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Benefit cuts: Monday will be the day that defines this government
Those on low incomes, after all the vicious talk dismissing them as cheats and
idlers, will be hit by an avalanche of cuts
'The Guardian has revealed how jobcentre staff are under orders to find any sanction
to knock people off benefits.
Not many know what is about to happen on Monday: neither those about to be
knocked down nor those sailing too high above them to notice.
But historians will see it as the day that defines the Cameron government.
An avalanche of benefit cuts will hit the same households over and over, with
no official assessment of how far this £18bn reduction will send those who are already
poor into beggary.
In his 2009 Hugo Young lecture, David Cameron spoke with apparent passion
of the damage done by inequality: "We all know, in our hearts, that as long as there
is deep poverty living systematically side by side with great riches, we all remain
the poorer for it." The wise saw the wolf beneath the sheepskin: sure enough, once
in power, the language he and his ministers used to blame the poor for their plight
was cruder and fiercer than in Thatcher's day. You need to go back to Edwardian
times to find ministers and commentators so viciously dismissing all on low incomes
as cheats, idlers and drunks.
On BBC news, Iain Duncan Smith, confronted with irrefutable cases of hardship, said:
"It's about trying to get as many people as possible out of the welfare trap and into
lives they can control themselves."
As the economist JK Galbraith observed: "The modern conservative is engaged in one
of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is, the search for a superior moral
justification for selfishness."