Yesterday, Polly Toynbee dismissed David Cameron’s new tax proposals as “part populism, part poison”. If that’s so, then I hope she’ll react with similar disgust to Hazel Blears’ latest belch of blame-the-poor prattle:
Hit-squads will make early-morning calls to make sure parents are out of bed to get their kids ready for school before heading out to look for work. They will even turn up with rubber gloves to get families to clean up filthy homes. Communities Secretary Hazel Blears said: “In a recession, there’s no space for freeloaders. We need a more muscular approach to ways the state intervenes into deliberately-unemployed people’s lives. Young people are often capable of much more than signing on the dole like their parents.”
Let us be clear; these aren’t serious proposals.
They’re nowhere to be found in the welfare white paper and would never be adopted in the lifetime of this Parliament. Just leaving questions of privacy and dignity aside (for the poor apparently deserve neither), Blears knew from the moment she spat these words that there is simply no money available for her army of ‘hit squads’, nor is there ever likely to be in the future. In a month from now, I’d be surprised if even Blears will remember giving this interview.
But this stuff apparently counts as a positive headline for a government driven by the impulse to ‘get tough’ on the weak, and so they have no qualms about helping make the terminally unemployed objects of national opprobrium. All because the tory media is so ignorant of working class life that it thinks this TV drama is actually a documentary.
What you have here isn’t government by grown-ups, but the say-anything sneer of a frightened schoolkid who’s trying to please the playground bully.
At this stage, I’m not sure the Labour Party even wants my vote.
At this stage, I’m not sure the Labour Party even wants my vote.
Cambridge graduate, liberal-left, cares about electoral reform, social issues and grassroots political activism. No, I don’t think they do either.
“working class life ” - we’ve established they don’t work so can we refer to them as the “benefits class”?
They only want sufficient votes to win the next election.
From the comments on the Sun site, it is clear that Labour are losing quite a lot of Sun readers votes too.
I had to read this article twice, the first time through I thought it was a parody.
F*ck me. An active politician actually uttered such complete bilge in public? Jesus wept, I’m near speechless at the absolute idiocy of such wittering, even if it is just kite-flying/dog-whistle bollocks.
Could we not have a hit squad to stop such arrant nonsense instead.
She talks about a muscular approach to the deliberately-unemployed, but would she do the same to deliberate-tax evaders like Bono or Bob Geldof?
Funny thing is with the talk of a ‘muscular’ approach, that the big families of never-employed on some estates I know would definitely outmuscle any hit squad. What peaceful communities we’d have with big brawls every morning at quarter to eight…
From racialising the working class one day to beating them up the next, I wonder what she’s going to come up with next? Wait a minute, that reminds me of another party…
Neil - Toynbee keeps thinking that New Labour either is (or will one day turn into) the Labour party filled with magic ponies that exists in her head, despite all the evidence to the contrary. She has no idea of how that could happen, or of how to deal with policies like Purnell’s or statements like Blears’. (It”ll be fun reading her attempts to persude Guardian readers to give New labour another term in office in the run-up to the next election.) Even if one shares her sympathies, her repeated failure to realise that it’s New Labour she’s dealing with makes most of her columns irrelevant to what the government actually does.
As for Blears’, she’s been promoting the deserving/undeserving poor schtick for a good few years:
The idea of deserving social housing residents was pioneered by Manchester-based Irwell Valley Housing Association, which in the 1990s introduced a “gold service” for good tenants, which provides superior service delivery to that received by those falling foul of the rules. While good citizens should get the best carrots, errant ones should face the stick, according to a separate chapter written by junior Home Office minister Hazel Blears.
New Labour might not want your vote, but it clearly wants the votes of the petty and small-minded who think the Welfare State is about moral and social conduct and not economic need, or who simply like the idea of kicking the cat on a regular basis so they can feel superior.
redpesto,
Thanks for the link; I’d never seen that story before and it makes ‘enlightening’ reading, to say the least.
Y’know, somewhere in the background to this is a serious debate about the rights and responsibilities of people within the welfare state, and I’d like to think it’s possible to argue in good faith about what form that should take.
But this latest Blears thing has nothing to do with that. Nor, for that matter, does it have anything to do with policy making. Alas, it has everything to do with drumming up a good headline and, in this case, helping the Murdoch/Dacre media beat up on the poor. Which is just so very, very sad.
Every child should have the right to live in a filthy slum and looked after by an idle and lazy parent. I thought the Beveredge Report wanted to do away with idleness, ignorance and squalor, but obviously I was wrong. After listening to to friend who was brought up in Eastern Europe during WW2 and then lived in refugee camps in Germany afterwards ; what is amazing is the effort made by his parents to keep him clean and fed.
Obviously the idea that a child going to bed at reasonable time; being washed regularly, having clean clothes, being given a nutritious breakfast and dinner; being read to and generally living in a secure environment has no impact on their well being or beneficial development.
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Rob Knight