Yesterday in parliament Liam Byrne said to Iain Duncan-Smith “Sanctions are vital to give back-to-work programmes their bite”. Not only does Byrne believe in forced labour he thinks it should be enforced by withdrawal of benefits. Byrne has also used the strivers v shirkers rhetoric that sought to divide the poorest sectors of society and have them fighting one another.
Byrne is Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, their very own Iain Duncan-Smith. Byrne “worked for the multi-national consulting firm, Accenture and merchant bankers, N M Rothschild & Sons, before co-founding a venture backed technology company, e-Government Solutions Group, in 2000 before entering parliament.”
It’s not clear what qualification and life experiences Byrne has that makes him suitable to be head of Labours welfare department. Baron Freud who is head of the present governments welfare reform also has an investment banking background. I wrote elsewhere that this was like putting the fox in charge of the chicken shack.
Neither Freud or Byrne have any idea at all of what they are doing to ordinary people: Money people who survey the wasteland they are creating from the ivory towers of ignorance and ideology. Byrne likes to be interviewed beside photographs of Tony Blair. Maybe this indicates the share a common set of values and work within the same moral universe that turns black into white and deception becomes just another word for truth.
That the Labour Party has such a person in charge of its welfare policies shows that it is bust completely. In some way I dislike Iain Duncan-Smith less than Byrne because he is doing what you would expect from a party that represents money. Byrne is just another name to add the list that is headed “Blair” – the list of those who have betrayed ordinary people for mere money or power.
Welfare Sorrows
