Supreme Court to hear Government’s workfare appeal

On Monday 29 July 2013, the Supreme Court of England and Wales, will consider the Department for Work and Pension’s (DWP) appeal against the judgment of the Court of Appeal which unanimously held that the Regulations under which most of the Government’s "Back to Work" schemes were created were unlawful and had to be quashed.

Supreme Court to hear Government’s appeal on the “Back to Work” Regulations

The ruling which was handed down on 12 February 2013 was a huge setback for the DWP whose flagship reforms have been beset with problems since their inception.

The case was brought by our clients Cait Reilly, who was made to stack shelves in Poundland for two weeks, and Jamie Wilson, who was stripped of his Jobseeker’s allowance for 6 months after refusing to participate in a scheme which required him to work 30 hours a week for six months for free.

The Court of Appeal in its ruling held that over a two year period the Government unlawfully required hundreds of thousands of unemployed people to work without pay and unlawfully stripped tens of thousands more of their subsistence level benefits.

In March 2013, following the judgment, Iain Duncan Smith not only applied for permission to appeal but also took the wholly extraordinary step of rushing through parliament - The Jobseekers (Back to Work Act) 2013 - emergency legislation which overturned the Court of Appeal’s judgment and retrospectively declared lawful what the Court of Appeal had declared unlawful. That legislation, is the subject of a fresh judicial review challenge4 but it make the Government’s appeal to the Supreme Court academic because the law has now retrospectively changed since the Court of Appeal judgment.

"The decision of the Supreme Court on the DWP’s appeal will in the main be academic because the Government has already retrospectively changed the law to overturn the Court of Appeal’s judgment. However, the Supreme Court will also be considering our clients’ cross appeal in which we argue that the DWP is under an obligation to publish clear and accessible information about these schemes for jobseekers so that those like our clients understand what the schemes are and what can be lawfully required from them"

Tessa Gregory, solicitor, Public Interest Lawyers
Source; PIL

Watch this hearing on Monday at 10.30am on Sky Courts…

R (on the application of Reilly and another) (Respondents) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Appellant)

Court 2 | 10:30

Source; Sky Courts

The Great Crapsby: Why Iain Duncan Smith isn’t all he seems

The Great Crapsby. Artwork by Dan Murrell for the New Statesman

Like Fitzgerald’s doomed, self-fictionalising hero Jay Gatsby, the Work and Pensions Secretary has constructed a personal narrative for himself that doesn’t quite take in all the facts. Look deeper, and you discover the powerful ideology and lack of empathy that motivates his politics.
BY SARAH DITUM PUBLISHED 29 MAY 2013 8:39

It’s a bold play for Iain Duncan Smith to reference F Scott Fitzgerald in the course of his tedious, risible political thriller, The Devil’s Tune.

 A female character approaches a grandiose house:

“Laura was reminded almost instantly of The Great Gatsby. She smiled at the absurdity […]”

(Anyone who’s battled through this shockingly bad novel will feel the absurdity if not the smile.)

A bold play, but perhaps not a wholly inappropriate one, since at least one of Duncan Smith’s barely distinguishable characters owes a debt to Gatsby himself. Democratic presidential pretender Kelp is the epitome of the American dream, according to the novel – an ex-military man who has made his own myth and risen from dirt, with the help of some dubious money and connections. He’s also a deeply crooked politician.

Iain Duncan Smith has his myths too.

He’s the “quiet man”, the man who had the “Easterhouse epiphany”, a man whose compassion for the poor drove him to found the Centre for Social Justice, where his honest intentions become honest research. He’d like it to be believed that he – like Gatsby – has hauled himself up from common stock, but that’s not quite true. Nor are many of the other things that are widely believed about him, but he is like Gatsby in one regard: he’s a great work of self-fictionalising. The end result, sadly, is no match for the luminous Mr Jay.

Let us think of IDS instead as the Great Crapsby.

The narrative of the Great Crapsby is one of fall followed by resurrection, hinging on a single dramatic incident of enlightenment. Following his unlikely victory, Duncan Smith was a humiliation as Conservative party leader, his reign of just over two years was marked by embarrassment and ineffectiveness. His pitiful parliamentary performance won him the name “Iain Duncan Cough” in Private Eye, and having once betrayed Major, Duncan Smith reaped the disloyalty of his party in turn.

After he was deposed in 2003, it seemed plausible that he would vanish into the political scrub. Instead, he founded the Centre for Social Justice – the allegedly independent think tank that would do so much to promote and shape Conservative policies on welfare and society, and that established Duncan Smith’s credentials to take on the work and pensions portfolio.

Stories of the CSJ’s origins routinely mention something called the “Easterhouse epiphany”:

“It was on the Easterhouse Estate in Glasgow where I began to appreciate the scale of social breakdown occurring in Great Britain,”

writes Duncan Smith in one of the Centre’s publications;

“The CSJ was born through a visit to Easterhouse Estate in Glasgow,”

he says in another.

In 2010, Tim Montgomerie described the Easterhouse visit as the moment

“something suddenly clicked […] he realised here was his personal mission and a mission for the Tory party.”

So far, so Damascene. And it’s worth remembering that the apparatus of piety plays a large part in the iconography of IDS – he has claimed that:

“My Catholic background […] has become integral to everything I do.”

But – besides people saying that it happened – what evidence is there for this miraculous moment of enlightenment? 

Not, it turns out, very much at all.

In 1994, Duncan Smith (then working in the Department of Social Security, predecessor to the Department of Work and Pensions) wrote an editorial for the Mail (the text of which is copied here). In it, he decried the growth of spending on welfare since the foundation of the welfare state; he claimed that the benefits system had betrayed the intentions of the Beveridge Report, and was being defrauded and abused on a vast scale.
Worst of all, he alleged, the welfare state had created a class incapable of self-help:

“[T]he system discourages people from getting a job […] people become trapped, remaining dependent on the State rather than on their working abilities.” His answer? “There should be just one, income-assessed benefit.”

In 2010, Duncan Smith (now work and pensions secretary) delivered a speech. In it, he claimed the benefits system had betrayed the intentions of the Beveridge Report, that it was being defrauded and abused on a vast scale, and worst of all, that it was counterproductively “supporting – even reinforcing – dysfunctional behaviour.” His answer? Universal credit.

Over 16 years, there was only one appreciable difference in the rhetoric: in 1994, Duncan Smith claimed that it was particularly appalling to see welfare spending expand during a time of economic growth; by 2010, the argument for urgent action was that “the economy isn’t growing as we had hoped”. But that change is simply a matter of shaping the argument to the political conditions. Whatever Iain Duncan Smith discovered in Easterhouse in 2002, it did nothing whatsoever to alter his politics. His diagnosis and prescription for the welfare state has remained constant, from the Nineties to now.

The “epiphany” is a useful fiction, nothing more.

It feels painful to impugn Duncan Smith’s honour like this, because the perception of him as a decent man is so strong, even among those who oppose his politics. In some ways, his ineptness as a party leader has come to be seen as evidence of his virtue: his failure as a politician is proof of his good faith. But a certain taste for self-fashioning has long been evident in him. In 2002, Michael Crick discovered what might kindly be called exaggerations in Duncan Smith’s CV. It stated that he had attended the Universita di Perugia. This was not true: instead he had been to a language school in Perugia, and had not received any qualifications. Duncan Smith is a Perugia man in precisely the same way that grifting Gatsby was “an Oxford man”.

When he isn’t bloating his qualifications, Duncan Smith can be found putting on the poor mouth and talking up his experience of poverty. Having haplessly claimed that he could survive on £53 a week “if I had to”, Duncan Smith was forced to plead personal experience. After he left the army, he told the Mail, he lived illegally with his then-girlfriend, now-wife Betsy Freemantle, in a ragged bedsit.

“They say love makes everything work,”

said Duncan Smith, although presumably the fact that his partner is the daughter of a monied aristocrat and the recipient of an inheritance in her own right also went some way to making everything work. Whatever privations the Duncan Smiths may have experienced, there was always the comforting hand of wealth to keep them from plunging into the underclass. They now live – rent-free – in the Freemantle ancestral home.

So he may not know directly what it is to be truly poor, his defenders can say, but at least he has studied the issue through the Centre for Social Justice. Well, that depends on what it means to study something. The CSJ has published report on report, all of them with the curious effect of reinforcing its founder’s prior positions and supporting government policy.(The intimacy of the CSJ and DWP is underlined by the fact that, until late 2012, Philippa Stroud was both a special advisor to Duncan Smith at the DWP and paid by the CSJ to be co-chair of its board of advisers.) Few of us have the divine inspiration that lets our hypotheses precisely anticipate the results of our research, but Duncan Smith appears to be one of those saintly, second-sighted few.

Either that, or he has no respect at all for evidence. In 2010, Duncan Smith made a number of claims about the stymied brain development of children who “witness a lot of abuse”, or whose mothers have “different, multiple partners”, citing the work of Dr Bruce Perry. Perry protested that his work had been “distorted”: while Duncan Smith implied that children of chaotic or neglectful households were destined to criminality, Perry’s work had in fact been on children who suffered extreme deprivation, including being locked in a basement without human contact. Yet Duncan Smith maintained, implausibly, that he not misrepresented Perry’s findings.

This wasn’t an isolated case of over-enthusiasm. Here’s another: in April, Duncan Smith claimed success for the benefits cap before it had even been implemented, saying:

“Already we’ve seen 8,000 people who would have been affected by the cap move into jobs. This clearly demonstrates that the cap is having the desired impact.”

Again, the original research showed nothing of the sort. On 9 May, Andrew Dilnot of the UK Statistics Authority wrote:

“[the statement] is unsupported by the official statistics.” Furthermore, Dilnot’s letter to the DWP points out there have been previous incidents of statistical abuse in the department, and requests “further assurance that the working arrangements within the department give sufficient weight to the professional role and public responsibilities of statisticians.”

It is one thing to be an individual fantasist, telling flattering stories about yourself. It is another to insist that government policy should be directed by fantasy. But the final tragedy of the Great Crapsby is that, for all the dull power of his imagination, reality stubbornly refuses to comply. The work programme, which Duncan Smith launched two years ago, doesn’t work. The hardest cases are neglected while private providers profit from shuffling the easily employable into jobs.

Universal credit – the single benefit that Duncan Smith has been arguing for since the 1990s – seems unlikely to happen in this parliament, after widely predicted problems with the computer system saw the trial reduced to a minute population that included only individuals with the simplest circumstances. In the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority review, universal credit was given an amber/red status, meaning “in danger of failing”.

The Great Gatsby had his vast wealth and a belief in the green light. The Great Crapsby has his vast wealth and an irresistible attraction to that red light of failure – not just his own personal screw-ups, but a belief that the poor must be made to fail and ground down as far as possible. How we must hunger for saints in our politics if we accept a man as good purely because he says he is good, while so much of what he does bespeaks falsehood and a perfect absence of empathy.

The New Statesman

Supreme Court grants IDS appeal against Reilly and Wilson

R (on the application of Wilson and another) (Respondents) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Appellant)

The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has granted the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions permission to appeal the Court of Appeal’s decision in this matter.

The Court of Appeal upheld the Respondents’ claim that the ‘back-to-work scheme’ run under the Jobseeker’s Allowance (Employment, Skills and Enterprise Scheme) Regulations 2011/917 was in breach of provisions made pursuant to the Jobseekers Act 1995.

The Court of Appeal upheld the Respondent’s claim in its judgment dated 12 February 2013, which can be found on the BAIILI website

The hearing before the Supreme Court in this case will take place on 29 July 2013.

Supreme Court UK

Is it constitutional for Parliament to reverse a judicial decision (in a hurry)?

The House of Lords Constitution Committee published its report earlier today on the Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill. (Professor Adam Tomkins has drawn attention to this issue on his blog, and has promised a longer post on the subject in due course.)

The background to the Bill is formed by the Court of Appeal’s recent decision in R (Reilly and Wilson) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2013] EWCA Civ 66, in which certain regulations concerning entitlement to benefits were struck down. New secondary legislation has already been made in order to fill the legal gap left by the quashing of the old regulations, but the new rules operate only prospectively. What, then, about people who were sanctioned improperly (i.e. by reference to the old, invalid rules)?

Normally, when a court quashes administrative acts or secondary legislation, the effect is to render (or, more accurately, confirm) that the measures are void ab initio (i.e. legally ineffective “from the very beginning”). So those who were sanctioned under the old rules were treated unlawfully, and are entitled to be paid the benefits they were improperly denied. But, says the Government, this would cost it £130 million: and so it is inviting Parliament to pass legislation—the Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill—which would retrospectively change the law. That is, the Bill would make lawful the denial of benefits to individuals, even though the Court of Appeal ruled that denial to have been unlawful. What this amounts to, therefore, is the Executive using primary legislation to reverse the effect of a judicial decision.

One of the concerns raised by the Constitution Committee relates to the use of a fast-track procedure in order to enact this legislation—the effect of which is to reduce the time for parliamentary scrutiny. Even more fundamental, however, is the other issue raised in the report: namely, the retrospective nature of the legislation. As the Committee notes at para 14 of its report, this

engages the cardinal rule of law principle that individuals may be punished or penalised only for contravening what was at the time a valid legal requirement. According to the doctrine of the sovereignty of Parliament, retrospective legislation is lawful. Nonetheless, from a constitutional point of view it should wherever possible be avoided, since the law should so far as possible be clear, accessible and predictable. This applies to civil penalties as well as criminal offences. In the words of the late Lord Bingham of Cornhill: “If anyone—you or I—is to be penalised it must not be for breaking some rule dreamt up by an ingenious minister or official … It must be for a proven breach of the established law of the land.”

This will not be the first time that a judicial decision has been undone via primary legislation. But that does not detract from the compelling nature of the points raised by the Constitution Committee. At root, this episode calls into question the relationship between the rule of law and the sovereignty of Parliament—and in this context it is worth reminding oneself that not all judges today accept that the latter necessarily prevails over the former. For example, in Jackson v Attorney-General [2005] UKHL 56, Lord Hope said:

Our constitution is dominated by the sovereignty of Parliament. But Parliamentary sovereignty is no longer, if it ever was, absolute. It is not uncontrolled in the sense referred to by Lord Birkenhead LC in McCawley v The King [1920] AC 691, 720. It is no longer right to say that its freedom to legislate admits of no qualification whatever. Step by step, gradually but surely, the English principle of the absolute legislative sovereignty of Parliament which Dicey derived from Coke and Blackstone is being qualified.

Of course, it does not follow from this that the courts would respond to the new legislation by putting Parliament back it its place; such an outcome is highly unlikely. But what this episode does demonstrate is a profound lack of respect by the Executive (which is, inevitably, behind this legislation) for the judicial branch of Government. That lack of respect is evidenced by the use of a fast-track procedure to enact legislation which, given the enormity of any decision to reverse a judicial decision, deserves close and searching scrutiny.

The broader point, then, is that if our constitution is (as I think it is) based upon an unwritten but crucial mutual respect between the political and judicial branches, there are likely to be (unpredictable) consequences if one party ceases to treat the other with adequate respect. The capacity of courts to ensure the lawfulness of Executive action forms the centerpiece of our constitutional machinery for upholding the rule of law. And the use of primary legislation to reverse the effects of that process is therefore a fundamental attack upon it. If politicians fail to treat the courts and the rule of law with appropriate respect, politicians should not be surprised if the courts repay them in kind. Nor should it be assumed that judges would be acting unconstitutionally in doing so. This is not a plea for judicial supremacism. Far from it: it is a plea for the Executive and Parliament to recognise the need for restraint that is essential to the effective operation of our unwritten constitution.

Public law for everyone

Yesterday's Labour Workfare Masssacre

Reblogged from Diary of a Benefit Scrounger

 

This morning, like the night after Agincourt, lefties like me scan the bloody, burnt out social media #workfare battlefield in the hope of finding twitching Labour corpses. There are none. Like the French 600 years before, a few generals at the top of the pile made the fateful decision to crush the weak and exhausted. Like the French, they were shown exactly why that's often not a very good idea at all. 

In the three years since Labour have been in opposition, nothing has described their fate better than the welfare debate. With minds stuck in an ideology forged around a gleaming new millennium, welfare was a comforting Blairite hawk to offset the freer doves of education, international aid and health. 

Tough on povety, tough on the causes of poverty. It suited Purnell, and Murphy and Cooper as they forged their credentials as "centrists" and who knows? Future leaders? 

So the argument goes : "It's a no brainer. The public think everyone on welfare is scrounging. (Except them) The tougher we are on welfare, the more people in the "Middle" and the "Shires" and the "City" breathe easy at night. (As long as it's not pensioners and it doesn't affect them.) Combining a little social justice elsewhere, with a good dose of judgement and steel in welfare = the chance of a majority. 75% of the public support workfare. Therefore, supporting the government on this is a chance to show we are still tough on poverty, tough on the causes of poverty. The Daily Mail fall gasping at our feet, they raise a glass in the gentleman's clubs, and no-one will listen to the screams of the anguished or weak, well, because they're anguished and weak."

Some around the shadow cabinet now look uncomfortable, shift in their seats. This is at least progress. Some mention the change in the welfare narrative lately. Opinion polls shifting, disability becoming toxic for the Tories, the increased media interest and above all, that behemoth of opinion formers - social media. But the hawks give the doves a little slap about and logic prevails. 75% of everyone or about 1% of the active, gobby probably-gave-up-on-us-anyway-leftie-activist-Face-Tweeps??? 

As has happened so often before, but had been happening less lately, the hawks won the welfare Agincourt, and they took to the commons. 

We on Twitter and Facebook steeled ourselves. Defeat had been heavily trailed on the blogs and had met with the grim opposition of the archer who knows he may be amongst small and ragged numbers, but he has all the arrows and the mighty have none. 

And so it proved. If the Daily Mail or the BBC even noticed Labour's unprincipled stand yesterday, designed to get them picked for the election team, there is little evidence today on a quick dodge of budget fever. 

But on Social Media? 

Oh Agincourt,

"Those few, those happy few those band of brothers. 

For those yesterday who shed their blood may have been a brother. 

Be he ne'er so vile, election day may have gentled his condition and Englishmen abed may have held their front doors wide as any speaks, that canvassed late, upon election day!!!"

For the return of precisely zero centre ground, floating voting, Mail readers, Labour managed to enrage and alienate 10s of 1000s of active, passionate, left of centre, engaged, knowledgeable, informed, opinion formers who are read by journalists and opposition alike - not to mention their own families and friends. 

Life has changed since 2000. Politics has changed. The economy has changed beyond all recognition. Living standards have fallen. Corruption seems to stalk everywhere now that gossamer veneer of "success" has floated away. 

But most of all, "media" has changed. Numbers of papers sold are plummeting, news figures freefall by their side. 

And every day, social media takes over. Sure, not the majority, but the vanguard. And they are the ones who care and think and devise and solve and organise. Just like any world paradigm change, it is the few who lead you to safety not the many. 

Every time Labour remembers that, they are rewarded with just a little touch of Harry in the night - Murdoch and Leveson, Gas giants and Loan sharks their names in our mouths bitterly remembered. 

We appreciate their company, there in the breach. 

But every time they take what they know is the wrong decision on principle, the response is swift and horrific. 

I won't pain myself more by sifting through the "I'll never vote Labour again" tweets or sifting through the debris of torn up membership cards and broken hearts. 

But Labour squandered so much more yesterday on a battle they could never win, and all the while they go on frittering away principles and viable voters on the wind of a cruel popularity it cannot win, our cause be not just.

 

 

Workfare: Will we get more results?

We were told that more Work Programme performance data would be published this month.  I would be very surprised if that happens.  It would be only four more months after the last lot, and one cannot imagine that there's been such a dramatic improvement that the government will be keen to publish.  Without that improvement, A4e and the other providers will be in real difficulties.  The attachment fees were just about keeping them ticking over, and we know that A4e were in trouble a year ago.  So, will we soon hear about contracts being ended?

While we wait and wonder, you might care to read a couple of DWP documents.  There's an impact assessment justifying the legislation to ensure that they don't have to pay back the £130m wrongly taken from people who were sanctioned while the compulsory work schemes were illegal.  Then you could look at a number of documents which tell "the DWP reform story", downloadable from their website.  They call it a "communications toolkit".

Last week we were told that under Universal Credit, enquiries would have to be made via an 0845 phone number - in other words, expensively.  In fact, this was raised a year ago by the Mirror.  Last November the DWP confirmed this but said that "free claimant access phones" would be available in "a large number" of Jobcentres.  So that's all right, then.

One other item: there's an article about the Trussell Trust and food banks on the Independent's website.  What caught my attention was a comment by someone calling himself Marchie1053 - scroll down and find it.    He draws attention to the close links between the Trussell Trust and the Conservative party.  Interesting. 

Watching A4e

Contact workfare exploiter Salvation Army – Day 2 Workfare Week of Action

Salvation Army International and UK HQs were paid a surprise visit to launch the week of action. [Photo: Sinister Pics]

Join the online day of action on Tuesday 19th March and tell workfare exploiters The Salvation Army exactly what the public think about their use of forced labour.

The Salvation Army released an astonishing statement recently which seems to suggest they will force people on sickness or disability benefits into unpaid work.

In a series of answers to questions asked on social media, the charity are unrepentant about their use of workfare. Responding to a question asking how they “can morally take sick and disabled people and force them to work?” the charity reply that they believe in “emancipation through employment” – a chillingly familiar phrase.

The Salvation Army have shown they are happy to act as Iain Duncan Smith’s workfare foot soldiers and yesterday their fight for the right to use unpaid workers was aggressive. The response to a peaceful protest at their UK head office was heavy handed, leaving one person temporarily arrested (until the police realised the accusation was entirely fabricated) after being falsely accused of assault.

Salvation Army need to be shown just how many people object to their use of forced unpaid labour. Join in the online day of action and tell them what you think!

Salvation Army UK can be contacted on facebook and on Twitter:
Tweet to @salvationarmyuk
Boycott Workfare

Iain Duncan Smith Bashes the Bishop [the void]

As if we didn’t already know that Iain Duncan Smith is a wanker, the bungling Work and Pensions Secretary has resorted to bashing the bishops in yet another rant defending his vicious social security slashing regime.

His latest outburst comes after 43 Bishops wrote to him warning that

“As a civilised society, we have a duty to support those among us who are vulnerable and in need. When times are hard, that duty should be felt more than ever, not disappear or diminish.

‘It is essential that we have a welfare system that responds to need and recognises the rising costs of food, fuel and housing.”

  This led to yet another tantrum from the Work and Pensions Secretary who claimed: “There is nothing moral or fair about a system that I inherited that trapped people in welfare dependency. Some one in every five households has no work – that’s not the way to end child poverty”.

And the thing is, for once in his life he’s right.  There is nothing moral about a system that condemns millions to lives of unemployment and poverty whilst people like Iain Duncan Smith live in luxury (in his case scrounging off his wife’s inheritance).  There is nothing moral about a society that excludes disabled people or those with mental health conditions from fully participating.  There is nothing moral about the shocking fact that people who often do some of the hardest physical work are not even paid enough to keep them fed, housed and warm.  There is nothing moral about capitalism at all.

Yet Iain Duncan Smith’s answer is not full employment and neither is it greater workplace access for disabled people – which has fallen by over a third since this Government weren’t elected.  His answer is not to demand a living wage or rent caps or more council housing – nothing must trouble the landlord class after all.  His answer is not even quality training and free education to at least provide an illusion of social mobility.
His answer is certainly not to question the system under which an arms dealer or loan shark becomes rich beyond belief whilst being a parent or carer is no longer even judged to be legitimate work because it doesn’t make a profit for the rich.  Jesus Christ would weep if only he weren’t a largely fictional character from an archaic Middle Eastern soap opera.

Iain Duncan Smith’s answer is to punish the poor for their own predicament.  His idea of a moral society is one where those with least are forced to claw each other’s eyes out in the scramble for the few scraps the rich toss down from above.  And for those who don’t make it into insecure low paid work, let them die in the gutter.  Let their children starve.  Let them lose their homes and be forcibly relocated hundreds of miles away from school, family and friends. Force them to work without pay or let them beg in the street as a lesson to the rest of us.

Honest capitalists will admit that unemployment is vital for the system to function.  That otherwise workers, not bosses, might have the power.  No capitalist country anywhere in the world has achieved real full employment and almost all, including the UK, have given up trying.  There are hundreds of people chasing every vacancy in some parts of the country.

Iain Duncan Smith is either all too aware that unemployment is here to stay and doesn’t care what happens to those unable to find work.  Or he is arrogant enough to believe his tinkering with social security contains the magic button that will somehow fix the problems created by capitalism.  Problems that no-one else, anywhere in the world, has come close to solving.  And his cure is forced unpaid work, benefit cuts and homelessness.

In other words he is either stupid or a genuinely nasty human being whose true agenda is merely to brutalise the very poorest.  Every crisis needs a scapegoat, and Iain Duncan Smith has chosen low income families, disabled and unemployed people as the human sacrifice to atone for the sins of the rich.
Follow me on twitter @johnnyvoid

the void

Liam Byrne : “Sanctions are vital to give back-to-work programmes their bite”

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

Shameful Failure to Tackle Slavery and Human Trafficking in the UK

'Ministers, the police and social workers have been accused of a 'shocking' failure to prevent the spread of modern slavery in the UK, leading to sexual exploitation, forced labour and the domestic servitude of adults and children from across the world.

Describing government ministers as 'clueless' in their response to tackling human trafficking, both into and within the UK, the most exhaustive inquiry yet conducted into the phenomenon concludes that the approach to eradicating modern slavery is fundamentally wrong-headed.

Instead of helping vulnerable victims who are trapped into forms of slavery after being trafficked from overseas, the legal system prosecutes many for immigration offences.'

Read more: 'Shameful' Failure to Tackle Slavery and Human Trafficking in the UK

Iain Duncan Smith's delusional & self-righteous defence of workfare