If you could do it. If it were possible. If the decision
was entirely in your hands, surely you would stop the world, consult all the
interested parties, get the big brains together and redesign our perverse
welfare system from the negatively incentivised dog’s breakfast it is now and
into a fit-for-purpose safety net for the truly vulnerable. Nobody – and I mean
nobody – with a moral brain can believe it right that tens, that hundreds of thousands
are paid to be kept out of useful participation in the society to which we all
belong. Nobody can legitimately claim that a something-for-nothing benefits
package is a good thing. This is the system Iain Duncan Smith spent well over a
decade trying to reform.
Are we grateful? Of course not, but we ought to be.
Nobody, in any government for several decades, has tried to grasp that particularly
poisonous nettle; few have dared to rein back the state. Instead, many
ministers have reluctantly rested their arses on that seat – in a department
which changes its name more often than some change underpants – for the
shortest time possible, in the vain hope they will be rewarded with a less
toxic office in the next reshuffle. IDS did the opposite; after being party
leader he stepped down in 2003 (rightly so – he was rubbish as leader) and set
up the Centre for Social Justice. He could have chosen an easy life but instead
he became an Aunt Sally for all the spitting hatred that comes with any attempt
to inject reason into welfare.
Nobody can claim his vision was perfect or his aim always
true, but it was undeniably in the right direction. Bomber pilots used to say
you can tell when you are over the target because of the flak you take. Of
course, the usual suspects were in raptures at his resignation – a knee-jerk
reaction to things they don’t want to understand. But in their giddy dance of
glee they never stopped to wonder how it might work out. The law of unintended
consequences means it’s certain the event they observed with such delight is
likely as not to turn out worse as Stephen Crabb will be beholden to the PM as
long as his arse is shined by that chair and he will be utterly powerless to
resist further cuts.
The screechers think they’ve won yet this temporary delight
is just another distraction allowing everybody to continue to ignore the deeper
problems at the heart of our rotting culture. In a few decades a system that worked
for millennia has been undone; the family as the essentially fundamental unit
of society is all but forgotten. In its place we have a system that rewards what
were once, quite literally, the misfits. Human rights and the individual
pursuit of happiness should not mean that anything goes and society must pay
the bus fare. The pursuit of ‘diversity’ has replaced the pursuit of decency.
Of course families are not perfect, but in following the ideology
so thoroughly we have nurtured one element of the communist dream and brought
about the fractured, helpless, client state. So many now rely on state
assistance to maintain a lifestyle they have come to perceive as theirs by
right that dismantling that entitlement is seen as a war against the people. Those
clamouring for ‘social justice’ scream ‘divide and rule!’ at the ruling class,
yet their insistence on diversity has brought about the deepest divisions we
have ever seen.
Rainbow Nation, yer, but...
The blurring of the distinctions between morality and
human rights has been a lifelong project for some campaigners unable to see the
difference themselves. Before the new religion of diversity we had morality in
spades; pretty much everybody knew how to behave towards others. Now, enshrined
in law we have a bewildering array of ways we can be criminalised for simply pointing
out that something is wrong. IDS was doing his bit to right a small part of the
cause of some of these wrongs but you wished him gone. You should always be careful
what you wish for.
