ON ONE reading, David Cameron's speech on welfare on June 25th was a bold sketch of what a Conservative welfare state might one day look like. Never mind that the government's previous big idea—the “universal credit”, meant to simplify benefits and make work pay better—is not yet operational. Mr Cameron is looking beyond the next election, and the constraints of coalition with the Liberal Democrats, to a welfare system that, for working-age people, is a safety net rather than a smothering comfort blanket.

In targeting working-age claimants, the prime minister has some powerful backing. The overall number of adults living on benefits has been bizarrely immune to economic circumstances. Polls suggest the public is firmly behind a squeeze on able-bodied recipients. Some of Mr Cameron's ideas are questionable, however.

One is to target some of the 385,000 people aged under 25 who receive housing benefit to live independently (out of just over 5m recipients in total). Mr Cameron asked whether that was fair, at a time when many youngsters live with their parents while saving to move out. This continued the justice argument that has underpinned some of the coalition's previous reforms: the idea that welfare claimants should not enjoy lifestyles, or be able to live in places, that ordinary working people cannot afford. But half of those young claimants are themselves already parents. Some have a background of abuse.

The prime minister also reprised the old Tory theme of feckless families. Why, he asked, are welfare recipients spared the sort of financial calculations that working people face when they contemplate having a child? Without specifying a policy, he seemed to be edging towards a view of appropriate family size for welfare claimants, of a maximum of two or three children. Yet there is little international evidence that fertility is stimulated by childbearing subsidies; it may not be curtailed by their erosion. And punishing parents risks harming blameless children.

But perhaps the biggest weakness in Mr Cameron's case is that, in other ways, he has yet to relinquish the notion of welfare as a warm blanket. Other than promising to stick to a pledge to protect them during this parliament, Mr Cameron had nothing to say about the array of universal pensioners' benefits introduced by the previous, Labour, government. The winter fuel allowance, for example, costs around £2 billion ($3.1 billion), about the same as housing benefit for under-25s. Means-testing the payment of the allowance, and the free television licences to which all pensioners are currently entitled, would save £1.4 billion, reckons the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Pensioners have so far been much less affected by the coalition's austerity policies than younger people.

It may be sensible to outline future welfare cuts so that their victims are forewarned. More victims there will surely be: George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, envisages finding another £10 billion in welfare cuts by 2016, on top of those already announced (but mostly not yet implemented). But wouldn't a prime minister committed to a leaner welfare system soften up pensioners too—even though, unlike poor youngsters, they tend to vote? Another view of Mr Cameron's welfare sally is that it was less bold thinking than cheap politics, designed to cheer the Tory right and turn the screws on Labour.