Charitable Austerity Bureaucrats

Since the departure of the late Head Boy, who filled in the time between his prime-ministership and his pig-sticking days as an office boy in a PR firm, Her Majesty's Government has been woefully short on media skills. Even the presence of Murdoch goons like Jeremy Rhymes-with-Hunt and the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove has done little to counteract the general effect of dead-eyed affectlessness and gurning incompetence; and the Cabinet's closest approximation to a media performer now appears to be the Minister for Poor-bashing and Cripple-kicking. Esther McVey used to be on TV, which doubtless accounts for her brilliant public-relations wheeze that the fiasco of Universal Credit would be greatly improved if only the charitable sector as well as the Government could be implicated in all those wrongful refusals. "The state cannot, and should not work in isolation," babbled McVey at the Conservative Party rah-and-blah, "and must reach out to work with independent, trusted organisations to get the best support to vulnerable people." It would indeed be a most sinistral and Stalinist state of affairs if a Government department were actually to perform the function for which it was set up. Accordingly, in a few months' time, every underpayment, every deprivation, every order to get up and stack shelves at Poundland dispatched by the Department of Workfare and Privation to a cancer patient in their last coma, will be entirely the fault of the Citizens' Advice Bureau.