Disability benefits

Here it comes. The ability of Ian Duncan Smith and his massive department to unpick the disgraceful use of disability benefit to conceal able-bodied unemployment is now going to be tested, and I am in no doubt that the press is going to be full of examples of apparent bureaucratic sadism.

But what they have to deal with is perhaps the worst example of institutional cruelty posing as kindness ever perpetrated by the British state, blame for which attaches to every government back to and including Thatcher's. The resources that tax-payers are entirely willing to devote to those born disabled, or crippled by accident, have been diluted on a per capita basis by granting disability benefits to people who are perfectly capable of working, while the whole scheme has been poisoned in public perception by regular revelations of blatant fraud. 

"This is not a cruel process", says the Spectator. Bull-shit. If it is to winnow the genuinely disabled sheep from the skiving goats, it cannot avoid being a little cruel to nearly all the sheep, and a lot cruel to some marginal disability claimants. That is not an argument against doing it, simply a reminder that there will be moral as well as political costs, not the least of them being a true accounting of chronic unemployment. 

It may involve more stringent medical tests, but the aim is not to shuffle the genuinely ill into jobs that they cannot perform. Rather, in IDS's words, this is a plan to reinvigorate the "lost potential of so many people who have been dumped to languish at the bottom end of society". And when the number of under-25s claming IB has risen by 52 percent since 1997, it's clear that there is plenty of lost potential to go around.

There's no "may" involved - more stringent medical tests are unavoidable. But the blithe stupidity of that paragraph lies in the assumption that there are jobs waiting out there even for able-bodied Brits. While the Labour regime was dumping the useless products of Britain's state education system into the welfare system, it was importing hundreds of thousands of immigrants to do the state-dependent jobs it created.

This, even though the best hope for the partially disabled has always been state employment. You want cruelty? How about importing hundreds of thousands of aliens to boost Labour's re-election prospects at the direct expense of the most needy and helpless elements of the resident population?

If the party most identified with the welfare state found the products of the system to be unemployable, what chance is there for those further handicapped by mental or physical disability? The very fact that the Labour regime gave disability benefits to so many young people argues that even its most vociferous supporters know in their cold hearts that the welfare state has become pathological.