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Star Comment: IDS’s vicious election pitch

Iain Duncan Smith’s torrent of poisonous drivel on welfare “reform” yesterday was par for the course from Britain’s most hated minister.

Routine guff about how ripping up the social security safety net somehow helps people to find jobs is nothing new.

Mr Duncan Smith claims that “everything we have done” has been about finding people work.

So that includes shutting down the Remploy factories which provided work for those with disabilities? 

Launching the notorious “workfare” scheme which forced the unemployed to provide free labour to private firms in return for their benefits — and thus giving employers a stark incentive to cut back on staff they actually have to pay?

Farming out contracts to “get people into work” to privateers who consistently underperform compared to jobcentres — while slashing the number of public servants at the jobcentres themselves?

Even where Mr Duncan Smith’s vindictive policies are not directly counterproductive — and they often are — they do nothing to solve the problem of mass unemployment.

 

Jobless figures that stay stubbornly in the millions are not, as he affected to believe yesterday, the result of Labour bribing the masses to remain idle with over-generous benefits. 

Anyone who has tried to live on the dole — which has fallen, not risen, in value compared to average wages since the 1970s — can give the lie to the idea that supporting yourself on it is easy.

No, mass unemployment returned to Britain during the Thatcher years and it is the neoliberal policies followed by all governments since which have kept it here.

A government prepared to invest to solve Britain’s myriad acute problems — the housing crisis, the understaffed NHS, the dearth of social care, the ageing transport and utilities infrastructure, the growing threat of climate chaos expressed in disasters such as floods — could easily create the jobs Mr Duncan Smith claims he is trying to help people find.

But planning and investment in people rather than corporate profit is anathema to this government.

Forcing the most vulnerable to the wall through threats, harassment and sanctions is not. 

Hence the Department for Work and Pensions predilection for murderous “solutions” such as the Atos assessments which saw more than 10,000 people die within six weeks of being declared “fit for work” before the DWP decided to stop counting.

 

 

Even the minister’s shameless bid to play on anti-immigrant sentiment by blaming the welfare state for immigration is not new.

He chose to imply that business needs immigrants because British people are too lazy to work when benefits are available, rather than that immigrants come here specifically to claim benefits, which has been disproved too often even for Mr Duncan Smith’s taste.

But we’ve heard this slander of Britain’s work ethic before, not least from bosses’ clubs such as the CBI and radical-right Tory manifestos such as Britannia Unchained.

The Work and Pensions Secretary’s outburst does not change his department’s policies in any respect.

Rather it is a pitch to the electorate with one eye on 2015 — and tells us all we need to know about the sort of vicious, hard-right campaign the Tories intend to fight.

The Conservative Party is expert at divide-and-rule politics — pitting private-sector workers against public-sector workers, young against old, those with jobs against those without.

To win next year Labour needs to show it has a different narrative — one that unites Britain’s working people and stands for all of us.

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