Decent People

Daveybloke, the Cuddly Conservative, is the subject of a searing indictment by his alter ego, the Secretary of Deserving Poverty and Pensions Crisis. Daveybloke's ghost-writers placed an article in the Daily Maul on 8 December, raising the question of how to stop all of Britain's two-million-and-rising benefit thieves from turning into kidnappers as well. Now, a mere six weeks later, James "We're Closing In" Purnell has responded, observing that "this is the same old Tory approach of being happy to stigmatise people out of work but not to help them back into work". This seems a little unfair, given that the Tory idea of helping people back into work - slashing benefits to pay the rich - is really rather close to the New New Labour approach. Purnell notes that, for him, "the lesson is fundamentally different. We saw the community pull together and spend 24 days searching high and low for what they thought was a lost girl. And we saw decent people recoil in horror when they realised someone had done something so repellent." Of course, when New New Labour imprisons children for headlines and profit, decent people like Daveybloke and James Purnell are somehow not nearly so squeamish.