• All young single people between the ages of 16 and 24 should be required to work for their benefit - and if they fail to find a job after a fixed period of time they should lose all access to benefit, former welfare minister Frank Field proposes today, ahead of the Commons' second reading of the government's welfare reform bill.
  
  He also urges that claimants who turn down any reasonable job offer should automatically have their benefit stopped.
  
  Field calls for workfare system to force the young to earn benefit
  
  
• Tackling the culture of benefit dependency is one of the most important challenges that modern politicians face. Countless governments, of all political persuasions, have been overcome by it, but I believe that today more than ever we have a duty to radically reform the welfare state and reshape it for its original purpose. Welfare reform cannot be tacked on to other reforms and policy statements – in order to mend our broken society as we have committed to doing, radical and bold welfare reform must be at the heart of everything we do.
  
  That's why the Conservative party is going to support the government's welfare reform bill when it is debated in the House of Commons
  
  A new way with benefits - Theresa May, new Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary
  
  
• Mr. Terry Rooney (Bradford, North) (Lab): My right hon. Friend rightly talks about the rights and responsibilities agenda. Of course, the responsibilities of claimants are enforced through sanctions, and the state’s right to co-operation is enforced similarly, but the responsibilities of the state to the claimant and the rights of the claimant tend to get diminished. Will he consider the idea of a claimant’s charter, in which those rights and responsibilities are clearly delineated? Claimants would then know what they could expect, as well as their obligations.
  
  James Purnell: I am aware that the idea has been suggested by Gingerbread, as well as by my hon. Friend, and it has a lot of promise. We want to consider how we can make sure that it is not restrictive and does not become a lawyer’s charter.
  
  Hansard 27 January 2009

thanks shawn - pretty depressing, and here's me without my adams family head on...

i got down as far as reading Mr. Purnell's misappropriation of Beveridge's authority - quoting -
"In his report, Beveridge said:

“social security must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual...The State in organising security should not stifle incentive, opportunity”

or responsibility".

it takes great effort not to be extremely rude about Mr. Purnell, but he's not talking about co-operation, he's talking about force. He's a one trick pony - compulsion, compulsion, compulsion.

Difficult not to be extremely rude about Frank Field either. He seems to spend his life on a one-man hate campaign against claimants. One of my happiest memories was going on a demo outside his surgery in Birkenhead town hall some years ago, after he'd proposed that disabled people were getting too much benefit and should have it cut. Some disabled people blocked the road with their wheelchairs, then handcuffed themselves to the wheelchairs and slid on to the tarmac. And a bus driver who agreed with the reason for the demo left his bus parked in the middle of the road and went off somewhere, so the police couldn't make him move it...wonderful.

One of those things that New Labour is quite adept at is throwing a premise around as though it were fact thus enabling it to propose solutions that appear palatable to some precisely because the initial premise goes unchallenged. In this case “broken society”.

This phrase supposes that society was once whole and is now broken. Any o’level history student can take that premise apart. If society has always been replete with social problems then attention should be focused on the causes, i.e. the political and economic forces in which the various political and economic institutions move and not on those institutions’ inability to shape and direct those forces for society’s benefit, nor on the individual as a casualty of those forces. It is individual people and communities that are broken, not society.

Politicians like Field. Purnell et al, should be challenged on their almost Orwellian misuse of language and their pandering to the worst excesses of the tabloid press.

It'll be National Service next, and I'm more than half-serious.

I apologize to all you lexicologists out there for my appalling use of the word ‘premise’ instead of ‘premiss’. It appears that I’m often confusing the foundations of syllogistic reasoning with diverse forms of architecture. Why, only the other week I took out a huge mortgage on an invalid argument. Now the bank is accusing me of advancing nothing but tautologies, hiding behind truisms and is now forcing me to formulate a structural analysis of my position. Sill, it can’t prove I exist. It’s simply its word against mine!

I think you need the help of a metalexicographer but you may have the basis for a handbook of interesting appeal arguments.