The Daily Mail's take on the sentencing

Daily Mail readers apparently need pictures.  So the paper's report on the sentencing in the A4e fraud case comes with lots of pictures, including two of Emma Harrison.  But accuracy, not a quality conspicuous in the Mail at any time, has deserted it today.  Harrison is called "David Cameron’s millionaire former jobs tsar".  Er .... no.  She was "family champion", which meant little.  They do acknowledge this later, but it doesn't excuse the initial lazy mistake.  Then, after an accurate account of the sentencing - they couldn't really get that wrong - there's a box entitled "How the Mail exposed fraud against taxpayers".  "The scandal of the massive taxpayer fraud at A4e was exposed by the Daily Mail three years ago," they say.  They do talk about the whistle-blowers, but the claim that it was the Mail which exposed the fraud is ludicrous.  The whole story of Harrison's downfall is re-told.
Let's not allow the Mail to re-write history.  Yes, it was their story which brought the £8.6m payout to the attention of many more people than had read this blog, Private Eye, the Guardian or the Telegraph.  The reports they ran for nearly a week were probably responsible for Harrison's humiliation.  But the Mail didn't "expose" anything. 

Watching A4e - the highlights (3)

Let's go back to an extraordinary week just over 3 years ago.  In January 2012 the Telegraph looked at A4e's published accounts for the year to March 2011 and reported two facts, in separate sentences.  Emma Harrison owned 85% of the shares; and the company had paid out £11m in dividends.  I reached for my calculator and did the sums; £8.6m for Harrison.  With her salary as Chair it came to a pay-out of £9.5m.  I dashed off a blog post.  Re-reading that, I didn't write the startling headline I thought I did.  But it was enough.  A writer for Private Eye who reads the blog saw the post and checked the figures (this isn't guesswork - he confirmed it).  His deadline for copy for the magazine was close, and he went with what became the killer fact - Harrison had paid herself £8.6m out of public funds.  It was early in February and the timing was excellent.  The Public Accounts Committee was about to grill people from the welfare-to-work industry, including A4e.  We know that members of the committee read the Eye (and I believe at least one follows this blog).  So that was the stick with which to beat the hapless chap from A4e - £8.6m.
What was the reaction in the media?  At first, they were not very interested.  The Guardian covered it, in sober fashion, as did the Telegraph.  And then, nothing.  It was all very disappointing.  What more did they want?  But then the Daily Mail decided to wade in, all guns blazing.  Let's be clear, I am not a fan of the Mail.  Just the opposite.  But this time they had done their research and decided to trash Emma Harrison, comprehensively.  The article was devastating, tearing into her lifestyle, her history and her company.  It was horribly personal.  And they didn't stop there; there were several more articles through what must have been a dreadful week for Harrison.  The BBC stayed silent on the matter and one could only wonder if there was some sort of political censorship going on.  At last, after several days, Paul Mason was allowed to make a brief report on Newsnight.
It all made Harrison's position untenable.  She announced that she had resigned from her role as the government's "family champion"; and 24 hours later came the news that she was standing down as Chair of A4e.

Bad news and no news

There's a bit of news today which provides no comfort for A4e.  Big reforms to pensions come in next year, and the government has recognised that people will need advice and guidance.  It was expected that the Money Advice Service (MAS) would be the outfit to deliver that; but no.  The Pensions Advisory Service will deliver the non-face to face guidance, while Citizens Advice will handle the face to face service.  What has that got to do with A4e?  Well, it's A4e which has the contract from MAS to do the face to face money advice, a fact which is still nowhere mentioned on the MAS website.  So what might have been a new source of work for A4e won't be.

The "no news" refers to the silence over the Slough fraud case.  If you need a reminder, there's this from the Daily Mail.  Five A4e employees were convicted of fraud early this year, having pleaded guilty to using forged paperwork to make false claims.  Sentencing was delayed, presumably until the trial of the remaining 8 accused, who were, we were told, due to go on trial in October.  I assumed that these ex-employees had pleaded not guilty, hence the delay.  Okay, there are two weeks of October still to go, but will we hear any more of this case?  I know it's small beer compared to the massive frauds by G4S and Serco, apparently forgiven by the government.  But we need to hear the full story.

Proud to work?

The DWP Press Office has been infamous for a long time.  It's staffed by civil servants who are supposed to adhere to the Civil Service Code, which says that they should have "integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality".  But perhaps they're working under the direction of the DWP's Director of Communications, Richard Caseby, who appears to have no such scruples (he's a former managing editor of the Sun).  Back in January the Press Office put out a press release referring to "welfare hand-outs", a term the Daily Mail obligingly repeated.  Then last week came this:

There was no pretence that this was anything other than straight-forward propaganda.  Objective and impartial it was most certainly not.  But I bet the intern (unpaid?) who gets to do the graphics has fun.

Today they attempted a rather different Twitter campaign, one which the Press Office didn't invent but which has decidedly sinister overtones.  It's called "Proud to Work", and it seems to be the creation of the ERSA, the work programme providers' trade body - but clearly they are all working together with this.  The DWP re-tweeted the highly dubious statement that the "Work Programme will deliver £18bn to economy".  Immediately afterwards came re-tweets of stuff from Interserve, A4e and Working Links (not on this screen capture).

What I find most disturbing about this is the "proud to work" tag.  It's subtle.  It suggests that those who are not working are not proud, have no pride.  It suggests that unemployment is voluntary, the result of lack of self-respect.  Perhaps it suggests other things to you.

Is there anything that can be done about the DWP Press Office?  Not at this stage in the parliament, I think.  There doesn't seem to be any mechanism for opposition MPs to complain about it effectively.  What it proves, however, very clearly, is that this government, and Iain Duncan Smith in particular, work closely with the right-wing press to spread lies and damaging propaganda.  If they win in 2015, it will only get worse.

Incredible attack on the BBC

I've only just seen this incredible story in the Mail; I thought the news feed was a parody at first.  But no.  Iain Duncan Smith is furious and has complained bitterly because the BBC led its news bulletins with the story "with more criticism of the Government’s changes to the bloated benefits system".  George Osborne is said to be miffed as well.  "Mr Duncan Smith claimed the corporation had run five negative stories this week alone about sickness and disability benefits, and ‘ignored’ a major announcement on an extension of his flagship new universal credit."  The attack goes relentlessly on.  "‘Who is the biggest opponent of welfare reform? Not a weak Labour Party, but the relentlessly negative BBC,’ he said.  We have successfully introduced the benefits cap to make sure a life on benefits must not be more attractive than working and we have achieved record employment, with more women in work than ever before.  But the BBC news appears to consistently rely on a narrow band of commentators who are overwhelmingly negative."  The DWP has lodged a formal complaint.
This is absolutely chilling.  It confirms what we knew; that the BBC has to tread gingerly because of overt threats to its funding.  But it's a direct undermining of democracy.  The state broadcaster must report only what the government wants it to report.  It must never criticise.  It must allow a minister to say whatever fiction he wants to.
Iain Duncan Smith is a very dangerous man.  He has the mindset of a dictator, delusional and unhinged, and he is being allowed to wreak havoc.  The BBC must not give in to this blackmail.

Question Time

Iain Duncan Smith is on BBC's Question Time tonight.  Don't expect any hard questions, however.  It's clear from the line-up that the intention is to lead on the issue of Islam in schools.  If you're thinking that it depends on what questions the audience ask, you'd be wrong.  I was in a QT audience 10 years ago, and I don't suppose much has changed.  The producers select those questions they want to use.  However, since another panel member is Labour's Chris Bryant, who is the shadow welfare minister, there will probably be a discussion on employment.  There's a useful summary on FullFact which could help with that.

It's also possible that the Oxfam graphic will be raised.  Tories hate it and are attacking Oxfam's charitable status because they've become "political".  The Daily Mail has the right-wing response, but there's a very sensible article by Richard Murphy on the Tax Research UK site.  There could be a lively argument on this, especially as Ian Hislop is also on the panel.  I don't suppose for one moment that IDS will be asked about threats to shut down the Trussell Trust.
The programme will inevitably be a disappointment, but Twitter should be fun.

How the Daily Mail lies to you

The basic story is straightforward.  When people find that their benefits have been cut, disagree with the decision and take their appeal to a tribunal, they find that DWP officials only turn up to 4% of the hearings.  There were 250,000 benefits tribunals last year, a surge in numbers after Iain Duncan Smith turned the screws.  You can read all this on the Telegraph's website, where it notes that "Last year, in cases where a presenting officer turned up, the DWP’s decision to cut the benefits was upheld 57 per cent of the time.  Where they did not turn up, the Government’s success rate fell to below half, at 49 per cent, according to figures obtained by Sadiq Khan, the shadow justice secretary."  Given that this is a Tory paper, it's a fair report.

But then look at the same story in the Mail.  The headline slants it as "claimants win legal right to keep money".  But in the very first sentence we have: "Benefits claimants cheats are able to keep money they are not entitled to ...."  And this is the slant throughout.  IDS is nobly trying to clamp down on cheats but the tribunals are failing to deal with this because there aren't enough DWP officers turning up to put the case in person.    It's a lie.  There's no other word for it.  Those 250,000 people are not "cheats".  But that's the Mail's hate-filled agenda.

The testament of IDS, and the Tory agenda

You probably know that Iain Duncan Smith is on the Marr programme tomorrow (BBC1, 9.00).  Lots of people have been contacting Marr and the show's producers asking for a real interview, lies challenged and all that, but we don't have any real hope.  There's a piece written by Smith on the Telegraph website today which amounts to his testament.  Ludicrous, delusional, stomach-turning - but that's the line he will take, and the increasingly toadying BBC will let him spout it and thank him for gracing them with his presence.

It was Stanley Baldwin, Conservative Prime Minister in the 20s and 30s, who said that the press had "power without responsibility - the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages".  It seems to me to apply to individuals who write for particular papers, giving support to the likes of Duncan Smith without any glimmer of knowledge of the subject.  Take a piece by Simon Heffer in today's Mail online.  I suspect it was the subs who wrote the disgusting headline - Let's get the feckless to buy food - not fags and booze.  But that's Heffer's thesis.  Yes, the push is there again to determine what the poor are allowed to spend their pittance on by giving them swipe cards to ensure that they don't buy any luxuries.
Who is Simon Heffer, you may ask, and what qualifies him to pronounce on this subject?  Well, he was educated at King Edward VI's School, Chelmsford, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he read English and subsequently took a PhD in modern history.  He wrote biographies before joining The Daily Telegraph as a leader writer in 1986 and later held the posts of chief leader writer, political correspondent, parliamentary sketchwriter, comment editor and deputy editor.  He has since rejoined the Daily Mail and edits a new online comment section, called RightMinds.  That CV, I suppose, makes him an expert on the subject of welfare reform.
What he's advocating is familiar, but I want to pick out one sentence.  "Retailers would be invited to sign up as part of an approved merchant scheme and would  benefit by having guaranteed custom in return."  Think about that for a moment.  And then turn to an article in an American online newspaper, slate.com.  In the US the poorest get food stamps, which haven't been actual stamps for a long time.  It's all electronic now, and it's the system which Heffer wants to see here.  The major supermarkets reap huge profits from the system, because people are forced to buy their food there; and the biggest beneficiary is Walmart, which owns Asda over here.  The figures are not disclosed, because of that old get-out clause "commercial confidentiality", but when the numbers on food stamps go down, so do the profits of the supermarkets.
Now, call me suspicious, but could it be that behind the cant about saving the poor from their fecklessness and saving the taxpayer from exploitation, there's another agenda?  Could it just be that there's a massive profit opportunity here?

A grubby way to rubbish the Archbishop

The intervention of Cardinal Archbishop Vincent Nichols in the "welfare" debate was indeed embarrassing for the government.  As far as the Daily Mail was concerned it demanded a response.  So they have today published a lengthy piece by Dominic Lawson headlined: "A Lefty Archbishop who's generous with YOUR money - but not his flock's".
To call this article grubby is an understatement.  Lawson is the son of Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer, who has recently reinvented himself as the spokesman of climate change deniers.  Dominic starts his piece with a slur, to direct his readers' attention away from the issue and towards the Catholic church's meanness when it comes to money.  That paves the way for a kind of character assassination.  Nichols, he says, "is entitled to his opinion" but clearly doesn't understand the issues - which concern "breaking the cycle of dependency", of course - and he doesn't understand how popular this is with his parishioners.  But "Nichols's anathema owes more to political prejudice than to religious doctrine" because the Archbishop is "tribally Labour".  Why is Nichols wrong?  Here, Lawson fails, as Tories always do, to address the specific points.  To say that the government has torn up the safety net is wrong because it is spending £94bn a year on working age benefits.  That is a non sequitur.  The safety net was a minimum income level designed to ensure that no one was completely without money, and that, as we know, has gone.  Delays in paying benefits, as cited by the Archbishop?  Well, they have actually gone down a bit since 2009/10.  Food banks?  Here it gets very dirty indeed.  "Many users may be relying on it because they have spent too much of their welfare payments on less essential items, such as the Fixed Odds Betting Terminals, which now litter every high street in the nation's less affluent boroughs."  There is then one of those Tory untruths about Labour banning Jobcentres from pointing people towards food banks, and the Church of England's supposed support of this, and he ends by returning to his wife's little anecdote and using a cute biblical phrase about "motes and beams".
This is not journalism, of course; it's pure propaganda.  Perhaps the Archbishop will be heartened by the fact that the government felt it necessary to respond through its mouthpiece, the Mail.  And he will surely reflect that, according to the portrayal in the Christian gospels, Jesus was a Lefty.

A4e fraud - first four plead guilty

The Daily Mail reports that the first four ex-A4e staff in the long drawn out fraud case pleaded guilty at court in Reading yesterday.  They admitted a total of 32 offences of fraud and forgery while working on a scheme called Inspire to Aspire, which ended in 2011.  (There's a fifth person who couldn't get to the court and will plead guilty later.)  The Mail claims credit for this case, but it was a whistle-blower who brought it all to light, and A4e has always claimed that it was their own audit processes which revealed the fraud, and they notified the police.  However it was revealed, it is embarrassing, to say the least.  Money was claimed for job outcomes which were fictitious.  The fact that this first batch has pleaded guilty means we won't get to hear the details, but it appears to have involved forging outcome forms or signatures.
Sentencing hasn't happened yet.  Eight more people are due for trial in October (!) so this drags on.

Dragging on

There's nothing to report on the A4e front; no sign of the 2012/13 accounts, and no more information on what is obviously a precarious financial position.
I've bookmarked lots of articles featuring IDS and Benefits Street, which few people would want to read.  One I recommend, though, is by Mark Steel on the Independent's website.  It's titled:  We've had ‘Benefits Street’, so how about ‘Bonus street’? A gritty look at the grim reality of life with an unearned £2m windfall".  Or you could read Nick Cohen's piece in the Spectator, titled The Tories' hunger games. (But don't follow his link to Isabel Hardman's piece in the same magazine - The fight for compassionate Conservatism - unless you want to feel nauseous.)  It's indicative of the way the programme has polarised people.  For the Tories it continues to be splendid propaganda, not least for the drive to lower the benefits cap.  As the Daily Mail reports, a particularly nasty MP, Philip Davies, used it to feed IDS the line in a debate in parliament.  "Mr Duncan Smith also revealed he thought the controversial Channel 4 show Benefits Street was helping to win the argument for reform. The Tory minister said viewers were rightly 'shocked' by programmes such as Benefits Street and On Benefits and Proud, featuring people who spend their benefit money on luxuries such as cigarettes and wide-screen TVs, but that they had enabled the Government to force through measures, which he said would put an end to the abuse. Conservative MP Philip Davies said the documentaries will leave working people 'irritated' by the spending of those living on state handouts."  (Is that "compassionate Conservatism, Ms Hardman?)
For some constructive reading I recommend Guy Standing's book The Precariat, published by Bloomsbury in 2011.  It's an excellent analysis, from a sociologist's point of view, of the plight of growing numbers of people around the world, including many who read this blog.

Weekend round-up

Still waiting for A4e's accounts, but as one of our commenters points out, A4e has frequently been late filing its accounts in recent years.  Perhaps of more immediate interest is the down-grading of its credit rating.  But while we await developments there are the usual attempts by the DWP to hide its own incompetence.  The news came out that there has been a blunder with the hated bedroom tax.  Anyone who was on HB before 1996 and has been on it ever since should not be subject to the new legislation; they are covered by an older law which wasn't superseded by the new one.  One estimate is that this applies to around 40,000 people, many of whom have already had to go through the misery of losing their home or trying to exist on less money.  And I reckon that many of the people who have been on HB that long will be disabled or have long-term conditions.  So the government intends to "close the loop-hole".  It's not clear whether that will mean more retro-active legislation, or whether they can just sneak it through on a Statutory Instrument, which doesn't go through Parliament.  Either way, why did those highly-paid civil service lawyers not spot this before?
The DWP tried to distract from this with news that the benefits cap is very successful.  This is perhaps the most popular of all their bites at benefits, because it seems only fair that you shouldn't get more than many people can earn.  But it obscures the fact that the bulk of the money goes to landlords, not the claimants, so if you live in an expensively-rented home and suddenly lose your job, you will lose your home as well; this is shown by the fact that the large majority of the boroughs where people have been affected are in London.
The row about Channel 4's Benefits Street rumbles on.  The Daily Mail's contribution comes from John Bird, who is the founder of the Big Issue.  It's typically confused.  Bird thinks that the show tells the truth about benefits, and he's an expert, he says, because he came through dire poverty himself.  Perhaps the worst example of right-wing hate-mongering came from Katie Hopkins on the BBC's This Week last night.  Who's Katie Hopkins?  Quite.  Her only claim to fame is that she was on The Apprentice; she now writes for the Sun, and seems to have taken the place of Kelvin McKenzie as the nutter of choice for TV producers wanting to anger their viewers.  (The Daily Star called her rent-a-gob.)  Last night she called for more welfare cuts; directly insulted Diane Abbott MP, who showed remarkable restraint by not decking her; and said, "Food banks are a con."  The rage about her on Facebook, most of it, I guess, not from benefits claimants, shows that we might just have reached a point where the general public is embarrassed by this continual demonisation of the poorest.
One bit of news about the DWP itself came from an unlikely source - the Telegraph.  It revealed that more than 1,100 DWP staff have been warned over "prying" on benefits records.  That's breaches of privacy, accessing records they had no right to see.
Finally, how's this for irony?  "BBC misleads public every day on scale of cuts, fumes Cameron".  Yes, it's the Daily Mail describing Cameron getting annoyed on Radio Merseyside when he as accused of treating Liverpool unfairly.  No wonder the BBC has become so tepid in its journalism.

.... and a happy New Year

While the more fortunate of us were tucking into our turkey on Christmas Day, even if it was courtesy of a charity in a homeless shelter, Iain Duncan Smith was composing a piece for the Daily Mail.  There will, it says, be "No hiding place for those who opt for a life on benefits".  He didn't have to think too hard about it.  All the familiar cliches and lies are there, like "lifestyle choice".  On the benefit cap, for instance, "around 19,000 who would potentially have been subject to the benefit cap have already moved into work".  That's two fingers up to the government's own statisticians who told him that the statement was dishonest.  But the main point of the piece is to trumpet the new scheme "that will require 6,000 jobseekers to spend 35 hours a week at a supervised jobsearch centre.  People who have been out of work for several years or those who are lacking motivation [my italics] will be required to spend up to six months looking for and applying for jobs in return for their benefits."
More dishonest twaddle.  This is about sanctioning as many people as possible as quickly as possible.  Even if they turn up on time and do as they're told, they'll be sanctioned for "lacking motivation".  Some will go into the cash-in-hand economy (which hurts the rest of us) and some will simply be homeless.  But it will give the repellent IDS the chance to say that he's got them to sign off.  There's no detail about who will run these centres, but they will certainly provide jobs for loads of security staff.
The Mail likes this stuff so much that it has an editorial comment on it.  The clever chappy who wrote it thinks that IDS's initiative "will doubtless provoke howls of indignation from the liberal establishment".  (Who are they, you may well ask.)  "It is a robust approach and there are those on the Left who will say it's cruel.  They said the same about the benefit cap, the 'bedroom tax', the unpaid work programme and universal benefit [sic]."  I could go on quoting, but it's too nauseating.
The lie about the numbers being driven to get a job by the benefit cap was published by the Telegraph on Christmas Eve, with elaborations and the statement from IDS that it had "pushed 250 people back into work every week".  (For those who are not clear why this is a lie, it was pointed out by the statisticians that there is constant "churn", some people coming off benefits and some coming on, and there is no way of knowing how many of those signed off as a direct result of the cap.)
More embarrassing for IDS (no, okay, he is never embarrassed) was the Christmas Eve news that 32,000 people had not received their benefits because of an "error" by the DWP.  Not to worry; if they rang up before 5.00 pm they would get the money within 3 hours.  Presumably, if they were lucky enough to hear about this, the unfortunate could phone a premium rate number -something which the government has now decreed should stop.  The DWP will have to give out private local rate numbers - a victory for Margaret Hodge and her Public Accounts Committee.
Boxing Day brought an interesting exclusive in the Independent.  Labour has decided that outsourcing public services is not necessarily a good thing.  They've recognised that the contracts don't provide better competition or drive down prices because "what we have in this country now is an oligopoly of a few companies that are not competing effectively and are providing poor value for money for the taxpayer."  Hallelujah!  Yes, Labour started it, but if they've now seen the light we can only rejoice.  Perhaps they'll also do something about the scam reported in the Guardian on Boxing Day.  The GMB union is taking a case to court against a marketing company, PerDM, which apparently employs people on a fake self-employment basis and then pays them way below minimum wage.
It's not going to get any better, folks.  The best we can hope for in 2014 is that there are more real jobs, and some of those desperate for work and a viable income will escape from the clutches of this appalling government.

"An incendiary idea" - or vicious and stupid?

You have to hand it to the Daily Mail; when you think it can't get any worse, it does.  Today's gem is an article by Mark Littlewood headlined "Why Osborne must publish the names of every benefits claimant - and how much we pay them; An incendiary idea to save on our £500m A DAY welfare bill".
You might already have spotted the first clue to the flaws in his argument from this headline; the use of the words "we" and "our".  He develops this, summarised in three quotations from article:

• "The amount we now spend on welfare is jaw-dropping.  The average household is taxed to the tune of £8,000 every year to finance the State's programme of handouts."
• "Taxpayers have a right to know exactly who is claiming what and how much they are getting."
• "Many people now have a third of their wages - or even more - confiscated at source by Revenue & Customs.  The biggest item this cash is then spent on is welfare.  You have a right to know who is receiving it."

It's the language of "us and them".  Personally, I don't know which category Littlewood would put me into.  I am retired and receive a state pension.  (He includes pensioners in his scheme; is my state pension a "handout"?)  I'm also a taxpayer.  But then, the majority of benefits claimants have been taxpayers, and will be again.  Most of us are both claimants and taxpayers at some points in our lives.  That's what a welfare system is for; you pay in when you can and draw out when you can't.  But the Mail has been tireless in helping successive governments to draw a line round all benefits claimants and separate them from the "hard-working families" beloved by politicians.  For someone like Littlewood, it seems to make sense.  After Oxford he worked for various organisations including the Liberal Democrats, and is now Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs, a think tank which is very secretive about its sources of funding.  He can't see himself as ever being in the position of having to claim benefits.  Like all his class, he considers himself far superior to all of us scroungers.
What about his central thesis; that there should be a publicly accessible database of what benefits everyone gets?  No problems with that, surely?  It's not naming and shaming, is it?  Two more quotations:

• "Anyone ashamed to claim money from the State shouldn't be claiming it."
• "Surely no one needs to worry about violent retribution against claimants.  The British are far too reasonable to start taking up pitchforks and burning torches and assaulting imagined benefits cheats.  We are generous and fair-minded people."  (Surely this is tongue-in-cheek!)

Leave aside the fact that there are many, many elderly people who are not claiming the benefits to which they are entitled because they are ashamed.  That's not important compared to the fun we could all have looking up the incomes of our neighbours.
It isn't going to happen, and I suspect that Littlewood and the Mail know that.  The point of the article is to further demonise anyone who is dependent on the welfare system.

The freedom of the press - to lie

The owner of the Daily Express is Richard Desmond.  The editor is Hugh Whittow.  The writer of a particularly shameless article today is Giles Sheldrick.  I mention these names because newspaper articles don't come about by accident.  They are the result of deliberate decisions by men who consider themselves free to debase the whole concept of truth.  This is propaganda of the most egregious kind, peddling an interpretation of figures which have been shown to be false.  These men don't have to explain why they do this.  They are not answerable to the people they insult and denigrate.  They just make money.
If you have read the article, you might also read this piece in the New Statesman; or, if that's a bit left-wing for your taste, this one in the Economist.  You might also read FullFact's analysis of the figures, written back on 24 April.  But the circulation of the Express is nearly 600,000, and presumably those people read it because it confirms their prejudices, not for truth.
Related to all this is an interesting piece on the Left Foot Forward website, which graphs the number of times the word "scrounger" has been used in British newspapers since 1994.  It takes off steeply from 2010. Some of the comments under the article rubbish the accuracy of the exercise, but it remains fascinating.

PS:  I later discovered this, even worse, article in the Daily Mail.  They've added a bogus "workshy map of Britain" to fuel the lie of those "found fit to work".  It's breathtaking in its sheer dishonesty.  The writer is someone called Amanda Williams.  I wonder how much she was paid for this scurrilous trash.  These two papers between them continue to make Britain a nastier place than even the politicians know how to do.

Stats, the BBC - and reputations

The publication of the latest unemployment figures didn't get much coverage because the media were all too concerned with the Thatcher funeral.  However, for analysis have a look at the FullFact site here and here.  The first shows how the government is "managing" i.e. manipulating the figures for the media.  It is telling it's own story which is just not borne out by the true figures.  The second shows "what the politicians missed in the jobless figures".

Another story which might warm your heart (or not) was in the Daily Mail.  It's a very long piece about Iain Duncan Smith and his "days on the breadline".  The most important part of it is his criticism of the BBC:

"He clearly believes passionately in the work he is doing, although he despairs at how the Conservatives’ austerity programme is reported — above all, by the BBC. ‘The BBC is always negative, never explains, never talks about why we are reforming, or the fact that national debt is rising to terrifying levels,’ he complains. ‘All the BBC case studies are hard-luck stories like that of the £53-a-week market trader. They never focus on a family stuck on a housing waiting list or in bed-and-breakfast accommodation.’ He is clearly exasperated, too, at how removing the Spare Room Subsidy — which will see housing benefit-payment cuts to council house tenants with surplus spare rooms — has been labelled the ‘bedroom tax’ by Labour. When the BBC employed the same phrase, Duncan Smith complained. ‘Now they call it the “so-called bedroom tax”. It’s a disgrace.’"

As I've said before, this carping and intimidation is disgraceful - though we know it's official Tory policy.  What he says doesn't strike me as remotely accurate.  But IDS bombards the BBC with complaints, was disgustingly rude about Stephanie Flanders, and is really trying to ensure that the BBC presents only the spin that the government wants.  That's what is a disgrace.

And there's another worrying trend.  Anyone who goes public with their opposition to the government is likely to have their backgrounds trawled over and their reputations trashed by the right-wing press.  It happened with the chap who challenged IDS to live on £53 a week, and now it's happened to the woman who led a Facebook campaign to have people turn their backs on the Thatcher funeral procession.  Isn't a free press great!

What about A4e?

That was the question asked by a friend, who noticed that this blog has veered off into the territory of welfare changes rather than focussing on the company.  There's a good reason for that.  A4e is attracting very little publicity and isn't seeking it.  How different from when Emma Harrison was in charge!
But attention needs to turn to all the companies delivering the Work Programme.  You may have noticed that in all the recent coverage of the changes, no politician has mentioned the WP.  And no journalist has asked the obvious questions.  Since the Work Programme is a failure, why are you still pouring money into it?  And why are you painting the unemployed as idle, not "doing the right thing" (and much worse), when your scheme to help them into work has proved useless?
We don't know whether A4e's finances have improved in the last 12 months.  It seems unlikely.  They are still advertising for staff in the same language as in the past.  There's an advert for an Advisor (Skills) Work Programme on the jobandtalent site (I don't know whether it's also on UJM) which talks about "individual, tailored support for each customer" and also "sales leads" and "sales calls", which is an odd way of describing contacts with employers.  We also get "A4e's DNA: Trusted, Passionate, Driven, Brave, Friendly and Caring" and "A4e's core mission is to improve people's lives".  I'm not mocking this.  It ought to be the reality.  But it's more than ever hollow, when there's no profit to be made and the struggle is just to keep the losses down.  
A4e, and all the providers, are almost certainly dealing with people who are increasingly angry and / or demoralised.  The government is determined to paint every benefits claimant as a drain on the taxpayer.  And now they have used the Philpott case to advance that idea.  As the Independent reports, Osborne is "questioning why taxpayers were funding 'lifestyles like that'".  Others are using it to call for cuts to child benefit.  And all of it after the disgusting Daily Mail opened the subject.  For a magnificent rebuttal to that, I applaud Zoe Williams in the Guardian.  

The Work Programme - what we now know

Two quotes from that grisly Emma Harrison interview on Channel 4 News:
1.  (about the leaked A4e figures) "They're wrong."
They were right.
2.  "The Work Programme is the most successful programme we've ever run."
It isn't. 
The one thing that's missing from the data released so far is the comparative figures for the providers, at least in a form that means something.  So we don't yet know how A4e compares with the others.
Everything else is out there.  The dead weight figure for the first year was 5%, the number expected to get jobs without the WP or any other intervention.  So the target of 5.5% was very low.  The actual figure achieved is 3.5%.  There were 200,000 breaks in claiming, which the ERSA (the providers' trade body) wants to spin as 200k jobs.  Mark Hoban on the Daily Politics claimed that one in four have found work.  Iain Duncan Smith says that more than 50% have come off benefits.  Yeah, right.
The best summary, surprisingly, comes from the Daily Mail.  What a pity they spoil it by referring to people "returning to claim handouts".  Hoban intends to write to the worst-performing providers telling them to produce an action plan.  A far cry from the original promise to "sack" them.
There's a fair bit more talk to come today, much of it trying to prove that black is white.

"Whipping girl of the welfare apologists"

That's the curious description of A4e's owner Emma Harrison in the headline to an interview in the Sunday Times last Sunday.  It's a neat way of insulting all of us.  And another curiosity is that this is described as Harrison's "first interview since the scandal", completely ignoring the interview she gave to the Daily Mail on 11 August.  There's nothing new in this one, except that the self-justification is stronger than ever.  "I was busy helping families get back to work," she says.  The history of Emma and her company follows, complete with tuck-shop incident, and then the account of how she thought of the "family champions".  Her initiative was the inspiration for the whole government programme.  But then, "Suddenly I'm put forward as the face of all evil".  The article goes on: "Harrison does not deny that there was wrongdoing at A4e, but she believes it was blown out of proportion by political point-scoring.  Those who wanted to attack the government's controversial welfare policies had a handy whipping girl."  On the money, that £8.6m, she's still "unrepentant", giving the same explanation of her entrepreneurship as she gave to the Mail.  She now spends her time working with her Foundation for Social Improvement, helping small charities.
Perhaps this is another attempt at rehabilitating Harrison's reputation.

That interview considered

Time for reflection on that Emma Harrison interview.  The Daily Mail gave her the chance to tell her side of the story, ironically.  I know from the stats for this blog that it was the Mail's monstering of her that did most of the damage.  So let's look at what's being said.

It's impossible for us to know whether Harrison herself was the business brain behind securing all those contracts and connecting with the right people.  Clearly she saw herself as a charismatic leader, the company figure-head.  She encouraged the culture of the business, driven by targets and rewards.  Was she surprised when some employees cut corners?  What emerges from the interview is a lack of understanding about real business.  Outsourcing is very different from the sort of entrepreneurship she sees as her expertise.  She says: "People say it’s taxpayers’ money, but it is profit honestly earned over many years on orders that were placed with our company. I've been investing in this business, taking massive personal risks, for years. This was not a dividend of one year, it was a result of 25 years of work.  I agree it’s a fantastic amount of money but I have tens of millions of pounds invested in A4e, some of it supported by personal mortgages. I'm not a gambler, I was very exposed. Any entrepreneur will understand this. I'm the majority shareholder in A4e. I'm taking all the risk."
     Take that first highlighted phrase.  An outsourcing contract is nothing like an order placed with a company.  If I make widgets or run an accountancy practice I only get paid if I do the work I've agreed to do.  If I mess up an order or an account I won't get another one.  My business depends on delivering what I said I would deliver, and being better than my competitors.  That is far from how outsourcing works.  A4e, like the others, has consistently failed to deliver, as its business grew.
     As for "massive personal risks"; I can't see it.  A genuine entrepreneur would take that apart.

The real problem for Harrison was hubris.  She believed her own PR.  She has never publicly debated with the critics of her company and herself.  Until she does that she will not be credible.