“Good News to the Poor?” Not a Chance!!!

"I could live on £53 a week if I had to."

No sir, you could not – nor should you be expected to.

But the desperation that makes you claim such a ridiculous improbability is part of the visual impairment of a Government lacking ears to hear, eyes to see, experience to understand and a heart to feel the rich possibilities of the people who make up our communities.

When it comes to U turns, the transformation from weeping compassion in 2002 Easterhouse, and the body swerve given to the exhortation you preached at a fringe labour meeting in 2006 to aim at a level of income that supported and helped the poorest, requires a sufficient causal explanation for an effect that is gratuitously callous.

Bob Holman is one of my heroes; he along with Kay Carmichael taught me Social Administration at Glasgow Uni in the 1970's. I learned from him the meaning of the word poor. Coming from the family of a dairyman on the farms, though never thinking of myself as poor even if we were, I heard someone explain how the real world works, and how it can be made to work in different ways depending on the choices made by Governments and the powerful. You, IDS, met Bob Holman and took time to see, listen and respond to people in Easterhouse, many of them on benefits, who shatter stereotypes such as undeserving poor, work-shy, benefit fraud and various other bogey words used to justify current policies.

Last June Bob wrote in the Guardian a piece that now seems like a Micah type prophecy. Or maybe Amos who talked about grinding the faces of the poor in the dust and selling them for the price of a pair of slippers.  By the way, I suspect the slippers worn in your home may have cost the best part of a week's survival money for those on £53 a week.You can read Bob's considered outrage here

So now IDS, you are back to stereotypes, scapegoats and soft targets for the populist right. And the demonstrable foolishness, hard to hide cynicism, or otherworldly ignorance exposed by the claim you could live on £53 per week, further diminishes the integrity let alone residual integrity of a coalition brokered on the self-interest of the parties. And I'm sorry to say, based on the arrogant naivete of those who say they know, when in fact they cannot possibly know what it's like to live on benefits.

And as for the claim that the changes will make the benefot system fairer – I am not at all persuaded the word fair is the same as the word just, right and humane. It seems to me a playground word, used by those who think others are being treated unfairly generously. I'm more concerned about those treated unfairly callously.

I recognise but cannotd apologise for the political partisanship of what I've written. I follow One who preached good news to the poor, and worship a God who requires that we act justly, love mercy and walk humbly, and live for the coming of a Kingdom of justice and joy and righteousness.