Tory benefit proposals are stupid and cruel

The plan to make the unemployed work for their benefits is breathtakingly wrong

Iain Duncan Smith should think again about his workfare proposal. 

If I were a betting woman, I'd be wondering at which point Iain Duncan Smith might be scheduling introducing public stocks for the long-term unemployed. Put the lazy feckless proles into the stocks. Not all of them, just the ones who have thus far stubbornly proved themselves "hard to help" by Duncan Smith's Work Programme (widely and scathingly described as disastrous).

Let the bone-idle coves get pelted with rotten vegetables and malodorous dung by the fine upstanding working public for larks. Pelt the poor!

But this is childish. Duncan Smith isn't planning to introduce stocks for the long-term unemployed; that would mean they might get to sit down. The plan is to make people work for their benefits.

In a move rumoured to be announced at the Conservative conference, there may be plans for a US-type workfare-style scheme whereby the long-term unemployed would be required to work for their benefits, either for communities or for companies. I would have thought that being unemployed is clear-cut – you are or you aren't. However, a recent poll places me firmly in the minority.

Of the 1,930 people polled, by the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange, people strongly supported such schemes. While only 17% were interested in ensuring minimum waged jobs, more than half wanted people to work for their benefits; 75% thought that people with mental disabilities (judged fit) should still be made to work for their benefits, while a whopping 78% applied the same view to the physically disabled. However, 67% felt that unemployed mothers with young children should be excluded. The words "all heart" spring to mind.

The wider danger is that, once tweaked, this idea could swiftly morph into a righteous attack on the "something for nothing" culture, on those people said to lounge about on the dole for years, with no intention of getting a job, all the time laughing at the bleeding-heart state and its gullible taxpayers. There's a fair chance that the fact would get lost in the mix that the numbers of those who are very long-term unemployed (exceeding five years) are surprisingly small.

Duncan Smith may also clean forget to mention that the majority of benefits are claimed as supplements by those already working, but on low wages. All we would be left with is the "something for nothing" culture and the latest cunning scheme to stop it: get the work-shy to work for their hand-outs. A guaranteed crowd-pleaser. Just one problem: if the aim is to help the long-term unemployed back into work, it makes very little sense.

It seems not only unfair, but also impractical, to expect people to work unpaid while simultaneously seeking paid work. Job-hunting is an exhausting, complex, time-consuming affair, as has been demonstrated by the lamentable performance of the Work Programme. Moreover, the unemployed must surely be completely free to seek work, not semi-free. The term is "jobseeking", not "jobseeking, when I'm not labouring just to earn my benefits, so that I don't starve". What does this resemble if not a state-sanctioned form of moonlighting?

This "workfare" scheme is not only ripe for exploitation by big business, it also defeats the government's stated objective, indeed their responsibility – to give the long-term unemployed the best possible chance to find work. Yet more depressingly, it represents another attempt to change the national conversation about the unemployed.

Instead of being helped, encouraged and empowered back into work, they must be chided, chivvied and, above all, punished, placed on some modern-day version of chain gangs, including, it seems, even the physically and mentally disabled.

So go ahead, Mr Duncan Smith, announce your plan at conference –let's hope it will be recognised for the spiteful, grandstanding, illogical and self-defeating nonsense it really is.

Observer