text of today's speech from theresa may, shadow work and pensions secretary is available @

Labour has failed generations of workless families

This is one of the reasons I despise politicians. Such hypocrisy is breathtaking. Has Theresa May developed some sort of 1980’s amnesia when her beloved party declared war on the organized representatives of the very class she now cries her crocodile tears for. A war, which cleared the way for the systematic dismantling of Britain’s manufacturing base. A war which put millions out of work, laid waste to entire communities and left many trapped in poverty and despair or left others as Smack ravaged individuals who would be left to battle their addiction for the next twenty or thirty years, if indeed they lived that long.

While in no way wishing to defend the appalling mess that is New Labour what it inherited was the Tory legacy. Yes, New Labour has had 12 years to turn it around and it has squandered much but it was always going to take a generation or more to make big inroads into the problem. Yes, globalisation has produced great market shifts but New Labour’s love affair with globalisation, big business and privatisation has led it to take its eye off the ball and left a huge dent in its credibility as the Party that was going re-invent the British political landscape to a return to the more consensus based politics that preceded the first Thatcher administration.

Now the Tories are beginning to make some noise. They sense with an election looming and Gordon Brown’s increasing ineptitude when it comes to convincing voters that he is a safe pair of hands when trying (and failing) to handle one crisis after another, that their time has now come. They know that New Labour has opened up the door to the idea that the Welfare State is no longer the sacred cow that it used to be. There is consensus now among the 3 main Parties that the Welfare State of Beveridge has gone and gone for good. The involvement of the private sector is here and here to stay. The question that remains is how big a piece of the pie is that private sector going to get?

Weasel words indeed. In particular, this quote made me laugh in a bad way:

"First, we are not afraid to be honest about the state of worklessness in Britain today. We need to stop hiding people in different parts of the benefit system and get on with the job of doing something about it. Our efforts will not be narrowly focused on those claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, but acknowledge that there are many other people on different benefits, that are capable of working with the right support. The biggest of those benefits is Incapacity Benefit."

Considering shovelling people off JSA onto IB was essentially the Tories welfare policy in days of yore, it's a bit rich that they now proclaim themselves as the only true savious of the people that they cast adrift, often in areas where they were similtaneously destroying what local industries there were.

isn't that what capitalists always do?.....

and since there's not enough jobs for those who are fit ....

The fragrant (for those too young to remember, see the 1980’s Geoffrey Archer libel case against the Daily Star for the reference for the use of this word) Ms May’s views appear to be going down quite well with the readers of this particular rag. Read the comments to the piece.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6812269.ece

It is worth recalling that when the Major administration abolished the old Sickness and Invalidity Benefits the then Opposition did practically nothing to defend claimants who were unfit for work. Their convenient cry was that many of these claimants were in fact unemployed and not truly incapacitated for work.

I remember trying to persuade local MPs and the authority for which I then worked that taking potshots at the administration was grossly irresponsible when a principled and rational defence should have been mounted of the old definition of incapacity for work. But no one wanted to hear that.

We have now gone further down that evil road. No one now save the severely disabled — and not all of those— will be counted as unfit for work: there are those who are fit for work with a bit of a push, and there are those who will be fit with a bit of a push in the not-too-distant future.
Not that medicine has found a cure for their ills, mind you. The cure for unfitness for work has been accomplished by the magic of stipulative definition.

"Ms May’s views appear to be going down quite well with the readers of this particular rag. Read the comments to the piece."

always until they fall ill themselves and find out what it's REALLY like....