Sunday 27 June 2010

BBC News - Duncan Smith considers incentives to relocate jobless


“Unemployed people living in council homes could be offered incentives to move to areas where there are jobs, the work and pensions secretary has said.”
It was only going to be a matter of time but even I am surprised at how quickly this Condem government has come around to Norman Tebbit’s way of thinking. And this old recidivist Tory policy has been dusted off and wheeled out by the acceptable face of Ian Duncan Smith (left). They have already started thinking of the disabled as benefit cheats and the old as retiring too early, now they are talking about the working population as work shy and feckless people who need to be encouraged to “get on your bike” and move across the country to find work. Their disdain for “the great unwashed” is palpable, shameful and all-too-typical.

And where are these jobs for which people should mount their bikes and ride? They are depending on the private sector taking up the slack but have absolutely no control over that and so no guarantee of a jobs market to which bikes may be confidently ridden.They have plans to savagely cut back on public services, throwing hundreds of thousands of people out of their jobs, swelling further the ranks of the unemployed and shrinking considerably the amount of money people have to spend.

With millions more unemployed, belts being tightened and significantly less money to spend in the country what on earth reason for hope can the private sector have in the prospects for growth and expansion? Why should they invest in a country that has more and more people out of work and less and less money to spend? In a shrinking market and a growing liability? But of course the next step in this grand design (Oh, the plan, the plan) is to get rid of the minimum wage so that those nice people at the CBI can bank on a growing population of slave labour.

I am reminded of that verse in Exodus which declares that “there arose a new king over Egypt, that did not know Joseph.” That king’s policies led to slavery for Israel. In the same way it might be said that a king arose in Downing Street about which this new generation knew nothing; but they will soon learn, they will soon learn. Welcome to the 1980’s, a place of individual wealth and collective poverty, of blaming the poor and celebrating the wealthy, of social Darwinism, a meritocracy in which only the strong survive.
BBC News - Duncan Smith considers incentives to relocate jobless

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