If disability benefit cuts are ‘changing things for the better’, why can’t Stephen Crabb say how?
Public reaction to Stephen Crabb’s appointment as Work and Pensions secretary has been less than enthusiastic.
Here’s a classic Tory trick: Make an assertion about one issue and then seek to justify it by reference to completely different matters.
So Stephen Crabb tells us his forthcoming cuts to ESA payments are “changing things for the better” – then tries to justify it by discussing an increase in employment.
Those are two different things…
… unless Crabb was trying to imply a subtext.
Isn’t he actually saying, “Oh, look – the number of people in work has increased because of our benefit cuts. It will increase again after we take money away from these sick and disabled people because they’ll have nowhere else to go but employment”?
Nice try, but the argument falls on two vital points:
Firstly, people who are on ESA are unable to work – except in special circumstances that are – or at least should be – designed to help a long-term recovery from their condition. Cutting benefits in the hope that they will seek employment against is certain to worsen their condition, in most cases. Stephen Crabb is trying to force people to their deaths.
Secondly: Last time I looked, unemployment had increased. Where are all these wonderful jobs?
Iain Duncan Smith’s approach to Work and Pensions policy was to lie, lie and lie again. Evidence of this behaviour is legion, on This Blog alone.
Stephen Crabb seems no different. Perhaps that is what he meant when he said there was “no reason” to change.
Disability benefit cuts are among policies “changing things for the better”, the new Work and Pensions Secretary Stephen Crabb has said.
Mr Crabb made the claim at his first Work and Pensions Questions session in the House of Commons, during which he was asked how he differed from his recently departed predecessor Iain Duncan Smith.
But Mr Crabb defended the Government’s approach, saying there was “no reason” to change it.
“We are a government that has helped deliver the changes that has seen a huge fall in workless household, we’re seeing nearly half a million more children growing up in a home, seeing a mum or dad going up to work,” he said.
“There is no reason to change policies that are changing things for the better for those who have least in our society.”
ADVERT
Join the Vox Political Facebook page.
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:
Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.
Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:
The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:
yes those on esa wrag stacking shelves at your local charity pimp shops salvation at hand nay they also take a slave mind ouch mind to take those slaves it seems that the the circle of wagons of disabled unemployed are shrinking by their sweep it under the carpets
Its because he is lying and it proves we are right. I would gladly swap my dementia for a month and let’s see how he copes then by listening to lie after lie.
Obviously yet another clone from the Cons factory of idiots. Same old Cons speak bearing no relationship to the truth. So I guess we have yet another fully paid up SS member ready to do the work of his beloved leaders and follow in the jackboots of his ol’ mate Herr Dunky Smith. Where in gods name to they find these low lifes? one always hoped someone sensible and humane would come along and demonstrate this Cons human touch they love talking about but have never understood.or delivered
he says “we have seen a huge fall in workless households”, yeah thats because they dont have homes any more because the welfare reforms have essentially lead to being chucked out into the streets.
Even when confronted with damning evidence these Tory cretins just tell utter barefaced lies.
my god i thought Thatchers lot were the worst govt we’d ever had until these scumbags came along !!
While Duncan Smith attempts a character volte-face, (hypocrite); Crabb inherits his misdemeanors. He must be under no illusion that as IDS’ incumbent he to will be in the firing line for future incrimination’s. Is he stupid, no really, is he so detached he cannot for one moment see the train crash descending on him. If he had one morsel of premonition he’d leave now and join IDS in some monistry.
So whatever happened to the conservatives argument that correlation doesnt necessarily mean causality?
““We are a government that has helped deliver the changes that has seen a huge fall in workless household, we’re seeing nearly half a million more children growing up in a home, seeing a mum or dad going up to work,” he said.”
What we have seen as a consequence of Conservative welfare “improvements” is half a million more children going hungry and homeless, in this the World’s fifth largest economy under a Tory Government.