Righting Wrongs

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.

The Angry Mob

The Benefits Street argument just won’t go away. But the unassailable fact is that some people are simply worth less than other human beings… and some of them do quite well for themselves. There are crooked lawyers, coppers, businessmen, sportsmen, entertainers and politicians – you don’t have to be broke to be bent – it’s human nature to grab the opportunities and it takes a lot of training to overcome the temptation.

But it seems there are good crooks and bad crooks. When some ‘loveable rogue’ hijacks the welfare system to live off the labours of others, anybody daring to condemn them is howled down by a chorus of righteous leftie frenzy, yet when it’s an elected official legally claiming expenses or a high earner legally avoiding tax the same mob turns on them instead of their persecutors. Tell me, are there different versions of legal depending on your social status? It’s always seemed that way, but this is the reverse of the traditional ‘them and us’ divide.

On the one hand, some hold that there is no such thing as the undeserving poor – everybody is equally wonderful – but on the other, there is such a thing as undeserving rich. I believe we are mining a very rich seam of hypocrisy here, where it’s fine for Polly Toynbee to be paid much more than most people for writing about the heinous inequity whereby some people’s labours are worth less than others. And it’s fine for millionaire career politicians to dishonestly lay claim to a humble start because they say they speak for the ‘most vulnerable in society’, but it is not okay for other millionaire politicians to accept their good fortune without apology?

Owen Jones repeatedly bemoans the lazy stereotyping and ‘demonisation’ of the Chav – a creature we all recognise as one of questionable values, low education, poor taste and minimal social merit – who contributes little if anything to the sum national worth. But it’s absolutely okay for wee Owen to simultaneously repeat the lazy stereotype of Tory Toff, whose (admittedly enviable) privilege rarely costs the country a penny.

It’s a real conundrum for Labour and the left; how to plough the equality furrow without straying into the politics of hate and envy. Some, indeed, are more equal than others. But Labour long ago lost their working man ethics and are desperate to re-establish any credentials to support their repeated but false assertions that they are champions of the poor. All of which made Prime Minister’s Questions a tricky obstacle course for Ed Miliband yesterday – he had to steer clear of the economy and employment pretty much altogether. And as for Ed Balls, Labour’s front bench Rottweiler remained firmly muzzled as he has been for weeks.

What a shame that the righteous indignation of the left allows them to give no quarter to a supposed enemy – anybody doing what they see as their job. For all the hatred Iain Duncan Smith attracts, for all the brickbats lobbed at him daily, his is the one mission, throughout the whole system of British politics that Labour should be backing to the hilt. Getting people back to work? Ending automatic, lifelong benefit dependency? Attempting to lift people out of the poverty of both mind and pocket? How dare he?

Labour - So angry they could throw the phone down.

And – the horror – what if he succeeds? What if aspiration and self-reliance make a comeback? Will Labour just have to hate everybody then? Or will they just do what they’ve done for almost four years - stamp their feet and jump up and down like a demented little Mr Angry… from Purley?

Back in control

Well, hard on the heels of the "Oh, my God! Really?" news that thick unsocialised scum spawn yet more thick unsocialised scum (under a system known, ironically, as Socialism) comes a long-awaited official recognition of another obvious correlation. Ian Duncan Smith has been hinting about it for years and using delicately phrased language to express those hints but now he's more or less said it outright in terms that even bottom feeding Labour voters can grasp.

"the current payment of benefits is supporting “dysfunctional behaviour” and for some families “the notion of taking a job is a mug’s game”" (Click the link and read it for yourself)

Good news. Does this signal a new confidence in the Conservative Party? It's about time they ditched the Limp Demics and said what needs to be said. Population Control. That's the solution - don't breed what we can't feed. Herds of wildebeest grow in number when the grazing's good and shrink, by attrition when it isn't. Populations of all kinds depend for survival on availability of resources and parasites cannot live without a host. I'm fed up of being part of that host population and you should be too.

I hain't a Helk... I'm a Gnu" [link]

But IDS should go a step further and move towards a wholesale reduction in benefits across the board. It is unconscionably stupid that a family paying tax should receive benefits paid from that same tax. It is outrageous that successive governments have invented benefits that hide the truth and take unemployable people off the jobless statistics. We should call a spade a spade, ya dig?

A reduced and stable population with the right attitudes and skills would steadily push up employment rates, which would steadily increase wages and a reduced state would decrease necessary taxation. It should be possible to have kids - if you must (sigh) - on a single full-time wage, but if you have other desires you'll have to make hard choices.

In 1957 Harold Macmillan said "You've never had it so good." He must be spinning in his grave.