Iain Duncan Smith became Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in May 2010 – a role he has held ever since, despite efforts by David Cameron to unseat him in the 2012 reshuffle. He has virtually no further-education qualifications and spent several months on the dole after leaving the Scots Guards in the recession of 1981. But the next year he married a very wealthy woman, the daughter of a very wealthy man, and he and his wife and four children still live in a house rented from his father-in-law on his wife’s father’s estate: he became an MP in 1992, inheriting Norman Tebbit’s safe constituency of Chingford. Whatever Iain Duncan Smith’s experience of unemployment thirty-two years ago, it’s safe to say that in thirty years he hasn’t had money worries – except when he became Leader of the Opposition and it was discovered he’d given his wife one of those plum “assistant” jobs which used to be a bonus for the spouse or child of an MP.
Betsy Fremantle Smith was paid £18,000 from Parliamentary Staffing Allowance. The Commons Standards Committee, investigating the situation in 2003, found that she was doing non-constituency work which should have been paid for out of Short Money. IDS was acquitted of deliberate wrong-doing and was not sanctioned of any MP benefits: but while his Department of Work and Pensions actively makes use of tip-offs to catch people claiming money they are not entitled to (whether they are doing so deliberately or out of the same honest confusion that led IDS to pay his wife money he was not entitled to claim) Iain Duncan Smith still harbours vindictive feelings towards the two officials who uncovered his own wrong-doing.
The difficulty with Iain Duncan Smith is not how to expose his hypocrisy, but how much of it can be fitted into a few hundred words. He has four children, yet argues that families with more than two children ought to be sanctioned: in 2009 he took six months paid leave without notice to care for his wife when she was desperately ill, yet has instigated changes in benefit to ensure that neither sick people nor their carers will be supported. In 1981, jobless and unqualified, he took full advantage of the welfare safety net to claim benefits for months while looking for suitable work, yet in a recession as bad as that of thirty years ago he claims graduates are “snooty” if they don’t agree to work for Poundland for free. While attending further education for two short periods, IDS gained no qualifications, and asserts that shelf-stackers are more valuable than scientists. While benefiting hugely from MP expenses, Iain Duncan Smith tells many untruths about the cost of people claiming disability and welfare benefits.
Iain Duncan Smith has made many speeches in favour of law and order. Yet when IDS’s workfare sanctions were ruled unlawful by the courts, instead of accepting that millions taken unlawfully would have to be repaid and that people unlawfully made to work for commercial organisations for free had a claim to minimum wage for their hours (or, if determined to fight lawfully for welfare, proceding to the Supreme Court for a further appeal) IDS decided to have emergency legislation passed making his unlawful sanctions retroactively lawful.
Iain Duncan Smith lives in a large and comfortable home which he does not own and which it’s doubtful he pays market rent for, yet has instigated the bedroom tax. The idea behind the “bedroom tax” is that the housing shortage can be remedied not by building more social housing or by preventing bankers from gambling on house price rises, but by forcing people who live in social housing and have a “spare room”, to move out into private rented accommodation of a more suitable size. This won’t save money at any level. (Iain Duncan Smith calls this the ending the spare-room subsidy.)
Even where none of these apply, the idea that everyone who lives in a council house can easily find a new place to move to is itself false: even if it were true, moving home is expensive and disruptive: being evicted for non-payment of rent still more so. Most people whom the bedroom tax affects are in work – being forced to move house to a location not of their choice will massively disrupt their childcare, their travel costs, and their children’s education.
But Iain Duncan Smith calls the £14 per week that on average families in social housing claiming housing benefit will lose “the spare room subsidy” and complains that the term bedroom tax is inaccurate. To IDS, one of the Cabinet’s millionaires, living in subsidised housing for thirty years and earning over £130K a year with a £90K a year expenses budget, £14 a week may seem a trivial subsidy. As trivial as the £18,000 which he accidentally paid to his wife.
Update: Please sign: We call for a Cumulative Impact Assessment of Welfare Reform, and a New Deal for sick & disabled people based on their needs, abilities and ambitions and No freeze or cut to minimum wage. Thanks!
