The Relic

Nu Labour's regressive Green Paper on welfare reform would even have made Margaret Thatcher's cabinet think twice. It requires the abolition of income support and incapacity benefit, while claimants will be rquired to look for a job or face community work. Private and voluntary organisations will have the right to bid for contracts to get the jobless back to work, while single parents will be expected to seek work when their children reach seven.

This may play well with Daily Mail readers, but leaving aside the fact that forced labour for 20% of the average national income is just plain wrong, there are countless reasons why it can't and shouldn't work. Here are a few:

1) People are already employed on minimum wage to pick litter and clean graffitti. The existing workers will inevitably be undercut and thrown onto benefits themselves.

2) Single parents have great difficulty in finding and maintaining childcare in an age where families are fragmented. Beyond a certain age this makes for latchkey kids left to their own devices, with far-reaching negative social consequences.

3) The monetarist policies pursued by governments since Margaret Fascist's generate unemployment by default.

4) The halt and lame are lumped in with supposed welfare spongers, while in fact that small hardcore that don't want to work would be bloody useless in the workforce anyway. Cutting their benefits would be asking for a crimewave.

5) In these days of weakened unions the measures will make things worse for those who are working. This so-called "credit crunch" is a deepening recession, and the draconian measures will make people ever more afraid of losing their jobs, no matter how badly their employers treat them or how low their wages go.

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The Relic

Richard Dawkins for Pope.