Monday, October 05, 2009

Why is it wrong to sort out incapacity benefit?

I gather there is some excitement about Tory prposals for incapacity benefit. As one would expect the proposal to deal with those on incapacity benefit who ought not be - and there are many - has been met, certainly on Twitter, with people reducing the issue to "bastard evil Tories want to punish the disabled".

Oh what a wonderful we live in where supposedly intelligent human beings dissemble a policy that is designed to target very specific cases, and make it all about punishing a special interest group by appealing to emotion. As I beleive someone said this morning, Stephen Hawking is disabled and he still works.

No, this policy, whether one likes it or not, is about those people who are signed off work when they could do a different job with a little bit of retraining. This is the nub of the problem after all, people who, for example, are bricklayers who hurt their back and then stay on incapacity benefit and don't re-train shouldn't be doing so.

That's not nasty, it's just common sense. Remember, we have 2.5m unemployed, and around another 2.5m workless

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