Effortful Reasonability

The dependably regrettable Iain Duncan Smith has advised the undeserving poor that jobs will not come to them, and that in order for them to get to the jobs it may be necessary to travel for an hour or so each way, utilising their generous unemployment benefits to take due advantage of Conservative investment in Britain's extensive and efficient public transport system. Duncan Smith denied that he was having "a get on your bike moment", recalling Norman Tebbit's advice to the idle during the Conservatives' last concerted attempt to return Britain to the nineteen-thirties. "What we're saying is when work is available you take reasonable effort to take that work and to work as hard as you can to do it," he said. Reasonable effort must be made to take available work (and to the undeserving poor, work is by definition available); and the undeserving poor must put as much effort as possible into making the reasonable effort. Self-evidently, no-one who was unemployed could ever have thought of that on their own. Duncan Smith did not get quite so far as suggesting that the unemployed might care to facilitate their commute by maintaining an extra home or so at the taxpayer's expense; perhaps the Conservatives are saving that bit of fatherly advice for all those inexplicable teenagers whose lifestyle choice is to sleep on the streets.