believe it or not, Bill Clinton. Ron Haskins was assertively conservative and Republican. But, on the matter of welfare reform, he was full of praise for Clinton. He had met Clinton before he became president and even then had been impressed by his detailed knowledge of the welfare system. There was only one other governor who knew as much or more. Clinton was also emphatic, regardless of his own sexual history, that people should leave college, get a job, get married and have children in that order.

Most other democrats fought reform bitterly. That Democrat attitude still has not gone. Haskins now works at the Brookings Institution which clearly has a full representation, to put it gently, of Democrats. One day Haskins found, just in time, that one of the images he was going to use for a presentation had been doctored. It was a poster with Bush and Cheney. On it had been put super-imposed message, "We hate poor people".

He said that even Clinton vetoed the reform package twice. Support from Democrats in the House amounted to a mere 17 votes. Then Clinton, at the last moment, decided not to veto the package on the third occasion. Only at this very late stage did the vote among the Democrats increase to about 100.

The achievements of the package so far?

- a 60 per cent reduction in those on welfare rolls
- a massive saving in taxation
- a major reduction 'poverty' as officially measured among lone mothers.

The disappointments?

- the rate of unmarried parenting has stopped rising but has not fallen
- black men are no more likely to have a job than previously
- there is little support in the figures for the idea that people can start on a low income job and hope to rise and rise from there.

I suggested, in the question and answer session, that getting people to marry more could be like trying to turn around an oil tanker - it takes time. People who are thinking of having sex, will not pause and say "Oh no, wait a minute. The benefit system has changed. Perhaps I won't after all."

It takes a big cultural shift. That takes place by such things as a younger sister seeing that her older sister is not having such a good life as a lone parent. She is having to drop off her children in the early hours at school or with childminders, then she is rushing to work, then going back to pick up the children and put them to bed. Not great fun. Over time, the younger sister might come to decide - or be advised - that maybe it would be better have children in the context of marriage.

Others in the room were concernd that a large amount of money was being spent on unmarried mothers in the form of child care subsidies that they would not get (?) if they were married. So lone parenting was, perhaps, still being unintentionally encouraged by the state.

UPDATE 25/6/05

Following back a 'site reference' to this website, I came across the following by someone signing him or herself 'darkhorse' on Guardian Unlimited 'The Talk'.

I notice that Bartholomew unquestioningly parrots the comments of Haskins.

It doesn't occur to him that changes in the statistics relating to single parent families and unmarried parents in the US over the 90s are almost certainly down to the fact that the US experienced a recession in the early 90s, followed by the usual economic growth cycle after a recession and the dotcom boom from 96-2000.

Instead, like a starry-eyed evangelist (or propagandist, more likely) he is, he unquestioningly accepts the spurious attribution of this improvement in income to a range of welfare reforms implemented in 96. It's as if he believes nothing else happened in the US in this period except these blessed reforms.

It so happens that Ron Haskins dealt specifically with this line of political counter-attack. Unfortunately I don't have a transcript of his remarks so I cannot authoritatively give chapter and verse. But he showed a chart which, from memory, was of the number of people on welfare benefits over several decades. This showed that periods of strong economic growth in the past have indeed had some effect. But the impact was alway relatively small and quite trivial compared to what has happened since 1996.