“Nothing To Do With Me”, Did You Say, IDS? Well Then You’re Still In For The Chop | TheCritique Archives
The Critique Archives is offering this opinion of Iain Duncan Smith’s latest denial of responsibility over the farcical behaviour of the DWP under his command. This Blog agrees with everything TCA has to tell us – and nothing that IDS has spewed (but that probably goes without saying).
News broke last week that the Department Of Work & Pensions has been publishing fictitious stories and made-up quotations about ex-benefits claimants, who do not even exist, going on to do really well after being sanctioned. So the Work & Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan-Smith, AKA CVFNNL (“CV From Never-Never Land“), is in trouble for the umpteenth time for telling flagrant lies to defend the sanctions culture he has created. I for one am struggling to think of a single occasion over the last five years when an attempt by Duncan-Smith to justify his work has not proven to be a lie, or at least a desperate denial of plain reality.
Finally, Duncan-Smith has come forward today to comment on the fake stories, making a rigorous attempt to distance himself from them. He has insisted that he knew nothing about them, and that they were nothing to do with him. He said that the fake stories are under investigation, but appeared to be meant as “an example of the kind of advice we give and ended up going out as a quote which was quite peculiar and quite wrong.”
But even if every word is, for about the first time in his career, the truth, it is not really much of a defence. The rules of Ministerial Responsibility are quite clear on this. As the Minister of the Department, IDS is its public face. He takes the credit for everybody else’s work when things go well at the DWP – abstract concept though such an eventuality may be – and he must equally take the blame when things go wrong.
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MINISTERIAL CODE
1 MINISTERS OF THE CROWN
General principle
1.1 Ministers of the Crown are expected to behave
in a way that upholds the highest standards of propriety.
b. Ministers have a duty to Parliament to account, and be held to account, for the policies, decisions and actions of their departments and agencies;
c. It is of paramount importance that Ministers give accurate and truthful information to Parliament,
correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity. Ministers who knowingly mislead Parliament will be expected to offer their resignation to the Prime Minister;
d. Ministers should be as open as possible with Parliament and the public, refusing to provide information only when disclosure would not be in the public interest which should be decided in accordance with the relevant statutes and the Freedom of Information Act 2000 https://www.gov.uk/…/61402/ministerial-code-may-2010.pdf
Excellent if only. Not only has IDS failed the people and the government but also does not appear to be held to account for the failings of the department of which he is head. Unfortunately it is now becoming a common theme. George Osborne has shown himself to be totally incompetent as a chancellor and Therese May failed to win Britain’s cases in the secret courts when we were sued by foreign corporations and the Health Secretary has failed to protect the NHS from privatisation when £700 million of the NHS was given to private interests 2 days after the election. (Not news the Tory’s wanted to have aired before the election because they would have likely lost, so the deal was kept back until after the election). It would seem therefore, that the Ministerial code is only a guideline which any government can ignore, it might as well not exist if it cannot serve the purpose it was written for.
He needs to be sacked stripped of all his assets and put on trial for crimes against humanity.
Couldn’t agree more but Kitty S. Jones put out a satire which was both comical and at the same time disturbing for it’s reflection of the truth of things. Our public media are brainwashing many into accepting and becoming inured to the most unacceptable. The ghost of Hitler’s Lebensraum is alive and kicking and ableism is high on the agenda, what’s truly frightening is that it has become accepted. The next IDS attack is to be against the mentally ill and will likely be just as successful. Welcome to 1933 Germany and the rise of the Third Reich lunatic party.
It’s also worth remembering as Mike pointed out in a recent blog, that the Lebensraum ideology which included ableism was also promoted by Labour’s Health Minister Yvette Cooper when she agreed to the WRAG package which included a claimant being fit for work if they could lift a cardboard box with the stumps of their arms if missing their hands. Inhumane thinking is not limited to the Tory party but is pervasive within the right of the Labour Party also. Andrew Lansley and his cohorts wanted to privatise the NHS and would have happily left millions of UK citizens without healthcare. It’s unlikely we will get any help from Blairites in trying to remove the likes of IDS.
I saw IDS being interviewed, virtually unchallenged, on Sky News yesterday. Dermott Murnahan is a wet blanket of an interviewer. Not so LBC’s James O’Brien who offered a masterclass on how to expose the lying psychopath. My estimation of O’Brien skyrocketed after hearing this. Listen to the b*****d squirm – it’s a must listen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ231M7fCNo
Martin has provided a link to Care2 Petitions Calling for RTU’s resignation.The government has decided that it will no longer recognise petitions other than those on its own EPetitions website. Mirror link: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/new-mps-petitions-committee-wont-6118596
Well on the government e-petitions website this one is racing up the chart so I suggest publicising it as much as possible:-
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/104436
Petition
To debate a vote of no confidence in DWP secretary Ian Duncan Smith
For denying the existence of, and refusing to publish data on the deaths of claimants of incapacity benefit and employment and support allowance between November 2011 and May 2014. This is despite the rulings of the Information Commissioner and public pressure resulting in a 200,000 strong petition.
▼More details
More information can be found in the links below:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/24/benefit-related-deaths-david-cameron-dwp
http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/reign-of-terror-iain-duncan-smith.html
http://www.bigissue.com/features/3637/atos-deaths-and-welfare-cuts
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/28/man-starved-to-death-after-benefits-cut
https://www.change.org/p/hm-courts-and-tribunal-service-publish-stats-showing-how-many-people-have-died-after-their-benefits-stopped
Sign this petition
28,679 signatures
Rat in a suit.
Hum billy liar has his demons copying him in his deeds
yet if I or you had a dodgy cv told lies we would be for
the chop yet its still in power must be right the partys
following the nazis party action t4 by the summer of 41
seventy thousands had they killed of their own peoples
yet this figure has been surpassed by these demons but
allowing the figures out they wont
Cheers for the reblog.
If it has nothing to do with IDS what the devil is he doing being paid £xxxxxxxxs by the country for being in charge of such a despicable department?
His spin doctor must be working overtime.
Don’t forget to sign the petition on Care2 for IDS to go.
It all helps!
your department, your responsibility, your ideas Grow a pair take responsibility for your actions you lying murdering scum sucker. you are nothing but a power mad wimp who says one thing then does the other, still waiting for you to live on £53 a week. if I had my way I would freeze all your assets to pay back the millions you have wasted in tax payers money then sack you and make you sign on then sanction your benefits so you know how it felt.
I hope we’re to take it that this is what you’d say to Iain Duncan Smith if you had the chance?
the man is just a born liar,like the rest of his cronies in this murdering government.
cant anything be done to bring this smug pyschopathic toe rag before the courts on
some sort of “crimes against humanity ” or “corporate manslaughter ” charges.
surely someone on here,cleverer than me,must know if this is possible ?
It does seem a lot of fuss about nothing. The most that could be said was that it was stupid to put out supposedly real cases. It is the sort of thing that has been done all the time by government departments and companies to illustrate official processes and products.
In reality, they could not have used real people. If they had then they would have been in a different type of trouble. Using non real people to illustrate how the system obviously seemed a good idea. People often do stupid things and that was one of them.
… For which Iain Duncan Smith is responsible.
This is the latest of many attempts to lie to the British public – and the latest of many attempts to be exposed.
Yet the liar is still in command.
IDS is not responsible. If someone in ICI issued an incorrect press release you would not expect the Chairman to resign. It happens all the time in corporations as well in government departments. The most that would happen is that the people directly involved would censured in some way. Government departments are far too big for people even close to the top to monitor all the literature that is published. The DWP employs approx 90,000 people. Because a leaflet is published containing illustrative details based on example cases, it doesn’t mean it is department policy and was cleared at the highest level.
It would depend on the content of the ICI press release.
In this instance, the release was intended to support Iain Duncan Smith’s policy that sanctions are good for people – a policy that runs contrary to all the evidence. Since we know that sanctions are NOT good for people – they often lead to death – and we know that Iain Duncan Smith thinks differently, we can infer that DWP employees have created the fake information in the leaflet in order to further his political objective. Therefore, whether directly or indirectly, he is responsible.
Furthermore, this is government, not business. In government, a minister (or in this case secretary) of state is responsible for the conduct of his department. He takes credit for its successes but must also take responsibility for any wrongdoing.
Your claim that people at the top of the department cannot monitor the literature that is published is poppycock. Ministers are responsible for requesting the publication of any new literature.
Your final sentence is astonishing and highly unattractive. Think about what you’re saying. Any leaflet published by the government MUST represent government policy.
“Because a leaflet is published containing illustrative details based on example cases, it doesn’t mean it is department policy and was cleared at the highest level.”
If it isn’t department policy, how did it get published? Whim of the officials? Well guess what? That’s just as bad.
IDS has either set out a policy designed to deceive, or he has lost control of the department, who did this without his approval. Assuming the latter for the time being, given there is evidence that this is not the first time this has happened, and he clearly did nothing about it then, it means he is not in control of policy in the DWP. Formulating and deciding on policy is the whole point of the Minister/Secretary of a Government Department. And part of that is making sure the officials carry it out, without exceeding their grounds. If he can’t do it, he shouldn’t be there.
A lot of sick and disabled people have died on his watch over the past few years and he is still getting away with this level of crime against humanity
If he were a government minister from another country persecuting people to their death we in this country would be the first to be outraged and to to look at taking steps to stop it
People like myself at 8 stone are particularly vulnerable to any type of stress as one of my long term medical condition’s makes me unable to eat or drink properly and in just hearing of how others suffer and die means that am unable to eat for many days and in some severe cases many weeks as my stomach completely closes down through stress
I know i fear him and i know many others fear him and i know he will be the death of me as my care team feel that will be the case as they have to deal ongoing with DWP forms etc and have done so for many years with no let up and even with screaming down the phone for them to stop persecuting me i know in my heart they never will
Nothing to do with IDS? If that’s what he maintains then he obviously doesn’t know what’s going on in his own department. The man should be sacked.
Nothing to do with me, is this man for real?! Time to start a real campaign and get everyone behind it in getting this useless, evil, tory **** out of his job pronto!