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Birthday boy IDS gets card — from bedroom tax victims

Work and Pensions Secretary's 60th coincided with the 1-year anniversary of the housing benefit cut

Mansion-dwelling Tory minister Iain Duncan Smith got a birthday card with a difference yesterday from tenants suffering under his bedroom tax.

The Work and Pensions Secretary, who lives in a £2 million country estate with at least four spare bedrooms, was celebrating his 60th birthday in the week his cruel tax reached its first anniversary.

Unite union activists marked the occasion by delivering a giant card to Mr Duncan Smith’s department.

It was signed by some of the 600,000 people stripped of housing benefit since last April and Labour MPs campaigning to end the attack on Britain’s poorest people.

Unite assistant general secretary Steve Turner called on the Tory to “reflect on the misery his creation has caused” as he enters his seventh decade.

“It has brought nothing, but hardship and suffering to the already vulnerable and should be scrapped immediately,” he said.

London tenant Carol Vincent was among Unite Community anti-bedroom tax activists who handed the card in at the Tory’s Whitehall hideaway.

Ms Vincent has been robbed of over £40 every week — despite the fact she cares for her terminally ill daughter’s children at her home.

“I take care during the week of my grandchildren,” she told the Morning Star.

“I’m being made to pay another £40.15 a week because I have more than two spare rooms but they are occupied most of the week.

“The people who can least afford it are being butchered once again.”

Labour MP Linda Riordan called on Mr Duncan Smith to come and meet people affected by his tax in her Halifax constituency.

She said: “I want him to come with me to see people in wheelchairs, living in a small flat, paying an extra £14 a week because they have to store medical equipment in their spare room.

“Can that be right? No.

“Attacking the disabled is beyond belief — Thatcher wouldn’t have gone there.”

Left Labour MP Grahame Morris said the Tory would scrap his bedroom tax “if he has any heart.”

And he pointed out: “In truth, it hasn’t saved a penny piece.

“People have been forced into more expensive private-sector rented accommodation.”

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