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Posted Tuesday 2nd April 2013 at 11.11pm
It'll wash out in the bath
Iain (and) Duncan Smith has called the petition asking him to live on £53 a week for a year "a stunt", on the grounds that he's been unemployed before.
1) The point is that your changes to the welfare system have made being unemployed worse - so being unemployed before your changes is neither here nor there.
2) It's one thing being unemployed for a while, and it's another thing being unemployed for a long time, or being unemployed after a long period on the minimum wage with no savings and no family to fall back on.
Obviously we shouldn't pick on IDS, or anyone else, for having money; there's nothing wrong with making money, or being born into a family that has money. It's the pretence that you know what it's like that's the problem.
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Posted Thursday 4th April 2013 at 7.09am
Matt Roberts says:
This article: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/grant-shapps-and-iain-duncan-smith-say-they-could-manage-these-cuts--so-lets-see-them-prove-it-8557033.html
agrees with me.
"The crazy thing about this is that you can reasonably defuse the preceding fantasy with a simple admission: for some decent people who have never been lazy in their lives, what’s coming is going to be really bad. You don’t even have to agree that it shouldn’t happen. You just have to stop pretending that it’s a doddle.
But Shapps and Osborne and IDS can’t do that: they have founded their argument on the division between strivers and shirkers, people with anti-gravity bootstraps who could manage on £53 a week and people who just don’t have it in them. This is why, when he’s asked if he could make ends meet under those circumstances, IDS obeys his primal political instinct and says, 'If I had to, I would.' This is why he would never think of saying: 'I don’t know, because I’ve never had to. And I know that that makes me a lucky man.'"
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