IDS needs to step into the real world

If he didn't live a life so detached from the rest of us, he would understand that such a statement is unmitigated claptrap.

The million young people condemned by the failings of the capitalist system to sign up for jobseeker's alliance and other benefits would love to work for a living.

Many would be prepared to undergo genuine training or work experience programmes with the prospect of a real job at the end of it.

But they can see the difference between that and the reality of being contracted out as free labour to profitable companies such as Poundland to stack shelves for their benefits.

This works out as an hourly rate of £2.25, which undermines the national minimum wage, currently standing at £6.19 an hour.

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Arrogant Duncan Smith, who faked a personal transformation to "compassionate conservatism" as part of the nasty party's efforts to rebrand itself, is now showing his true colours.

Despite the Court of Appeal undermining the very basis of the government's workfare schemes, which have never been codified as detailed regulations and presented to Parliament for approval, the Work and Pensions Secretary insists that he will go his own way.

"I am not going to give way on this. I absolutely clearly tell you this. People who think it is their right to take benefit and do nothing for it, those days are over," he snarled.

Who does he think he is? Who authorised him to drive a coach and horses through the National Insurance system into which everyone pays while in work and expects to receive specified benefits when unemployed?

Duncan Smith may feel he has the right to pimp anyone without a job to employers to exploit at no cost to themselves, but he's wrong.

The government doesn't behave this way just because ministers are a bunch of heartless multimillionaire wretches. There is a political point to their actions.

In the 1930s when three million workers were out of a job, the Tory-led national government revived the "genuinely seeking work" test, which obliged the unemployed to detail efforts to find work at pain of being denied discretionary benefits.

There were no jobs to be had, but this charade was employed to push people off benefit and to encourage the perception that they were to blame for being jobless.

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Duncan Smith and his cronies are involved in a similar softening-up job on public opinion, attempting to foster the twin fallacies that there are plenty of jobs out there and that claimants just don't want to work.

The minister has also launched a smear campaign against geology graduate Cait Reilly, who won her case against workfare in the Court of Appeal.

He sneered that "smart people" like Reilly "think they are too good for this kind of stuff," pointing out that former Tesco boss Terry Leahy started work at a supermarket stacking shelves.

Perhaps he did, but he would have been paid the rate for the job. He wasn't coerced into doing so unpaid.

That's all that Reilly and her co-plaintiff Jamie Wilson wanted - that and government investment to encourage economic growth and employment rather than the austerity programme that benefits only the super-rich.