These are the questions that IDS should be answering, but won’t be asked. Instead, Andrew ‘Brillo Pad’ Neil might ask him something about the delays and inefficiency in rolling out Universal Credit, and possibly ask him something mild about the number of people being sanctioned by the DWP, which may be followed by a question on its efficiency and the numbers of people, who have had the sanctions overturned. But that’ll be about it. Just about everyone on the BBC seems to have swallowed the line that the cuts are necessary, and that conditions should be made harder for the unemployed to get them into work. I caught Andrew Marr the other week on his show asserting that the deficit needed to be cut and so there needed to be more cuts when interviewing Ed Balls, himself hardly an anti-austerity campaigner. Marr is another target for the rage of the British Right, as he used to edit the Independent and therefore represents Left-wing bias at the BBC. Neil, however, probably doesn’t get so much criticism from that quarter as he is a man of the Right: he used to edit the Sunday Times. So RTU will not face much in the way of difficult questioning.
Like it or not, politics in the UK is far more nuanced today than it has been at any time in the last 100 years. How can it be anything else? All the main political parties are trying to occupy the same, narrow, centre-right ground.
Even so, one man has emerged as the pantomime villain of British politics: Iain Duncan Smith.
ConservativeHome readers regularly vote him into the top slot as the most popular cabinet minister – but it seems that anyone who has ever had dealings with his Department for Work and Pensions has the exact opposite opinion of him. He has been nicknamed IDS, but this blog calls him RTU instead – it stands for ‘Returned To Unit’, a military term for serving soldiers who have failed in officer training and have been returned in disgrace to their original unit (the implication being that his claim of a…
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Beastrabban\'s Weblog 
March 7, 2014 at 3:12 pm |
HCPs – Name and Shame, is a blog I have started that attempts to list all the HCPs that carry out WCA and PIP assessments for the DWP via Atos, Capita, and any other companies that are shameless enough to take on the contract.
We could help each other tremendously if everyone who has had an assessment would get their HCP on that list.
Please go to: http://nicolasite.wordpress.com
Another blog with DWP DMs names listed on it will follow in due course.
Thanks.
March 8, 2014 at 3:21 am |
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