An impressive coalition of Scottish voluntary organisations has been formed in response to the Government’s latest proposals for reform of the system of Incapacity Benefit (IB). The reforms will have the aim of moving at least one third of current IB recipients into jobs.

Under the name of the Scottish Campaign for Welfare Reform the alliance includes organisations which are household names – Barnardo's, Children 1st, Leonard Cheshire, Citizen’s Advice, SAMH, the Iona Community, Margaret Blackwood, Capability Scotland, Enable, One Plus – along with more specialised groups such as the Child Poverty Action Group, the Poverty Alliance and the Scottish Low Pay Unit. The STUC is another supporter as is the Scottish Local Government Forum Against Poverty. At its April meeting SCVO’s elected Policy Committee also endorsed the campaign.

The voluntary sector is sometimes criticised for sidelining its campaigning in favour of expanding its role in public service delivery. The organisational membership of this campaign rebuts that charge.  At least twelve of the members are major providers of public services, proving once again that the sector’s vocation of public advocacy is alive and kicking.

Twenty years ago another voluntary sector alliance was formed in Scotland to oppose Mrs Thatcher’s welfare reforms. Unlike today’s campaign the 1980s one comprised principally the specialised anti-poverty groups and the trades’ unions with support from SCVO and many local Councils for the Voluntary Sector. There was little support from what was then a much smaller group of voluntary sector service providers.

If today’s campaign has the advantage of a wider base of organisational support it faces a markedly different balance of challenges and opportunities. The 1980s campaign drew strength from a mood of general Scottish opposition to, indeed demonisation of, Mrs Thatcher. It had ready parliamentary allies in an opposition Labour Party in which Scots MPs with expert knowledge of Scottish poverty such as Robin Cook and Gordon Brown were increasingly prominent. And it had some specific Scottish issues around which to coalesce, for example the proposal to replace the system of demand led special needs allowances on which many of Scotland’s poorest people relied with the budget capped Social Fund.

On the other hand Mrs Thatcher was impregnable behind her large English majority and Labour MPs shied away from emphasising Scottish particularities. Also, somewhat ironically, the Conservative government, in the interest of concealing rising unemployment, was busy creating the very system of IB which the Labour Government now wants to dismantle.

The Scottish campaign will have to operate in a very different environment. Facing a Labour government and with most Scottish Labour MPs loyalists of Brownite if not Blairite hue the campaign will have to look principally to the Liberal Democrats and the SNP for Westminster allies.

There are no obvious successors to Brown and Cook as poverty experts. Although parts of Scotland have an abnormally high dependence on IB a distinctive Scottish interest is less marked. There is a broad if tepid consensus that the IB system is flawed, but poverty issues generally probably have less salience than in the 1980s. Pressurising people into the labour market at a time of high employment is politically more acceptable than at a time of record unemployment though the recent increases in unemployment and tighter constraints on public expenditure, including a cut of 30,000 jobs from the Department of Welfare and Pensions will increase the political risks.

The new factor is the Scottish Parliament. The record shows that the executive will do all it can to avoid benefit reform as a reserved issue. But with next year’s elections looming, the Labour/Lib Dem coalition, already fragile after the Dunfermline by-election result, will be subject to increasing strains.

If the Scottish campaign can marshall its case convincingly it could succeed in mobilising the Scottish Parliament behind its campaign to persuade Westminster to think again.