IN HIS speech to the Conservative Party conference George Osborne left no room for doubt: the Tories are tough on welfare. “This country must pay its debts, drive down its deficit, pull down its taxes, and pull up its young people,” the chancellor of the exchequer told delegates in Birmingham on September 29th. He announced that he would cut social security spending by £3 billion ($4.9 billion) annually if his party won the next general election, due next May. He would do so by freezing most working-age benefits for two years, a move that will affect 10m Britons. He also committed to lowering the cap on household benefits from £26,000 to £23,000 and to limiting the time for which 18- to 21-year-olds could claim unemployment benefit.

Despite the talk of paying debts, these policies would save relatively little money. Cuts of £3 billion add up to 3% of the government deficit in the current fiscal year. Two days after the chancellor’s speech David Cameron, the prime minister, pledged tax cuts worth more than twice that. The benefit cap saves little, has proved expensive to administrate, and is in danger of making the Tories look heartless.

What, then, was Mr Osborne up to? The most obvious explanation is that cutting welfare is popular. A government study last year on views of the benefit cap found that voters support the policy by a margin of five to one. Another poll found that a majority—and even a sizeable minority of Labour supporters—agreed with freezing unemployment benefits.

The speech thus betrayed the influence of Lynton Crosby, the Conservatives’ increasingly powerful campaign guru. Mr Crosby is known for the rigour of his polls and focus groups; Tory strategists joke that he knows what voters are thinking before they do. He specialises in the use of political “wedges”: simple, eye-catching stances which prise swing voters away from opponents. The Labour Party is generally seen as soft on welfare and profligate, so (the theory goes) the more the Tories get voters to think about the difference on welfare between the two parties, the more likely they will be to vote Conservative. Mr Osborne’s announcement, stark and straightforward, was a classic Crosbyite wedge.

It was also about internal politics. The chancellor is sceptical about the “universal credit”, an ambitious attempt by Iain Duncan Smith, the welfare secretary, to consolidate six tax benefits into one payment. The scheme is delayed, over budget and fraught with IT problems. Mr Osborne is believed to want to kill it or at least control it—something the benefits cap enables him to do. By asserting his power over welfare, and tightening the screws on total household benefits, the chancellor was trying to protect the government’s reforms from his colleague’s bungling.

Finally, though a quintessentially tactical move, the chancellor’s announcement was also part of the government’s principled attempt to sharpen the incentives for work over inactivity. Senior Tories objected to the ballooning size and scope of the welfare state under the last Labour government not just because it was expensive, but because it bred dependency. Hence Mr Osborne’s insistence that the savings from the benefit freeze (which will disproportionately affect young people) should be spent on apprenticeships, and his distinction between “paying our young people for a life on the dole, or giving them the keys to a life of opportunity.”

If the Conservatives have picked welfare on which to fight the next election—and Mr Osborne’s speech suggests that it will be a central part of their pitch—that makes them the opposite of the Labour Party. Though shadow ministers avow that they will stick to the government’s spending plans, the party generally prefers to avoid the subject, instead calling for greater intervention in markets to boost living standards. The result will be a fascinating clash between a party that wants to pull the state back, and a party that would extend its remit. Next year’s election promises to be the most ideologically intense for decades.