of BSkyB, so are losing the football and cricket watching crowds to the pub chains.

The smoking ban was introduced completely ignoring the views of the working mens’ club movement.  As the General Secretary of the CIU says the ‘no compromise’ approach adopted by last Government has left elderly and infirm CIU members standing outside in the cold. Surely we can reach a compromise where working men’s clubs are enabled to have properly ventilated ’smoking rooms’ if their members desire and their staff assent?

And that is on top of the other factors that are causing pubs around the country to struggle.

The decline of working men’s clubs is another example of how, all too often, working class communities have been ignored and marginalised.  Hopefully, the working men’s club movement can play a reinvigorated role in reinvigorating communities in the coming years.

At the risk of turning this into a site with a slightly peculiar focus on bin emptying policies, I have to take the equal risk of disagreeing with my Platform 10 comrade Fiona Melville, who wrote on the subject last week.

I understand Fiona’s point about local autonomy.  However, we shouldn’t miss the fundamental point that incentivising better behaviour towards the environment is likely to have a far more positive effect than forcing people to act in a certain way.  A simple understanding of social psychology would confirm that to be the case.

I wrote about this in a TRG pamphlet earlier this year and used an episode of the Royle Family as an example of the negative impact of enforced environmentalism.  As part of Caroline Aherne’s always beautifully crafted working class comedy, a common thread was that of various characters complaining about having to pay 5p for a carrier bag for the sake of the ‘environment’.

It symbolised the resentment at the use of compulsion rather than persuasion and incentivisation.  The top down approach of compulsion was symbolised by the bin tax or the policy of certain supermarkets of charging for carrier bags.

Instead of compulsion, policy makers and businesses should be focusing on persuasion and incentivisation.  That is why the Tesco approach of awarding Green points and incentivising environmentally aware behaviour is far more effective than the Marks and Spencer/ bin tax approach of compulsion.

Incentivisation makes the citizen consider their actions and respond in a much more positive way than compulsion.  Compulsion creates resentment and can have a negative impact on behaviour. That is why a shift from a bin tax approach was quite correct and is likely to be environmentally beneficial.

History is littered with examples of the judiciary almost arbitrarily ruling against trade unions.  Taff Vale and the Astbury Judgement during the General Strike are two of the numerous examples.  To that list can be added the High Court’s judgement against Unite on Monday.

This is not about the rights or wrongs of the BA strike (undoubtedly BA has to modernise in a changing global aviation industry).  This is about whether workers have a legitimate right to withhold their labour, following a ballot.  Any pluralist democracy should recognise the right for workers to organise and the right for workers to strike.  If workers vote to withdraw their labour, then that right should be respected.

That is clearly not what the British judiciary think.  They declared the BA strike illegal on the flimsiest of grounds and the most minor technicality.  An act of judicial activism made all the more astonishing given that 80% of voting staff had voted for a strike on an 80% turnout (not an easy decision to make given the loss of earnings involved).

It is yet another reminder that an increasingly active judiciary is playing more and more of a role in the public policy process. And it is worth reminding ourselves that the judiciary is probably the most unrepresentative of all the professions.  The judiciary come from a shockingly small sample of society – some 85% of senior judges were educated in public schools.  We should be asking ourselves whether such an unrepresentative, unaccountable body should be playing such a political role.

The role of the judiciary should be to uphold the law rather than make it.  The role of the judiciary should, in the field of industrial relations, be to be a neutral arbiter between business and unions.  At the moment, it seems that the judiciary is heavily slanted against trade unions – neutralising the power of the ballot.  Whatever you think of trade unions or this particular strike, the right to strike after a ballot should surely be respected.

LORD NORTON OF LOUTH “I spend half of each week in Hull teaching about the British constitution and the other half in Westminster trying to save it.”

The Conservative Party, despite myths to the contrary, has always been a driver of constitutional reform. In 1979, the departmental select committee system was one of the measures that we introduced to hold our ministers to their decisions. An executive with uncurbed power makes people feel powerless, and this Labour government has always attempted to centralise even further, and if re-elected will drive it into the ground. Labour has been crushed by the overwhelming dominance of political authoritarians – the state is the answer to all our society’s woes, and nothing will stand in their way. Labour’s constitutional vandalism has crippled parliament, and now it’s up to us to save it.

A Conservative government constantly asks two essential questions: Does this action enhance personal freedom? And does it advance political accountability? Alienation from our political institutions has led to the rise of the fringe extreme which have infiltrated our communities, and spread false ideas, despite evidence proving the opposite. So this is hopefully (if I can find the time between my upcoming exams!) the first in the series of articles examining how our radical reform agenda can save our political institutions.

Firstly : A British Bill of Rights.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights has strongly recommended the adoption of a British Bill of Rights. Gordon Brown said he supported one in the past, but has now fallen back onto spinning a line that the Conservatives want to take away the rights of our citizens which is nonsense. That he can backtrack on such serious reform in order to play party politics shows how shallow his commitment is.

The main Conservative suggestions for additional rights in a BBOR are the right to trial by jury, and the placing of strict limits on administrative penalties without due process of law. Other possibilities are rights for victims, habeas corpus, equality before the law, and good administration, all of which have been eroded.

The HRA is not entrenched, save for the obligation to interpret all legislation, including future legislation, compatibly with Convention rights. It thus entrenches the ECHR rights against implied repeal, but leaves Parliament free to pass incompatible legislation if it makes clear that is its intention – all of which Labour have done mercilessly.

Dominic Grieve has stressed the importance of creating a document with greater public resonance than the Human Rights Act  one which can be owned by the British people. We must seize that chance.