The Sketch: When it comes to benefits, mind your language ...
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Your support makes all the difference."Offensive". Formerly, millions of troops emerging from trenches to run into machine-gun fire. Latterly, describing a morbidly obese woman as "fat".
How careful we've become in the way we speak. I blame the media. MPs commit political suicide by saying poor people could save money by turning their heating down. "Put a sweater on if you're cold," counts as intolerable moralising. "Wear a vest" equals "police state".
Out of three million people on Incapacity Benefit, a million are skiving, or malingering or faking. But that can't be said by politicians because it "stigmatises all benefit claimants". Even the Tories don't want to be seen stigmatising so they go along with the rhetoric of "helping people rebuild their confidence, adapt to their condition and look for work".
Then again, maybe it's only polite. These hereditary beneficiaries have been tempted, debauched, ruined by various governments offering them money to shut up and not make a nuisance of themselves. Stigmata would be adding injury to insult.
That is a roundabout way of introducing the Freud overhaul of the welfare system fronted by James Purnell. They're following the Wisconsin example by paying outside organisations to be employment agencies for various categories of welfare claimants, and funding it, if the "client" stays in work, by the savings made on the benefit bill. It sounds perfectly sensible to me. Others will regard it as another step towards a fascist dictatorship.
James Purnell made us all laugh – by "us" I mean everyone except Labour MPs – by saying that Tories still didn't "get it". It may be worth looking at the provenance of this Green Paper. The proposals were commissioned by Tony Blair, devised by an ex-banker, and repudiated by Gordon Brown when he came to the premiership. Vile, market-based mechanisms were poisoning the ethic of public service. The Tories picked up the proposals, recognising Conservative DNA in the system of profit and reward, and adopted them for their own manifesto.
Quite quickly thereafter, Gordon's moral compass ceased to show him the way. It's a defining moment for politicians – when their actions are driven by their opponents rather than their supporters.
Thus, he says the Conservatives have no ideas they can call their own because he calls them his as well. So he's as Tory as you like and twice as tough. Just watch how Iran burns, when the time comes. That really will be offensive.
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