NO, YOU GET ON YOUR BIKE ON THIS ONE IAIN

The new Tory government in London are really clamping down on Benefits, doubtless as their way of reassuring their core vote that they haven’t gone soft just because they have a few daft Liberals about the place to make up the numbers.

Labour and SNP politicians have criticised plans to relocate people in a sort of Stalinist way, from areas of high unemployment to places where there are jobs. (Erm, where? London I suppose?)

The plans have been described by both parties put forward by Iain Duncan Smith as a return to 1980s’ “on your bike” policies of old Norman Tebbit whose constituency IDS now represents.

IDS said millions of people were trapped in places where there was no work and were unwilling to move for fear of losing their homes. He talked about “ghettos of poverty” where people were unable to find work but lacked the ability to leave. The scheme would allow people to go to the top of the housing list in another area, even it if was hundreds of miles away, rather than giving up their right to a home. Doubtless this will knock people already living in the area, down the list.

And for what...? In so many cases the jobs on offer will be at or just above minimum wage. The cost of moving is thousands... well above what poor people could ever hope to afford. And what about when the job comes to an end? After 3 months as the firm folds or the work dries up? Will they go to the top of the list to move back again, with no job to come to, but desperately wanting home to their family and friends?

Mr Duncan Smith needs to realise that mobility is a privilege of the rich. Moving house for them is almost always a matter of making a profit. Moving for working class people is an expense they can rarely afford. Given the state of the jobs market and the rapidity with which companies go under and jobs disappear, it’s a big risk. Mobility is much more difficult, like most other things, when you are poor.

Duncan Smith said Britain had one of the most static workforces in the western world, with people locked to areas and the result that there were more than 5,500,000 people who “simply don’t do a job”. Ah, that’s the reason they don’t do a job is it Mr Duncan Smith. I always wondered about that. So if they all just get off their fat, lazy backsides there will be jobs for them all ....right? What nonsense.

It’s not often I agree with Iain Gray but I’m right behind him when he said that the latest plans showed how little the Tories understood the reality of life for those seeking work or living on low incomes.

Grey pointed out: “Families cannot move around the country every time a parent is out of work. Politicians should be creating jobs in local communities, not trying to move unemployed people around like pieces on a board.”

Eilidh Whiteford for the SNP said: “Instead of endangering economic recovery with short-sighted cuts and reverting to policies which proved disastrous in the 1980s, the new coalition Government should be investing in growth and job creation across the UK.”

There was also criticism from Ed Balls and Ed Miliband.

We are all in this together, so we’re going to really hammer the poor and we can discuss it all at the next garden party, or perhaps at the Henley regatta. I’m sorry; I thought IDS had more about him than this nonsense.

Norman Tebbit and his beloved leader Margaret Hilda, and IDS, apparently having learned little about working class life.