Iain Duncan Smith – incompetent bungler or ideologically-driven, arrogant psychopath?

Oh dear, Iain Duncan Smith is not having a very good time of it lately, is he?  His handling of the flagship change to the welfare system, Universal Credit, couldn’t be more universally discredited as there are IT problems galore, delays and ever-changing completion dates.  The question is, of course, does this show IDS as he is more commonly referred to (in polite circles, at least) to be the most inept, incompetent man on the face of the Earth who is completely out of his depth or does it show him to be a deceitful, arrogant psychopath with a penchant for murderous social engineering?

Of course, IDS has also drawn a vast amount of criticism for the rest of the so-called welfare ‘reforms’ that lend themselves to assigning one or other of our competing titles for the Cabinet member and failed former Conservative Party leader.

According to experts interviewed on a Channel 4 documentary entitled “Psychopath Night” that took a look at psychopathic traits and some of the people who exhibit them, psychopaths have one particular trait – the inability to admit that they are wrong and the tendency to blame everyone else for mistakes.  I mention this in passing as that one fact may well help us in determining what IDS really is.

Let’s start off by examining the current situation regarding Universal Credit...

Universal Credit

On the IT side, software specifically designed for the implementation of Universal Credit does not include all the features needed to be properly implemented and cannot be used to handle claims by couples or people with children.  There is also an issue around the problem that the welfare changes are meant to be sorting out, that of fraudulent claims.  The software for the implementation of Universal Credit, as of September 2013, has no feature to allow for the highlighting of potential fraudulent claims and is therefore completely reliant on costly and impractical manual checks.

As of October 2013, only a miniscule 2,720 people were part of the unfortunate few who were selected as pilot claimants and the cost of the implementation of Universal Credit for that small number is approximately £225,000 for each claimant currently on the trial.  This accounts for £612 million of the total £2 billion budget set aside for the project or almost a third of the entire budget.

A total of £40 million has been wasted so far on the software that is barely able to handle a fraction of the claimants it should be handling by now and a further £90 million is earmarked to bring the software up to the required level to ably handle the requirements of Universal Credit.

One million claimants are supposed to be using the new Universal Credit system by April this year according to projections by the Department for Work and Pensions made back in October 2013.  The system is handling just 2,720 so far.

The target of 6 million claimants using the system by 2017 look set to be missed catastrophically.

A risk assessment report on the project from October 2013 suggested that, if the current raft of problems continued only “a maximum of 25,000 people – just 0.2% of all benefit recipients – will be transferred on to the programme by the next general election”.

The enormity of the colossal cock-up that is Universal Credit and the massive write-off of taxpayer’s cash was brilliantly summed up by a member of a Facebook group called WEAR RED - Stand up and Be counted:

“In December 2013 IDS also revealed that a staggering £90 million will be written off by 2018. Again we're not sure how you would spend this on UK infrastructure? But it's painfully obvious that you'd be doing a better job than IDS, even if you chose to make a bonfire out of the cash just to keep your kids warm for an evening. The point being that at least one person had benefited in some small way from your act of madness.”

In a Mirror newspaper article dated 5^th February, Shadow Welfare minister Chris Bryant was quoted as having said: 

“Iain Duncan Smith’s flagship policy has been plagued with delay after delay from the outset and millions of pounds have been wasted.

“We were once told Universal Credit would be on time and on budget and that a million people would be on the system by April this year, but this has come to nothing. It is staggering that the Government has spent £225,000 per person on this project.

“With poor initial decisions by Ministers and endless indecision from Downing Street putting the whole scheme in jeopardy, it is increasingly difficult to have any confidence in the Government’s handling of welfare.”

The only response that came from IDS was via a spokeswoman that is the typical non-answer we’ve come to expect from him and the empty statement that everything would be on track by 2017: “If Labour think Universal Credit can be brought in without spending any money up front it’s no wonder they cost taxpayers so much by botching the introduction of tax credits so badly.

“Over 6 million people will be claiming Universal Credit by 2017, which will bring a £35billion benefit to society, and our safe rollout continues with more people claiming every day.”

You can read the full story here: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/iain-duncan-smiths-universal-credit-3115946

The DWP select committee affair
IDS hasn’t just upset or offended the members of the public who are both taking notice of what’s going on and have a social conscience, he has taken it upon himself to deliberately withhold information from members of the Select Committee that has the duty to scrutinize his department.  He has also tried to lay the blame for the Universal Credit at the feet of DWP permanent secretary Robert Devereux so that he could wash his hands of his responsibility.

In his piece entitled “Why should we endure this disrespect from a public servant?”, blogger Mike Sivier from Vox Political quoted the words spoken by Commons Work and Pensions committee member Debbie Abrahams to Secretary of State Iain Duncan Smith during a clash over Universal Credit and his Department for Work and Pensions’ appalling book-keeping: “I can say with the strongest feeling my concern about the hubris you have demonstrated and your tone to this committee. You haven’t explained – certainly to my own satisfaction, and I am sure anybody that has been watching will draw their own conclusions – you have not made any satisfactory explanation about how you have informed, and kept this committee informed, about the difficulties that the Department was experiencing. There has been obfuscation, smoke-and-mirrors, even up to a few weeks before the report from the National Audit Office. The memorandum that was released in August was clearly saying that everything was fine and dandy. It is, clearly, not. I’ll give you one more opportunity to answer, so you can explain to this committee why there is such poor information provided by your Department.”

Duncan Smith’s response shows just how arrogant the man is: “Well, I just don’t agree with you, and I don’t agree that we have done anything else but be open and honest about what the issues are, as and when they have been identified, and what we would do about them, as and when we had made our decisions about that.”

IDS showed a shocking lack of respect when asked why he did not inform the committee of the ‘red team review’ of Universal Credit when he gave evidence to the committee back in September 2012, stating that: “With respect, I don’t have to tell you everything that is happening in the Department until we have reached a conclusion about what’s actually happening; I think I will take those decisions myself and account for the decisions that were taken.”

Unable to even keep his own story straight in his head IDS got himself in somewhat of a knot when he said that the review had reported back to him in July of that year, so he could actually have made a full and formal account of his actions to the committee, long before September 2012.  He tried to extricate himself by saying that: “It was an internal review.”

Dame Anne Begg, Chair of the committee stated that the committee should have been told the plans were being reviewed as a matter of courtesy, and the September committee meeting would have been the perfect opportunity to explain that a review had taken place, “but at that session you were bullish about how successful everything was”, to which Duncan Smith responded: “With respect … I don’t think this committee can run the Department.”  As an outside observer, I would have to say to Duncan Smith that I don’t think you can run the department.

Mike Sivier observed in his blog that “Committee members asked questions and Duncan Smith treated them with discourtesy bordering on contempt.”

IDS neatly although not convincingly sidestepped the question of whether the Universal Credit system was still only handling single people (which, of course, it is) and stated that the costs so far were “written down” rather than written off.  For those who aren’t fluent in bullshit, Mike Sivier came to the rescue with the following explanation of “written down”: “meaning they were said to be worth less money now than when they were introduced”.

As delusional as he is, IDS was adamant that he and the DWP had not made any mistakes or committed any wrongdoings despite the fact that his testimony was full of evidence to the contrary.

In one particularly rude exchange, Duncan Smith told Glenda Jackson MP that “I have no idea what you’re asking… You lost me about five minutes ago.” Her reply was to tell Duncan Smith that “You’ll have to try harder” as he rudely muttered that her question “sounds like a foreign language to me”.  Now, judging by one of her appearances on Have I Got News For You, I know that Ms Jackson may get a little confusing at times but she’s hardly speaking a foreign language; however, English may well be a foreign language to Duncan Smith whose main language is delusional bullshit.

Mike Sivier summed up the entire affair quite succinctly: 

“The information content of this meeting was zero – or as close to it as possible. What we got was a display of posturing, “hubris” – as Debbie Abrahams rightly identified it – and further obfuscation of the facts.

“What the meeting did reveal was everything we need to know about Iain Duncan Smith. Here is a man who understands nothing about being a public servant. He thinks that, sitting in a plush Whitehall office, with civil servants running around clearing up his various disasters, that he is somehow above the rest of us and doesn’t have to justify himself.

“He’s completely mistaken. He is there as our servant – to act in a way that suits us, not him. It is disrespectful of him to treat us this way.

“But he just doesn’t get it.”

Feel free to gauge IDS’ performance for yourself here:  http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=14819

International Business Times described the affair as “yet another ill-tempered session of a key Commons committee with the minister responsible, Iain Duncan Smith” that fueled fears that the flagship welfare reforms are in “far deeper trouble than suspected”.

Duncan Smith was, according to the piece, “accused of deliberately misleading the committee and attempting to "sweep things under the carpet" after a series of delays and cost write-offs” on his pet project.

Further media speculation on the way Duncan Smith treated the committee members was summed up with the following quote describing the committee members suggestion that: “Duncan Smith was treating them with arrogance and haughtiness while he thought they were not bright enough to understand the detail of his great scheme”.

In a funny addition to the piece in the International Business Times mention was made that in a recent book chancellor George Osborne claimed Duncan Smith was not bright enough for the job.  I think that, Osborne, is something akin to the pot calling the kettle black.  I know it’s a little off-topic but if I can piss off another member of the Government, I’ll take any opportunity that arises.

International Business Times suggested that “while much of the system is not due to come online until after the next election, Duncan Smith may be preparing to stand down in 2015 and, in effect, walk away from it”.  I don’t think IBT really knows what a zealot Duncan Smith really is.  He will not walk away from his task until his mission is complete – the wholesale wiping out of the poor and most vulnerable people in society.

To draw a line under this section, I include this from website Political Scrapbook which highlighted some of IDS’ arrogant attitude in a piece entitled “Arrogant Duncan Smith slammed for evading committee questions” (published on 5^th February):

"Following Iain Duncan Smith’s evidence on Monday, DWP select committee member Glenda Jackson brought a fiery point of order in the Commons immediately after PMQs earlier. Jackson highlighted the manner in which the Quiet Man thinks he can talk to MPs asking basic questions about Universal Credit:

“With respect, I don’t have to tell the committee everything that is happening in the department until we have reached a conclusion about what is actually happening.”

“With respect, chairman, I do not think this committee can run the department.”

With IDS claiming he had ”nothing to tell” the MPs about experts drafted in to rescue the IT underpinning his flagship policy, Commons speaker John Bercow confirmed that the job of the DWP Committee is to, errr, scrutinise DWP.”

Other welfare facts

Of course, Universal Credit is not the only change to the welfare system and we should look at some of the other misdemeanours perpetrated by IDS in order to determine whether he’s a bungler or a psychopath.

Blogger Sue Marsh included the following facts in her article entitled “The Big Benefits Row” on her blog Diary of a Benefits Scrounger:

• Disability Living Allowance (DLA) is being cut by 20%
• The criteria to qualify for DLA slashed has been by 60%
• 1 MILLION people are to be stripped of Employment and Support Allowance
• The Independent Living Fund has been scrapped
• 1500 people lost their jobs as Remploy factories were all closed
• Just 3% of the entire welfare budget goes to unemployed people
• Social security fraud is around £1.2 Billion per year – less than half of 1%, or
• 0.15% of total welfare budget. That’s just £1.50 lost for every thousand or 0.15% of the total welfare
• The DWP pay out much more in their own errors – 2.2 Billion
• A whopping £16 BILLION goes unclaimed, generally to avoid the stigma of “welfare”
• We have some of the toughest criteria for claiming social security in the developed world.
• Is our UK social security system too generous? No again. In international terms we come just 46^th out of 51, paying some of the lowest benefits anywhere
• 40,000 sick or disabled people will be hit by the Bedroom Tax. That’s over 2 thirds.

You can read the rest of the blog here: http://diaryofabenefitscrounger.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/the-big-benefits-row.html

And there are the cases of people who have committed suicide due to benefit changes or having their benefits taken away completely, cases such as Stephanie Bottrill who, it turns out, should have been exempt from the dreaded Bedroom Tax.

Statistics shooting around the internet and the media state that approximately 10,600 people have died shortly after their Atos assessment, approximately 73 people a week.  And I have to say that the facts above hardly lend themselves to the idea that IDS is a bungler.

The Bedroom Tax is a direct attack on the poorest and most vulnerable because it targets only those Housing Benefit claimants who live in social housing.  True, this does bring about a parity between social housing renters and those who rent from the private sector who have had these accommodation size restrictions for a long time but look at it from this point of view – rents in the private sector are significantly higher than in the social sector so, as a cost cutting measure, a size restriction for renters in the private sector makes some kind of sense.  However, social housing rents are already kept low relative to the housing market so are already value for money when calculating Housing Benefit. 

The trouble being caused by the Bedroom Tax is that the number of people who are forced to downsize currently outstrips the number of smaller social housing properties which forces them into the private sector for smaller properties.  This has to be an ideological attack because as a cost cutting measure it fails the basic test – more money will have to be spent out on Housing Benefit due to the higher private sector rents, probably more than will be saved by the Bedroom Tax.

Of course, private landlords will be making out like bandits because of the increased number of people being forced into the private sector and I seriously doubt that there aren’t quite a few Tories who aren’t benefiting from the exodus from social housing to the private sector.

So what’s your verdict?  Is IDS an incompetent bungler or is he an ideologically-driven, arrogant psychopath?  I know which option I choose.

The biggest crime

This entry is my latest submission to Your Thurrock although I somehow doubt it will be posted (for obvious reasons) so I have decided to post it here - just in case.

Following my enforced break from this column, due to putting work in on trying to set up a new project for mental health service users and carers in Essex, I have returned to expose the biggest crime perpetrated in the UK.  I like to believe that my column always makes my readers think and this column will do so by presenting you with some questions and some definitions in order to engage you actively in the process.  About 99% of my readers will be astute enough to work out where this piece is going before I get to the destination, but for the 1% who cannot, I will spell it out in big, bold letters at the end that you will be able to see all the way from One Tree Hill.  Let us begin…

Question: Is it acceptable in a civilised society to accept crime directed at a specific group of people based on gender, age, religion, sexuality, ethnicity or physical or mental disability?

Definition: Crime – an act that is against the laws laid down by the government of the country.

Fact: Slander is a crime.

Fact: Libel is a crime.

Fact: Incitement to hatred of a group based on their gender, age, religion, sexuality, ethnicity or physical or mental disability is a crime.

Definition: Disability – any physical or mental problem that affects an individual’s day-to-day life.

Definition: Hate crime – an act that is directed at an individual or group based on the victim’s gender, age, religion, sexuality, ethnicity or physical or mental disability; to persecute an individual based on their gender, age, religion, sexuality, ethnicity or physical or mental disability.

Definition: Persecute – (1) subject (a person, etc) to hostility or ill-treatment; (2) harass, worry.

Question: Should a civilised society allow crime to go unpunished?

Now we have set the scene with our questions, facts and definitions, we shall start our journey in earnest, filling in extra facts and posing extra questions as we go…

The current administration of this country, the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition or ConDums (yes, I did mean to call them ConDums), in the interests of cutting the budget deficit, have instituted the largest plans for public spending cuts in living memory.  These cuts affect many of the people who rely on welfare benefits to survive day-to-day.  Nowhere is this more keenly felt than in the people who are reliant in disability and health-related benefits.  The ConDums, however, allow the richest people and companies in the country to get away with tax avoidance on a huge scale and refuse to institute a ‘Robin Hood’ tax on banking transactions all of which would obviate the need for such savage cuts to the welfare budget.

Question: Who should carry the burden of deficit reduction plans – the rich or the poor and most vulnerable?

Part of the welfare shake-up involves taking claimants off benefits such as Incapacity Benefit and putting them on Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), which has two sub-groups – the Work Related Activity Group (WRAG) and the Support Group.  In which group a claimant is placed in is determined by putting them through a Work Capability Assessment (WCA) by a company called Atos, who have no healthcare experience but who are paid approximately £150 million to administer the WCAs.

Fact: The changeover from the old benefits to the ESA is highly cost-laden.

Fact: The WCA has been proved to be ‘not fit for purpose’ for those claimants whose ‘disability’ is a mental health problem.

Fact: A high proportion of WCAs have resulted in a successful appeal overturning the findings of the WCA, costing the country money in legal expenses.

Fact: Calls are being made with the express intention of getting the WCA criteria changed so that they are deemed fit for purpose.

If a claimant is put into the Work Related Activity Group, the claimant will be asked (or forced, depending on who you ask) to undertake activities in order to prepare them for getting into work, some of whom will actually be unfit for work due to their disability but wrongly declared fit for work by the WCA.

Fact: If a person fails to comply with a work-related activity, their benefit will be reduced or temporarily withdrawn.

Question: If an individual has to stop a work-related activity due to their disability, how are they expected to survive on reduced or no income?

Fact: The Government plans to cut the benefit of a disabled claimant by £71 per week for failure to comply with a work-related activity.

Fact: Plans are being put in place so that the disabled and those on health-related benefits will be forced to do unpaid work placements for an unlimited time. 

Fact: People claiming JobSeekers Allowance (JSA) are only expected to work in unpaid work placements for three months.

Of course, all of this is academic as the Government are proposing to abolish ESA and all other benefits and combine them all under the umbrella of Universal Credit (UC) at a huge expense to the country.

Fact: Proposals for Universal Credit are, at present, vague and ill considered.  They are also, at present, highly prejudicial to people with disabilities and health-related incapacities.

The ConDum’s austerity measures have barely begun to bite with currently mentioned figures being mentioned of only 6% being made so far and the Government is, in fact, increasing the budget deficit rather than reducing it.  The UK is in the grip of a full-blown double-dip recession, something the austerity measures was meant to prevent and yet the ConDums have given tax breaks to the rich and fail to collect the vast amounts of unpaid/avoided tax money.  The poor, on the other hand, are bearing the brunt of the cost of an economic disaster not of their making and the disabled and those on health-related benefits are being hit the hardest.  All the while, companies are failing causing more unemployment to add to those in the publicly funded sector who lost their jobs due to cuts in public spending.

Fact: One of the victims of the austerity measures was an organisation called Remploy, a company that employed hundreds of disabled people.

Question: Why have the public accepted such prejudicial tactics to be used against the disabled and those on health-related benefits?

I will answer this question for you.  The public have accepted such measures because they have been subjected to hours and hours of ConDum propaganda designed to make the public think that the disabled and those on health-related benefits are the cause of the problem rather than the victims.  They are seen as leeches on the belly of society, sucking away millions of pounds from the public purse.  By demonising the target group, the public are less concerned with the affect the cuts to public spending are having on that group.

Fact: For an extended period, Iain Duncan-Smith and Chris Grayling have demonised the disabled and those on health-related benefits in the media.  David Cameron allowed this.

Due to the highly prejudicial view of the disabled and health-related benefit claimants promoted by the ConDum administration, the levels of hate towards those groups has risen and will continue to rise in the future.

And so we reach the case against the ConDums on the charge of the greatest disability hate crime in the UK.

“If it pleases your Honour, based on the evidence presented above, I would like to proceed with the case for the prosecution of Her Majesty’s Government on the charge of hate crime against the disabled and health-related benefit claimants of the UK.

It has been established that hate crime is wrong and unlawful.  It has further been established that slander and libel are crimes and that persecution of or incitement to hatred of an individual or group based on gender, age, religion, sexuality, ethnicity or physical or mental disability are likewise crimes.

On behalf of my clients, I wish to submit the following evidence -

Fact: According to Government statistics, less than 1% of claims for health-related benefits are fraudulent.

Her Majesty’s Prime Minister has allowed speeches and comments of a highly prejudicial nature to be given by certain ministers of his administration giving a view of my clients as being work-shy or fraudsters.  This amounts to slander against 99% of my clients.  These speeches and comments have made their way into the printed media, which amounts to complicity in spreading libellous statements about 99% of my clients.

Further to these charges, the current and planned legislation of Her Majesty’s Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition Government are highly prejudicial to my clients as are the cuts to public spending that are currently underway.  I refer, of course, to the closing of Remploy establishments, the excessive punishments incurred for failing to comply with work-related activities and the unlimited duration of unpaid work placements for disabled/health-related claimants.  These amount to persecution of my clients.

Finally, thanks to the slanderous and libellous statements, my clients have been seen as figures to be hated by the rest of society.  It is true that many held this view before the current administration took power but the statements given by Ministers of the Crown have acerbated the problem.  This amounts to a hate crime against my clients, made even more offensive as it is against a group who are among the most vulnerable in society.

I submit to you that the current Government of this country is guilty of all charges and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

The case for the prosecution rests.”

Fact: David Cameron called himself a ‘compassionate Conservative’.

Question: If Cameron really is compassionate, why would he allow such disgusting tactics and policies to be used?

There are other regimes who probably have similar hostile views of the disabled and those with health-related incapacities although one springs to mind immediately – the Nazi Party of the 1930s and 1940s.  If you were disabled in any way, physically or mentally, your life expectancy was not going to be long.  You would not have been sent to the gas chambers with the Jews who were mercilessly persecuted but your life would have been curtailed in some other way – lethal injection.  Like the Jews, Romany gypsies and homosexuals, the mentally and physically challenged were persecuted as not being Aryan material.  They were demonised by the Nazis and turned into figures of hate, much like the disabled and health-related benefit claimants of the UK today.  At least, however, Hitler and his party were open in their hostility and did not hide behind the lie of trying to help the vulnerable whilst enacting legislation designed to kill them.

Fact: There have been many deaths directly attributable to the changes and cuts in welfare benefits for the disabled and those on health-related benefits.  A lot of them have been covered in the media.

With so many deaths directly attributable to benefit changes, perhaps we should add manslaughter or murder to the list of charges against this Government.

Things are not going to get any better whilst we have a corrupt, dictatorial regime in place that will push through legislation regardless of its detrimental effect on the citizens it is supposed to protect.  How can you call this a dictatorial regime, you may ask; it was democratically elected.  So was Hitler, I would counter.  And he had a greater share of the vote than the Conservatives did in the last General Election.

For some dark reasoning, the ConDums have it in for the disabled and those on health-related benefits.  The economic strategy that was built on adherence to austerity measures has failed.  The economy is in decline where under Labour it had started to grow.  The ConDums have no plan for economic growth and Cameron has been recorded as saying that he sees no end to the austerity measures that were originally meant to last only five years, the longest term for austerity measures in living memory.  The Government is increasing the deficit it had promised to get rid of within its five-year term.  The ConDums strategy seems dependent upon convincing the Great British public that the disabled and health-related benefit claimants are the cause of all the ills the UK is facing whilst letting the rich prosper and avoid paying their due taxes.

Why are the rich being molly-coddled?  Because they are the ones who vote Conservative and because they are the ones who are in power.  Why are the poor and disadvantaged being hurt the most?  Because they have no voice.  The people in the middle-income bracket hate the poor and disadvantaged because they fear becoming poor and disadvantaged themselves and because the ConDum administration instils hatred towards them to ensure their monstrous plans go ahead unchallenged by the public. 

The only step that Cameron and company have not taken is the one where the State institutes a campaign of forced euthanasia against the mentally and physically challenged – yet.  One wonders if this is to be the next step in the persecution of the disabled and health-related benefit claimants though.

Anyone for a waterless shower?  Cameron’s Final Solution.

Until next time…

Turning back time to the bad old days of exploitation

The following blog was submitted to Your Thurrock on 17th February but has not been posted yet.  As it is a topical piece I have decided to post it here so it is at least 'out there'.  The Your Thurrock version has an addendum about some of the stuff I've been doing since January.

It’s funny how one can go to sleep in the relatively enlightened world of 2012 only to wake up eight hours or so later in a world two to three hundred years in the past.  At this point I can imagine you are thinking to yourself that I have finally succumbed to a psychotic break and am no longer in touch with reality.  Recent developments at the Department for Work and Pensions have, however, proved that this country, after years of having apologised for our part in the African slave trade, has turned the clock back a couple of hundred years or so to renew that awful trade.  The victims of this renewed trade are not picked out by the colour of their skin, however, but by the very nature of their physical or mental affliction.  The slaves of this brave new world are those who are the most exploitable because of their vulnerability – financially, emotionally and physically.  The new slave class are the individuals who currently form the underclass of today’s society – the claimants of sickness related benefits who will soon be forced into unpaid work placements with absolutely no limit to the duration of their enslavement.  This is outright discrimination as non-disabled claimants of Job Seeker’s Allowance have a rigidly defined limit to the duration of any unpaid work placements they are forced to take.  There seems to be little regard to the nature of one’s affliction when burdening an individual with a forced labour placement that may actually do more harm to the individual than the supposed good it was meant to achieve.

One burning question that is crying out to be asked is – is this forced labour programme actually legal?  Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights that the UK signed up to states that "No one shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour".  How then can the DWP’s proposals be legal when it flies in the face of human rights legislation that the UK, as members of the European Union, must adhere to?

The other question on my mind is – what’s next, Mr Cameron?  Are we going to see the clock turned back even further and find ourselves in a Roman-style empire, a renewed British Empire with a newly crowned Emperor Cameron at its head with Tory lackeys and Liberal Democrat quislings at his side?  Will our new British Empire adopt a new national sport in which members of the underclass are thrown into the arena with hungry man-eating animals?  It would certainly be an extra way of reducing their numbers.  Is this vision of the future a fantasy or a prophecy?

I have, in the past, claimed that the ConDem Government is trying to cleanse our society of the underclass, those on whom the ConDems blame the ills of society, those seen as leeches on the Treasury’s teats because of their vulnerability.  It seems as though I was right and, to its shame, the public will probably sit back and applaud as the underclass is systematically exploited and devoured by the machinery of that exploitation.  The weakest and most vulnerable will fall to write a new chapter in the history of the United Kingdom and it will be written in their blood.

The Conservatives must be in a state of delirium as they finally drop all pretence and display their true colours, masturbating over their soon-to-be-realised dream of a society devoid of the proles who spoil their ivory tower world with their very existence.

The darkest part of the whole affair is that all of it will be met with overwhelming public approval, thanks in no small part to the demonisation of the underclass, the scapegoats blamed for all the UK’s ills.  The same incremental step approach that has seen fuel prices soar, taxation rise and living standards fall for the poorest and most needy, as untold numbers are forced into fuel poverty and the increase in VAT hits those hardest, without much in the way of public opposition, will finally lead to the most violent schism between rich and poor in history.

It seems that we have learnt nothing from history and are thus doomed to repeat it until someone has the moral strength and courage to say “enough is enough”.

Until next time…