Michael Meacher MP

By any standards the IDS so-called welfare reforms are extremely harsh, victimising the poorest for the follies of the ultra-rich bankers, bashing families with disabled children, pressurising the unemployed with over-the-top work capability tests into jobs that don’t exist (there are only 400,000 vacancies for 2.64 million jobless to fill), and forcing some 80,000 families to decant because housing benefit cuts mean the rent is no longer affordable.   So how do you sell a nasty, vicious package like this?   The solution the Tories have come up with is to create one superficially plausible idea and then repeat it over and over again to prove that the whole package is OK.    ’Nobody should get more in housing benefit than the average-paid hard-working employee gets from a week’s hard grind at work’ – who could possibly disagree with that?   A lot of people if they were told the truth.   But that’s not the point: it’s the Tories’ technique of under-the-radar attack that needs to be copied and used against them, because they are the ones who are far more vulnerable. (more…)