“The Zealot”, formerly known as Iain Duncan Smith, is fast becoming found out. Not so much ‘the saviour of the Welfare State’ more, the man who has put Welfare into a state! Regular readers of my blog will know that I have no time for Iain Duncan Smith nor for his ‘one size fits all’ approach to reforming the Benefits System.
The problems for Duncan-Smith go much further than an untried IT system, an ageing population and, as he would put it, ‘Welfare Scroungers’. The pisspotical obsession that the Coalition, Labour and the Greens have with the EU is the root cause of most of the problems concerning the Welfare State. The World has moved on and the EU has realised that most people in the UK have not grasped this and are using our own frustrations as a weapon against us. No longer can you expect to leave school and walk into a job or an apprenticeship. Industry and all that went to support it, coal, transport links, etc have gone. Margaret Thatcher caused anger and resentment with her reforms and Tony Blair converted that anger into apathy for political gain. We now have a situation where people, quite rightly in my opinion, blame the politicians for their ills and expect the government to come to their aid.
Duncan-Smith’s approach to the problem is akin to smacking a naughty child without first trying to discover why the child is perceived to be naughty. Punishing people for losing their jobs, taking retirement or for living longer than the prescribed six score years and ten seems to me to be a very draconian way of dealing with such a delicate problem.
Given the philosophy behind the creation of the Common Market, I find it strange that, post WW11, British politicians were queuing up to join a club which from the very onset was all about total European domination. Those same politicians seemed to have forgotten that this country paid a heavy price financially and in both civilian and military lives; nearly half a million British people died trying to prevent what the political class were so eager to establish!
Whether or not you believe that the Welfare State is sustainable is irrelevant, the relevance lies in the fact that it goes against EU doctrine. In order for the EU to work, according to its own rules, everyone has to feed from the communal Federal trough. This is the smaller trough set below the one which the Commissioners and EU hierarchy feed from. To have a Member State give away money, like it was gone out of fashion, to all and sundry is not a good thing in their watery eyes. So, they fight back by doing away with borders, insisting on the free movement of people across the continent, installing Human Rights into the constitutions of Member States thus giving every EU person access to our Welfare System regardless of the fact that they have not contributed towards it.
Enter Iain Duncan-Smith, a man so ridiculously focussed upon the impossible that he insisted he be exempt from any government re-shuffle until his task is complete. Oblivious to the facts he stumbles blindly on, completely unaware that his pet project has floundered upon the EU reef of misery. The truth is, his ‘task’ will never be complete while we remain members of the EU. His Department’s latest projection is that Universal Credit, (for that is his pet project) will now not be ready to roll out in full until the end of 2019. Even this, say his critics and, more importantly, the Commons public accounts committee, is far from guaranteed.
Even though the Labour Party, the LibDems and the Greens support this policy of Universal Credit, common sense tells you that you should never put all of your eggs into one basket! However, common sense has never been high on the agenda of either the Coalition or the Labour Party. To date this lack of common sense is set to lose the taxpayer in excess of £2.3 billion should there be a further six month delay, with a further £2.8 billion set aside for any calamity.
There can be no denying that after the debacle of thirteen years of a Labour government determined to destroy Britain in order to build a new idealogical Utopia based upon the EU blueprint of Federalism through regionalisation and poverty, the Welfare State is now not fit for purpose. The two-Party State which we have endured in this country for the past one hundred years has meant that consecutive governments, especially post WW11, have been blind to the root cause of problems deliberately caused by outside forces, latterly by the EU. It has been too easy, too convenient to blame the previous incumbents. Ill thought out schemes no matter how well intentioned, which ignore the obvious, are never going to work.
Your zeal for trying to fix the unfixable aint going to work, Mr Duncan-Smith, leastways while we are still members of the overbearing EU. How come you are the only one blind to this?
RantaBlog 