‘Moaning’ Work and Pensions committee lets IDS ‘off the hook’

IDS, it seems, was given an easy ride by the Work and Pensions Committee. He shrugged off his critics as moaners, and denied that Job Centre staff were indiscriminately sanctioning claimants. He stated that Job Centre staff were very, very hard working and operated within the rule. Well, yesterday I heard another unemployed fellow’s account of how he was quite arbitrarily sanctioned. I have mentioned before that I am attending a course designed to get job seekers into work. During the meeting yesterday, a number of the other people on the course voiced their opinions of the staff at Job Centres. They freely acknowledged that there were people behind the counters who were genuinely helpful and sympathetic. Many others, however, were not. The gentleman I mentioned said that he had been on Universal Jobmatch, using it to find suitable jobs. He then tried to apply to them by sending off his CV to these prospective employers. He said for the four weeks he had been signing on, he had seen four different clerks at the interview desk. The first three he saw were entirely happy with his job-seeking strategy. The fourth, however, told him that it wasn’t good enough, and that he was now sanctioned. This left the gentleman shattered and furious. He told the class that it was a good job he hasn’t seen the clerk outside the Job Centre, as if he did ‘he’d smash his face in’. His story provoked a wave of sympathetic comments and anger at the clerk’s behaviour from the rest of the people there. Apparently, what the clerk did was very definitely against the rule. You are supposed to have at least one warning before they sanction you. But in this case, and in so many others Mike, Mr Void and the other peeps blogging about these things, there is absolutely no warning. The imposition of sanctions is entirely arbitrary, and deliberately done by the bullying and cruel to support the government’s own cruel and mendacious unemployment policy. It’s mendacious because it claims to be tackling unemployment and helping the jobless, while in reality it is merely victimising them and striking them off benefit in order to present an illusion that less people are out of work. IDS is, quite simply, a liar. This is unparliamentary language, but it’s true. In the interview, I Duncan Smith turned up with armed police and a bodyguard. This is a tacit admission that Smith knows the effect his policies are having, and fears the resulting anger. One of Mike’s commenters makes the point that it shows that Smith is, like all bullies, a coward at heart. it also shows that he is at the heart of everything that is wrong with the DWP. It’s been said that organisations take on the psychology of their founders and leaders. Lenin and Stalin, the founders of Soviet Communism, were autocratic and intolerant, with the latter viciously paranoid. The Soviet Communist party, and thus those others that followed them, similarly became paranoid, intolerant and brutal. Although from the completely opposite end of the political spectrum, Smith similarly is a paranoid, intolerant thug, who obviously only feels secure in the midst of armed force. The system he has created is therefore similarly arbitrary, intolerant and bullying. And you also have to wonder about the psychology of a man, who turns up to a parliamentary committee meeting surrounded by armed guards. It sounds very much like a small, rather pathetic man trying to put on a display of aggressive masculinity.

Mike Sivier's blog

It is said that you can get the measure of a man, not from his words, but from his actions. Iain Duncan Smith brought bodyguards to the Commons Work and Pensions Committee yesterday. (Monday)

Why did he need the muscle? Probably because he knew how his behaviour would be received. This is a man who is absolutely not going to accept criticism, in any form at all.

The man whose benefit reforms were mocked by Ed Balls last week as “In Deep Sh…ambles” batted away concerns about inaccurate statistics as somebody else’s fault and, when confronted with a whistleblower’s claim that jobseekers were being sanctioned indiscriminately, said he wanted to see the evidence.

That’s a bit much, coming from the man who is still withholding the mortality statistics of people going through the assessment regime for Employment and Support Allowance. Where is that evidence?

Our evidence that he had a…

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