Iain Duncan Smith - true to form

I thought we might get an IDS-free day today, but still the media keep coming up with depressing pieces.  I've bookmarked so many that I can't possibly post links to them, and you wouldn't want to read them anyway.  When I listened to the interview yesterday on the Today programme, I was hoping that John Humphrys would challenge him over his misuse of figures - and he did.  But that brought the extraordinary conversation, recorded in the Huffington Post: 

  '"What they said was you can't absolutely prove that those two things are connected."  Challenged over the fact his statement was not supported by officials statistics published by his own department, Duncan Smith said: "Yes, but by the way, you can't disprove what I said either.  I believe that this to be right, I believe that we are already seeing people going back to work who were not going to go back to work," he said.  "I believe that this will show, as we move forward, that people who were not seeking work are now seeking work."'

Of course, lots of people picked that up and mocked it.  Another assertion, quickly picked up by the New Statesman, was that homelessness figures had "hardly moved".  Actually, homelessness in England is up by 27% since 2010.  The New Statesman published an excellent piece, "Five things Iain Duncan Smith doesn't want you to know about the benefit cap" - essential reading.
Something which went unchallenged was the assertion, or implication, that people can go out and get a job if they want one.
It was inevitable that the interview would result in a complaint from IDS about the BBC.  He said to Humphrys, "This is absurd. What you are doing, as always happens in the BBC, is seeking out lots of little cases from people who are politically motivated to say this is wrong.”
My final link is to a Steve Bell cartoon in the Guardian.

Labour had little to say.  And that's because they support the benefit cap, and know that a large majority of the electorate support it too.  No minds were changed yesterday, but what I found most worrying was that so many people on the ideological right were content to churn out statements which they know to be untrue or highly misleading.  
And the Tories feel that they're on a roll, and can put forward further "reforms".  We're hearing today about a reduction in the cap to £20k, if it's shown to "work"; stopping housing benefit to the under-25s; and denying housing to teenage single mothers.

  

The magical Work Programme

The unemployed have received the sort of publicity that's normal at party conference time. Particularly for the Conservatives they serve two purposes; they epitomise what's wrong with the country, and show how tough and effective the government intends to be. It's all nonsense, of course. An article on Left Foot Forward shows how it's all "recycled rhetoric". And the Guardian's cartoonist, Steve Bell, showed his opinion with a cartoon called Absence of Work. (It's a parody of a painting by Ford Madox Brown called Work, which can be seen here.) The cartoon on line has attracted well over 300 comments.

The solution, of course, is the Work Programme, which is being touted as "revolutionary". Grayling even called it a giant "employment dating sevice". But both the government and the providers must be nervous (not to mention the clients). There's no sign of a leap in the number of jobs available, and without job vacancies there can be no results and no profits. The government has staked everything on this model of contracting - payment by results - and will not want to row back on that. Another problem is highlighted in an article on People Management. People working for the providers could be expected to reshuffle to another provider if their employer loses out on the contract in that area. But more than half of those made redundant by the process have decided to get out of the sector altogether. That loss of experienced staff can only lead to a lack of appropriately qualified people advising clients.

Still, right-wing politicians and their friends in the media continue to believe that if you get tougher on the unemployed and reduce the minimum wage you will, magically, get them to work.