Bagehot: More tough, less love IN A dreary Wolverhampton community centre, Emma Reynolds recently sat through a series of the hard-luck stories it behoves British MPs to hear each week. A foiled asylum-seeker was stuck in legal limbo; a mentally ill man complained about cuts to local services. Most of Ms Reynolds's petitioners had come in search of benefits, for housing, disability or unemployment, which they had applied for and been refused. Their stories were often moving. "We'll manage somehow," said the tearful woman whose husband had been ruled fit for work after 11 years on benefits with a bad heart and depression. It just makes life harder, that's all. It was a snapshot of one of Britain's poorest cities in tough times - a situation, in the official line of Ms Reynolds's Labour Party, cruelly exacerbated by the welfare reforms of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government. Labour opposed most of them: for party activists, nothing defines the difference between left and right so starkly. Yet confronted with real-life problems on the streets where she grew up, Ms Reynolds, a rising star in Labour, took a more pragmatic approach. She absorbed every sorry detail - running her forefinger along lines of tedious official correspondence as she read - and dutifully agreed to make official representations. But she promised her petitioners no relief; nor, in most cases, did she think any was due. The man in search of housing benefit for his estranged wife had mentioned that she part-owned a house, Ms Reynolds noted. A man requesting disability benefit had walked into the room easily enough. Since entering Parliament in 2010, the MP has wised up. To her zeal for social justice she has added a recognition that the welfare system is too often abused: "You see some people who are not doing anything, they're taking us for a ride, basically." Perhaps not coincidentally, she also knows this makes her constituents livid. Her party is making a similar progression - wisely, because the scepticism and anger in Wolverhampton are widespread. In 1991 only a quarter of Britons thought cutting the dole would force people into work. Now over half do. Most, to be fair, have a vastly exaggerated idea of the contribution unemployment benefit makes to Britain's £200 billion ($320 billion) benefits bill. It represents only 3% of the total; pensioners, by comparison, consume two-thirds. Yet this is less explanatory than indicative of an antipathy which could change the way Britons think about the welfare state. That is because it is fuelled not merely by a big increase in the welfare bill - under Labour, benefits to working-age people increased by over 20% in real terms - but also by an erosion of the trust and empathy on which the system depends. There are a few reasons for that. Social mobility and immigration have weakened traditional working-class communities. Five years of economic gloom have added to the resentment, especially among those who, in straitened circumstances, feel less looked after by the state than their neighbours. Either way, Labour has suffered for it. In opposing the government's welfare reforms, including an effort to ensure that entitlements do not exceed the median family income, Labour put itself against public opinion. In Labour-Tory swing seats such as Wolverhampton, a recent poll found 64% in favour of the reforms and just 9% against. Worse for Labour, this weakness links to two others: the party's spendthrift reputation and its perceived softness towards immigrants, whose drain on the welfare state is similarly exaggerated. A participant in one Labour focus group described the party as an "organised conspiracy to take my money and give it to scroungers and immigrants." Hence Labour's rethink. It was apparent in June, when Ed Miliband, the party's leader, sought to differentiate between wastrels and the truly needy. "Labour - the party of work - the clue is in the name," he protested. This liberated Liam Byrne, then the party's welfare spokesman, to develop a raft of social-democratic yet hard-edged proposals. The most eye-catching was a pledge to provide the long-term unemployed with six months of, in effect compulsory, work. The government would subsidise their wages through a tax on bankers" bonuses. This was clever politics, preserving the principle of redistribution that underpins Labour's attachment to welfare even as Mr Byrne insisted the benefits bill should fall. Another proposal, to make benefits for the over-50s commensurate with their national-insurance contributions, was similarly designed to appease the anxious left. By promising to restore a Beveridgean contributory logic to welfare, even as he threatened to abandon the principle of universality that succeeded it, Mr Byrne implied he was not merely aping the penny-pinching Tories. Tough on scrounging and its causes Last month Mr Byrne was sacked. But his successor, Rachel Reeves, another high-flying new MP and an ally of Ms Reynolds, has maintained the attack. She promises to be even tougher on the work-shy than the Tories. She also sounds less keen on the appealing but unaffordable idea that payments should reflect contributions. Left-wingers are outraged but compliant for now. Largely undetected by the public, in the brouhaha over Mr Miliband's fight with energy companies, Labour has fashioned a serious, perhaps competitive, line on one of its weakest issues. This illustrates the party's biggest advantage. The right is split, the insurgent UK Independence Party having outflanked the Tories on issues including immigration and Europe. Mr Miliband, by contrast, can push his party to the centre without suffering more than the squeals of a disappointed base. He feels unhappy there himself, which is why there is still too little prudent centrism in Labour tax-and-spending plans. Yet be in no doubt of the significance of this shift. If Mr Miliband comes to the centre, as on welfare it appears he has, his edge could be a decisive one.