Creator of cruel and unfit system tries to hit back at Labour’s plan to end it – and receives a schooling
Former DWP Secretary Iain Duncan Smith is the creator of the Universal Credit system that has been widely and hugely criticised for its unnecessary cruelty and its complete unfitness for purpose.
So it was hardly surprising that he took exception to Jeremy Corbyn’s announcement that the next Labour government will scrap the system entirely and end its blight on the lives of this country’s most vulnerable.
But Smith made the usual Tory mistake of ‘forgetting’ who he is and which party he belongs to, when he tweeted his condemnation of the ‘cynical’ Labour announcement and a link to a dire article he’d written for a right-wing rag claiming it would be ‘disastrous’:
Corbyn’s retort was a masterly lesson in put-downs:
While Smith’s tweet garnered more than three times the number of responses as it did retweets – considered a sign of a badly-received tweet – Corbyn’s ‘ownage’ of the desperate former tormenter-in-chief has been shared almost five thousand times – and received triple that in ‘likes’.
Smith’s system is the backbone of what UN Special Envoy Philip Alston has described as designed and pointless cruelty that punishes the vulnerable. Smith’s regurgitation of the tired Tory claim that work under their system is ‘the best route out of poverty’ is a sick joke when – as Corbyn pointed out in his speech announcing Labour’s plan – many of those forced to resort to foodbanks by the cruelty of Tory policies are already in work.
Corbyn’s owning of Smith is amusing as an illustration of Corbyn’s and Labour’s natural superiority on social media – and morally.
But as a condemnation of stubborn and self-serving Tory callousness in a context 150,000 or more deaths connected to those policies, it is anything but a laughing matter.
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Long overdue!!! Needs to be sustained with clarity & robust defence, not whining. Focus should be: the clear negative effect on peoples lives and society while paying vast sums to ATOS renamed, but same company). This needs repeating over and over. Ie instead of money being saved, it is actually paid to foreign owned companies. So Duncan Smith happy to pay the foreign rich to rob the UK poor.
This non-excuse for a human being must be put on trial, along with his partner-in-crime Lord Freud and all the other collaborators in this monstrous scheme, for crimes against humanity as soon as Corbyn enters No.10.
Third attempt to write a reply that conveys my thoughts yet avoids inciting murder but it’s impossible.
Private Teams of investigators and assessors !making misery for the social security claimants..What sort of society is it that makes millions for private companys on the backs of unsuspecting claimants..How much longer do we wait for a Jeremy Corbyn government.Its almost impossible to calculate just how much damage these private carpetbagers have done to our once proud and admired public services
On having just read this, I went on Twitter to retweet Jeremy’s tweet. I wasn’t able to find it in Jeremy’s feed, so I checked IDS’s feed.
There I saw that 2 people had tweeted ‘in case you missed it’ and retweeted Jeremy’s tweet. I scrolled down to find the original, only to find that it didn’t exist.
Therefore, IDS must have deleted it. I scrolled back up to retweet the 2 where JC supporters had retweeted only to find that they too had been removed. In their place was a message saying ‘This tweet is unavailable”.
He doesn’t like the truth, does he?
I just managed to copy and paste JC’s Tweet from this excellent blog, and retweeted it to him hat way.
Naturally, I don’t expect it to last long…
Trying (and failing as always) to think what arguments would convince average voters of the real facts about politics, privilege etc., I wondered how many if any Eton boys excelled in the sciences and went on to develop novel drugs, software or hardware, or how many became top surgeons.
Most of them in my admittedly uninformed view appear to be trained only to maintain the hegemony of their class by entering politics, the law, the media, academia, the City or privileged positions in banking and industry.
I’d be very interested to learn of any Eton boys contributing intellectually to the sciences.
The defenders of capitalism always credit it with all the tech advances in history. They never mention that the scientists who actually invent the goods they sell were almost universally educated in state schools and universities – not just in the UK but around the world capitalists are parasites on state-funded institutions of education
I see the VW emissions scandal is in the news again – Tories surprisingly silent on how such corruption would be “far worse under Labour” – possibly because it would be obvious to a child that the financial motive would be lacking in state industries.
The capitalists would counter with accusations of “Nationalised inefficiency” – which conveniently ignores the fact that it would be the same people doing the same jobs whether privatised or Nationalised.
Little piece just on that I only heard the end of … something about BloJo <emNOT getting all feelie-uppie with some lady’s leg?
Oops.
92000 culled under the aktion t4. fast forward they did admit 96000 had died but justice we wait and now he get away