Mps hitting pay dirt and why we may never be safe again

Mps could be in for a cash windfall following recommendations made by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) that their pay should be given a pay rise of up to £20,000.

Actually it is thought IPSA will plump for a £10,000 rise instead, big of them don’t you think? Unless you happen to be one of the millions of people who haven’t had a pay rise since the big crash of 2008, in which case you will have ground your teeth to powder before reaching the end of this sentence.

If a £10,000 pay rise for MPs seems like a slap in the face then their own assessment of what they deserve is more like a punch on the nose. According to a survey conducted in January most MPs think their not ungenerous £66,000 salary should rise to £83,000, a considerable number of the members polled think it should be raised to £100,000.

John Bercow, a man who was only made Speaker because a dying Labour government though doing so would annoy an incoming Conservative one is said to be ‘sympathetic’ to their demands. This just about shows his worth as a parliamentarian, and it’s a lot closer to a handful of tarnished pennies than £100,000.

I am well aware there are many MPS who, though it is sometimes a struggle to believe it, who aren’t in politics for the money. Their motivation is serving the people and advancing democracy, what a pity their voice has been drowned out yet again by pinstripe clad piggies squealing to be given a bigger trough.

It’s that man again; Eric Joyce I mean, the former member for Falkirk has been arrested following an ‘altercation’ with staff at Edinburgh airport.

A spokesperson for the airport said Mr Joyce had become ‘abusive and confrontational towards airport staff and police’ during a row over a lost mobile phone. He is due to appear in court at a later date.

I don’t doubt Mr Joyce has his demons to battle, but isn’t his behaviour becoming more than a little tiresome?

Being suspended from the commons for fighting in one of its many bars may be a cry for help and he deserved a measure of sympathy; screaming airport staff earning the minimum wage takes him into the territory of the unregenerate yob.

Any sympathy towards him has long since curdled into boredom, it is more than high time he went away and didn’t come back until he’s grown up.

David Cameron says the government is going to focus on ‘big picture’ issues and not waste any more time squabbling about Europe or gay marriage. Meanwhile Nick Clegg says that he cannot ‘envisage any circumstances’ under which the coalition will come to an end before the next election.

They might hate each other but they’re going to stay together for the sake of the children, I mean the voters; anyway they’re not going to split up, honest, fingers crossed. I can just imagine the tense silences around the cabinet table punctuated only by the rustling of David’s newspaper and an occasional martyred sigh from Nick.

This, future historians will note, is the moment when the coalition entered its Terrance Rattigan era. A stage of British political history marked by well spoken people sitting stoically in drawing rooms as they seethe internally with rage and resentment, like a bad marriage the coalition will stumble held together by a rope of mutual dependency.

I can see the closing scene of Act Two now as the doomed pair sit in a chintz crowded drawing room.

“Would you like some more tea David?”

“No, I think I’ll go to the study and smoke a pipe before bed.”

The clock ticks, dust settles and as the curtain falls two great parties trundle a few seconds closer to political oblivion.

The murder of Drummer Lee Rigby on a suburban street in Woolwich South London almost defies words. Most of the millions that have been written about it seem trite, a hardly adequate response to the horror of what happened.

The best I can do is to add the following observations.

It is heartening to see that moderate Muslims, the majority despite what the tabloids would have us believe, have been quick to disown the actions of two deluded extremists. No faith tells its followers to go out and kill, it is individuals who pull triggers, set off bombs and use knives with deadly intent; god has nothing to do with it.

This might not be the first atrocity recorded by ‘citizen journalists’, it is though the first where the participants have played up to them. One of the defining images of Wednesday’s outrage was that of one of the murdered telling people recording events on their mobiles that this was a response to crimes committed by the west in ‘Muslim lands’ as blood dripped from his hands.

It was noting of the sort; attacking and killing an innocent man isn’t a political act; it is murder pure and simple.

This is though a very special sort of murder, one that combines the violence and self justification that has been the signature of malcontents down the ages with a thoroughly modern taste for showing off. They may have been dangerously deluded on every thing else, but the perpetrators were chillingly right about one thing; after this we will never be safe again.

Mrs Bottrill is the first casualty of austerity- she won’t be the last.

Remember the name Stephanie Bottrill; in life she was obscure; in death she earned a bitter sort of fame. When she threw herself in front of a lorry on the M6 Mrs Bottril became the first casualty of the austerity policies pushed by the coalition government since 2010.

Her suicide was, it has emerged, motivated by the stress caused her by the removal of £80 per month in housing benefits under the ‘bedroom tax’. In a letter written to her son she wrote ‘don’t blame yourself for me ending my life; the only people to blame are the government.’

In an interview given to the Sunday People Mrs Bottrill’s son said his mother, who had lost 25% of her housing benefit under the withdrawal of the ‘spare room subsidy’, had been struggling to cope. Previously she had, he said, been in good spirits, commenting on the ‘bedroom tax’ he added ‘it was dreamt up in London by people in offices and big houses. They have no idea the effect it has on people like my mum.’

Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls told Sky News Mrs Bottrill’s suicide was a ‘tragedy’ and that the changes to housing benefit were ‘driving people to the edge of despair.’

David Jamieson, Labour Group Leader on Solihull Council, also speaking to Sky News, said he was ‘absolutely appalled this poor lady has taken her own life because she was worried how she would pay the bedroom tax.’ He added that in the light of what happened to Mrs Bottrill the government would ‘sit up and take notice and reconsider this policy.’

Although small beer in comparison to the horrors enacted in Syria on a daily basis the death of Mrs Bottrill marks a turning point for the Cameron government, the moment when it stopped being comically inept and became a menace. Stephen Bottrill is right to lay the blame for his mother’s death at the door of the coalition, however hard David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne wash their hands it is a damned spot they will never be able to remove.

Before the 2010 election Iain Duncan Smith put forward the analysis that the welfare system was harming rather than helping the poorest people in society and needed to be reformed. In this he was quite correct, the welfare state is a creation of the 1940’s that has had bits bolted on over the subsequent decades at the whim ministers who pass like ships in the night. As a result it has become a confusing and perverse tangle that neither claimants nor administrators can understand.

What was needed, according to Mr Duncan Smith, was a programme of simplification allied to a change of culture so the system actively worked with claimants to help them back into work whilst giving real support to those people who genuinely can’t work. Again he was right; so how did things go so wrong?

The went wrong at the point when having entered office Iain Duncan Smith signed up to the myth of ‘austerity’ being the solution to every economic problem that has hoodwinked the rest of this hapless government. He has compounded this mistake by setting up a fatuous conflict between ‘strivers’ and ‘skivers.’

Let’s be clear Mrs Bottrill was not in any way a ‘skiver’ by all accounts she was an honest and hard working woman. Freeloaders, be they fraudulent benefits claimants or city traders who bend the rules don’t worry themselves to the point of suicide over going into debt; they max out their credit card and yours too without a thought.

Neither do they queue up at food banks every week as many Britons just like Mrs Bottrill do every day; they order up the sort of banquet that would make Henry VIII feel faint then saunter off leaving someone else to pick up the tab.

Most of the people who will be hit hard by the ‘bedroom tax’ and the rest of the austerity agenda aren’t ‘scroungers’ riding for free they’re hard working people struggling to make ends meet.

The tax that drove this innocent woman to her death has nothing to do with fairness; it is manifestly unjust, or even to do with balancing the books. It is an exercise in pure political cynicism, an attempt to blow long and hard on the dog whistle to appeal to disenchanted Tory voters in the shires whilst using the sillier end of the tabloid press to set the people hurt most by the cuts fighting amongst themselves.

Shamefully it seems to have worked, all week the media has focussed on the tedious squabble within the Conservative Party over Europe. Once upon a time Labour would fought the corner of women like Mrs Bottrill, not any more, the grassroots are demoralised and the leadership, after making the required noises moved on to the next photo-opportunity and the next sound bite.

Those people who think fairness is more than just a glib phrase used by politicians on the make should remember Stephanie Bottrill and how she died, particularly when it comes to casting their vote.

Hollowed out Labour, misfiring tweets and the perils of motherhood

Thirteen years in office left the Labour Party ‘hollowed out’ according to shadow cabinet member Sadiq Khan.

Speaking on the BBC he said ‘what you’ve got to realise is between 1997 and 2010 we did some remarkable things in government, but we lost five million voters, we lost tens of thousands of members, we lost thousands of activists and thousands of councillors.’

Gaining more than two hundred councillors in last week’s local elections has reversed the worst of the losses incurred under Gordon Brown, but Labour’s success was overshadowed by that of UKIP. The party has, according to Mr Khan, recruited fifty thousand new members since 2010 and is trying to persuade many of them to stand in areas where Labour currently has little representation.

The task now, he said, was to ‘make sure the public understand we’ve got new policies that can persuade them to give us their trust in 2015.’

Put like that it all sounds so simple, just a matter of recruiting shed loads of new members, tell them about your shiny new policies than sit back and watch the votes stack up.

In the real world things aren’t quite so simple, for a start many of those new members are actually ‘supporters’, they have little involvement in the life of the party beyond sending off a donation now and then. As for the new policies that are going to turn them all into activists overnight, they’re always coming; but never seem to actually arrive.

About the only thing Sadiq Khan said with which I can agree is that the Labour Party has indeed been ‘hollowed out.’ Only it wasn’t, as he suggests an accidental side-effect of being in office, it was done intentionally by the two dysfunctional men who led the party from 1994.

Alex Ferguson has announced his retirement as manager of Manchester United this week, cue much lamentation from the terraces and one mistimed tweet from Ed Milliband.

As is so often the way when politicians and popular culture meet he made a fool of himself, his message, which read ‘Proud man. Great manger. Staunch Labour Party supporter. Sir Alex Ferguson will never be forgotten,’ was interpreted as suggesting the great man had died, rather than just decided to spend more time with his racehorses.

Actually I doubt Red Ed and his aides even know who Alex Ferguson is, it is a miracle the leader of the opposition didn’t end up on the World at One babbling away about how he’d watched every wicket he took in the Grand National. Like Gordon Brown before him Milliband is a bookish man and he does neither himself nor his party any favours by blundering out of the library to comment on things he is only vaguely aware even exist like premiership football.

The UK has come twenty third in a list of one hundred and seventy six countries ranked by Save the Children by their quality as a place in which to be a mother.

Top of the league, unsurprisingly, were Sweden, Norway and Finland with Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo trailing in last. Stuck in stodgy mid-table the UK has fewer women in parliament and a higher infant death rate; more older and teenage mothers and a six times greater chance of a woman with an unemployed partner dying in childbirth.

These problems pre-date the coalition, but have been exacerbated by the obsessive commitment to austerity they have shown since 2010. Away from the leafy suburbs and rolling shires where David Cameron and his cabinet of the complacent make their home levels of inequality are approaching those last seen in the thirties; something has to be done and quickly too to avert a social disaster.

It is telling that Scandinavia, where creating equality is a realistic goal rather than political window dressing is the best place to bring a child into the world. For decades they have understood that you cannot have a strong economy, as opposed to an endless cycle of boom and bust without an equally strong society.

As we contemplate the increasingly troubled and unequal mess of our own society isn’t it time we took some lessons from our friends in the North?

AND ANOTHER THING

Tory Euro-sceptics have tabled an amendment to the motion approving the Queen’s speech calling for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU. This is, of course, a ‘wheeze’ calculated to cause the maximum amount of embarrassment for David Cameron as his authority with his party shrivels faster than its poll ratings.

What it isn’t is what the country wants to see its elected representatives doing as the economy trundles to hell in a handcart. Last week the public showed it had lost patience with the insular squabbling of the boys in the Westminster bubble; this week we’ve been served up more of the same anyway. And they wonder why people don’t bother to vote.

The Tories want to raise the number of children nursery workers can look after from four to six, the Liberal Democrats disagree, cue the sort of squabble that wouldn’t be out of place in a nursery.

Watching the toys fly out of the pram two things sprang to mind. First of all it is typical of the thinking inside the government that they have latched on to the idea that letting child minders look after more children, as they do in many other European countries, whilst ignoring the fact that in these countries people who deliver childcare are trained and paid better than they are here.

Second when the story broke journalists asked a number of cabinet stuffed shirts how they’d cope with looking after six boisterous toddlers, personally I’m inclined to think the inmates of a kindergarten could do a better job of running the country than a government that can’t even sell its policies to itself never mind the rest of us.

And finally Ray Harryhousen, the genius who created the special effects for films such as ‘Jack the Giant Killer’ and ‘Clash of the Titans has died at the age of ninety two.

A sad loss for his family and for the film world, particularly since he was about to start work on a new creature feature about the big beasts running the coalition, it was going to be called ‘Tantrum Amongst the Tiddlers.’

Smears, Stankovites and a turbulent priest

UKIP are a ‘collection of clowns’, ‘the most successful none of the above party of their day’ and their leader Nigel Farage, aka the Dick Dastardly of British politics, is the ‘heir’ to Nick Clegg.

These aren’t my views, necessarily; they were handed down to a breathless public by respectively Justice Secretary Ken Clarke and Tory donor Lord Ashcroft at the start of this week. It was all part of a media campaign highlighting the supposedly shambolic organisation behind the UKIP brand.

This was supported by a number of emails sent by former UKIP Treasurer Stuart Wheeler leaked to the Observer suggesting the party’s policy making process is chaotic and may lead to a split in the near future.

Spin the tape forward to today, a day after much of the country went to the polls in county council elections and the picture looks very different. Far from spinning down to the ground with his tail in flames Dick Dastardly Farage is flying high, meanwhile the Tories are wiping a lot of egg off their faces.

At the time of writing UKIP are coasting towards a national tally of sixty seats and twenty five prevent of the vote, not bad for a fringe party. The political earthquake some journalists, most of whom have been up all night and drunk too much coffee, have been predicting all day might not happen; but the clowns have certainly given the rest of the circus a damn good scare.

UKIP have a number of problems that could stymie their making the big push into the political mainstream, their organisation is appallingly badly run and, Farage aside, they lack any senior figure capable of coming over on television, but they are still managing to connect with a jaded public in a way the three main parties can only dream of doing.

This is due entirely to an ever growing realisation on the part of the voting public that the old way of doing political business no longer works, it is time for an alternative, or better still for several. UKIP don’t tick any of the boxes for me, but I can see why they might for someone else.

The Tories, the Lib Dems and Labour are all going to have to come up with something new to say and a more positive way of saying it or face exiting the big top once and for all.


Russian president Vladimir Putin has revived the ‘Hero of Labour’ decoration last awarded during the Soviet era. In a ceremony held in St Petersburg he handed out the first batch, honouring amongst other a coal miner, a mechanic and a theatre director.

This is part of a project to find ‘new heroes’ for Russia that are not linked to the darker parts of the country’s recent past.

Speaking to the BBC this week the director of the Lenin State Farm, there really is such a place apparently, said ‘Is it not an act of heroism to get up at five am to milk the cows and not come back home until ten at night?’

He added ‘What about doctors on call twenty four hours a day, are they not heroes? Today young people only seem to respect TV stars. It’s time to honour individuals who make a real contribution to our country.’

If you think I’m going to snigger at this in the way I do at the bare chested machismo Mr Putin usually displays you’re quite wrong. There is much to dislike about the Russia of the new capitalist tsar, not least the yawning chasm between the rich and everyone else and the regime’s brutal repression of free speech; but this time I think he might be on to something.

Something from which we here in Britain may be able to learn, our honours system does go some way towards recognising selfless charity work, but it is still too crowded with political hacks and celebrity grotesques. What it doesn’t do is recognise the men and women who do the dull, badly paid and usually unappreciated jobs like stacking shelves in supermarkets, caring for the elderly and cleaning out the drains without which our society wouldn’t function.

It may be going a bit far to address the checkout assistant as ‘Comrade Hero of Soviet Labour’ the next time you do the weekly shop, but would it hurt to honour them with a little courtesy. As they say down on the Lenin State Farm, are they too not heroes?


New Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welsby is shaping up nicely; he might yet turn out to be as much of a thorn in the side of the establishment as his predecessor Rowan Williams.

He’s certainly ruffled a few feathers by attacking the ‘culture of entitlement’ to be found within the City of London in his role as a member of the all party Banking Standards Committee. Speaking on the BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster programme he said ‘I think in banking, in particular, and the City of London a culture of entitlement has affected a number of areas, not universally by any means, in which it seemed to disconnect from what people saw as reasonable in the rest of the world.’

Bishop Welsby, who worked as an oil executive before taking holy orders, called for bankers to be given training in managing risk and the social consequences of their actions. When asked if his comments had caused upset in Downing Street he replied ‘sometimes feathers get ruffled, I mean, that’s life.’

Well spoken that clergyman. Even though I am still dubious about giving the church a seat in the legislative process, but if they’re going to be there then the bishops might as well use their position to, to keep the avian metaphors going, the odd cat amongst the pigeons.

Needless to say the archbishop’s comments have caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst people who would be happier of the Church of England would go back to being the Tory Party at prayer. As ever such nostalgic souls are missing the point entirely.

It is the job of a bishop to call people, either literally or figuratively, to their prayers, and as even we agnostics know prayer should be an awkward interrogation rather than a cosy chat. There is no more awkward question for a rich person to answer than; did I make my money honestly?

‘Joystick aces’ fighting wars without conscience

This week the Royal Air Force began flying unmanned drone missions from its base in Waddington Lincolnshire. Previously the ten Reaper drones were flown by RAF personnel from a USAF base in Creech Nevada, the aircraft are used for surveillance missions but have the capability to attack targets on the ground if required.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this week retired Chief of Defence Intelligence Air Marshall Sir John Walker said that ‘having a capability like the drones on the order of battle can only be a good thing,’ he likened them to the UK’s nuclear arsenal, saying they provided a strong deterrent without being used to take offensive action.

Several campaign groups including, CND, War on Want and the Stop the War Coalition opposed to the use of drones took part in a protest outside RAF Waddington yesterday.

Kat Craig of Reprieve told the BBC that the use of drone aircraft was a form of ‘aerial occupation, almost a form of collective punishment that causes huge concern and distress’ to the communities being observed.

Chris Nineham of the Stop the War Coalition said there was ‘something sinister and disturbing’ about the use of drone aircraft and that it gave governments ‘carte blanche to fight wars behind the backs of people with no public scrutiny or accountability.’

It is easy to romanticize aerial combat as a sort of high tech joust where honour is all, an image fuelled by media images of the heroics of the RAF during the Battle of Britain. The reality is, as always, very different.

War, in the air or anywhere else is always hell. A brutal marathon of crushing mental and physical exhaustion that all too often summons up the very worst in human nature. Just occasionally though in this dark maelstrom of violence there glitters the tiniest speck of conscience, a recognition of shared humanity transcending manufactured divisions shown, for example, in medics treating enemy combatants alongside their own and sailors rescuing the crews of ships they have sunk.

Creating a situation in which combat missions are flown from an office suite in Lincolnshire, by ‘pilots’ wearing according to some reports wings they have no right to, snuffs out that small speck of conscience. War then becomes what silly people have always thought it was, a sort of rough game for boys where nobody; meaning nobody on our side anyway, really gets hurt.

On one level I agree with Air Marshall Walker, having a squadron of drones in the RAF order of battle is similar to having a fleet of submarines armed with Trident missiles; but not in a good way.

Both feed the delusion that by owing such expensive military toys Britain is somehow still a ‘great power’ and encourage our politicians to adopt an imperial mindset that allows them to interfere in the affairs of smaller nations with impunity. You might think that a decade of deadlock in Iraq and Afghanistan would have taught us that this is seldom the road to success; but, of course it hasn’t.

Two years ago the UK joined America in intervening in Libya and when Colonel Gadaffi fell David Cameron was keen to present himself, ludicrously, as a great war leader. He’s rather less eager to take responsibility for the violent chaos the country descended into afterwards.

Now we look likely to intervene in Syria if reports of the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons can be halfway verified. Do you think the results will be any different? I don’t and neither do most sensible people, unfortunately we seem to be governed by silly people.

Once upon a time political leaders understood the horror of war because they had often seen it at first hand as young men. That didn’t prevent them from making foolish mistakes; Anthony Eden fought in the trenches of the western front but still allowed hubris to take Britain into the shambles of Suez. You can’t help thinking though the experience of being under fire must have influenced the sealed orders someone like Edward Heath say wrote, as all prime ministers do, to be given to the commanders of submarines carrying Trident to be opened in the event of the UK being taken out by a nuclear attack.

David Cameron, like Anthony Blair before him, has never been under fire or faced any hardship worse that the wine being corked at dinner. Give politicians of his stripe the illusory means of fighting ‘clinical’ wars where only the bad people ever get hurt and they will find ever more entangling foreign wars to fight from the safety of their armchairs.

When, as is always the case, it turns out that there is no such thing as war without tears and far from helping troops on the ground misplaced drone attacks actually fuel resentment and act as an effective recruiting tool for the insurgents don’t expect David Cameron to follow the example of Anthony Eden and resign in shame.

Like the drone pilots of RAF Waddington our push button PM operates at a safe distance from reality and the consequences of his actions.

Ding- dong the division lives on.

Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady of British politics and either a defining national icon or the national equivalent of a wicked stepmother has died aged 87; in death she continues to stir up controversy.

David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Milliband heaped praise on her during a special debate in the House of Commons, the deputy PM and the leader of the opposition did so with some qualifications, but the tone was valedictory to a fault. President Obama called her a ‘defender of liberty’ and the Queen granted her a ceremonial funeral at St Paul’s, the first such honour given to a commoner since the death of Winston Churchill in 1965.

Opponents of Mrs Thatcher’s economic reforms greeted news of her death with popping champagne corks and impromptu street parties and the song ‘Ding-dong the witch is dead’ from the Wizard of Oz leapt to number tow in the charts on the back of her passing. Its rise was helped by the BBC, in one of its fits of absurd piety, refusing to play more than five seconds of the song, clearly unaware of the fact that nobody takes any notice of the charts these days and that Mrs T would have been delighted by her continued ability to wind up the left more than twenty years after leaving office.

Since the announcement of the death of the political figure who squatted over my adolescence like a toad clad in twin-set and pearls I have watched the growing word blizzard of commentary and mostly failed to find anything like enlightenment about her stature and likely legacy. The best I have been able to do is to grasp at the odd passing flake and try to understand its often confusing pattern.

The first of these is marked ‘division’; Margaret Thatcher was truly the Marmite prime minister, capable of inspiring fawning adulation or foaming hatred, but never bland indifference. In the Britain she created from 1979 onwards the winners won big and the losers lost everything, whole communities were battered to a pulp by the recession of the 1980’s and have never recovered.

The next word to emerge from the blizzard is ‘connect’, like or loath her Mrs Thatcher achieved effortlessly the holy grail of modern politics, making a genuine connection with the voting public. Largely, it must be said, through appealing to their basest instincts, greed is good, society is a hindrance; the individual matters more than the collective.

This, perhaps more than anything else, stands in the way of her being a truly ‘great’ leader, as opposed to a ruthlessly efficient and highly successful one. Anyone with the right amount of eloquence can appeal to the self interest of his or her chosen constituency, a truly great leader though appeals to the things that make people nobler rather than just richer.

The last and most controversial word to come whirling out of the maelstrom is ‘legacy’. This is where the real meat of the issue resides and even considering Mrs Thatcher’s legacy requires all sides to address some profoundly awkward truths.

The left have to swallow the bitter pill of accepting that given the parlous state of the British economy in the late seventies the rise of someone like Margaret Thatcher was inevitable. A Labour government, probably led by Denis Healy, would have had to do many of the things she did and deal with the resulting angst, although you imagine with a better grasp of the social consequences of their actions.

Her supporters on the right who still get all dewy eyed when they think of her rejection of consensus and dogged refusal to change course cannot avoid recognising that her leadership style damaged politics. The four men who have occupied Downing Street since are all, whether they admit to it or not, ‘heirs to Thatcher’.

A fact evidenced by their hysterical desperation not to seem weak, tendency to bludgeon the electorate over the head with ideas and policies long after they have passed their sell by date and their obsession with squashing any dissenting voices within their own party. What they lack is the one thing Mrs Thatcher had in abundance, conviction, however muddle-headed her ideas might have been they were her own rather than the product of a focus group.

The truth is that as a country we haven’t reached an understanding of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy and won’t do for some time. At the moment enemies and supporters alike have turned her into an assemblage of quotes wrapped in an easily imitable voice, making her a heroine or a pantomime villain depending on their particular stance.

The real work of understanding how she changed this country and whether the results were harmful or beneficial will be the work of history and take decades to complete. History, of course, unlike the Iron Lady, is very much for turning. Facts not feelings are its stock in trade and its judgements are seldom kind.

IDS should take the £53 challenge- even though he won’t learn anything from it.

Open mouth, insert foot; end up looking like a total idiot. This week must have felt like old times for Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, a reminder of those halcyon days when he led the Conservative party up a cul-de-sac of political irrelevance.

Asked by an out of work market trader ringing in to Radio 4’s Today programme if he could live on £53 a week benefits IDS airily replied, ‘If I had to I would.’ Bad move; very bad move, by midweek the petition urging him to put his money where his mouth is had grown so large the Royal Mail will have to borrow a monster truck to deliver it to Downing Street.

IDS had taken to the airwaves to defend the government’s welfare reforms, which came into force this week, on the same day George Osborne told an audience of bemused supermarket workers that the government were ‘trying to make the system fair on people like you, who get up, go to work and expect your taxes to be spent wisely.’

They’re making the system fairer by abolishing much of it, a bit like ‘saving’ a village from the enemy by burning it to the ground; only you wouldn’t trust this gang with a box of matches obviously.

Along with the infamous ‘bedroom tax’ they are also going to scrap access to legal aid for anyone earning over £32,000, get rid of the Disability Living Allowance and bring in the Universal Credit for all claimants. All of which is part of the epic struggle between ‘strivers’ and ‘skivers’ the government is touting around in lieu of having a proper economic policy.

Speaking from a shared pulpit with an eloquence and sense of purpose that shames the opposition the Methodist, Baptist and United Reformed churches called the thinking behind the welfare reforms a ‘systematic misrepresentation of the poorest in society.’

Len McCluskey of UNITE said that the ‘sight of the chancellor urging the low waged in work to turn their backs on the poor out of work’ marked ‘a new low for one of the highest offices in the land.’

Shadow chancellor Ed Balls, showing his usual measured tone said the government’s plans for reforming the welfare system were ‘inhumane’ adding ‘what planet are they on? I can’t believe they are so callous.’

The case for reforming a welfare system created in the 1940’s is as compelling as the one for not doing so in the ham fisted manner favoured by the government. What we need is a welfare system that supports, educates and empowers people; what we’ve got is one that too often parks them out of sight. What we might soon have, if the government get their way, is one that abandons people completely; dressing up cynical neglect as tough love in the process.

What has surprised and saddened me, yet again, is the attitude to the poorest people in society shown by Iain Duncan Smith. For some, seemingly irrational, reason I thought he was different, a Tory grandee who had come down from his ivory tower, boogied with the poor folks for a while and actually learnt something from the experience.

What he has learnt, it seems, is that playing to the lowest common denominator is the route to political gold, at least in the short term. To this end he ramps up the ‘strivers’ against ‘skivers’ rhetoric hoping as he does so that the resulting division will hide the fact that the government he is part of has no idea how to kick start economic growth and has painted itself into a corner with its deficit reduction plans.

The welfare state isn’t an unaffordable luxury; it is a bulwark against barbarism and like it or not it is the safety net we will all fall back on at some stage of our lives. We need to spend more on it not less, with our zeal for reform focussing on making sure every penny spent produces a socially valuable return.

This is a tough message to sell, the Daily Mail and the Sun would hate it, the movers and shakers in the boiler rooms of the three main parties would feel a bit nervous too. It corresponds to none of the received wisdom about how the business of politics should be done, it costs money, won’t produce instant results and requires a level of maturity and collaboration seldom seen at Westminster.

Unlike the solutions being offered by the current government it might produce results in the long term; one day someone will have to try it, you just have to hope it isn’t too late.

Until then it might do IDS some good to live for a year in £53 a week, a 97% pay cut, if nothing else it might rid him of the misplaced notion that the poor just aren’t trying; they’re trying harder than anyone, just to survive. Then again, on his current form all he’s liable to learn from the experience of walking a mile in a poor man’s shoes is what its like to be a mile away wearing someone else’s shoes.