April 17, 2008...8:12 am
Thatcher: mother of the underclass
It’s been around for a while, but it’s worth checking out the “Heffer confronted” video on Iain Dale’s blog, where Iain takes Heffer to task for his undying devotion to the tenets of Margaret Thatcher’s rather than David Cameron’s Tory Party.
The best bit is where these two nod sagely about how today’s social problems linked to family breakdown were nothing to do with Thatcherism. The opposite is clearly the case. It was Thatcher who hit upon the cracking idea of massaging the unemployment figures by encouraging - yes, actively encouraging - the long-term unemployed to claim incapacity benefit. That has resulted today in second and third generations growing up in households with no work ethic and with no example to follow of a parent holding down a job. Thatcher institutionalised and depended upon the so-called welfare dependency she claimed, erroneously, to despise.
We are still paying the price today of her incompetence and cynicism. Where Thatcher deliberately inflated the number of IB claimants without thought for the longer-term consequences, Labour has spent 11 years driving those numbers down.
Iain Dale and Simon Heffer should spend more time talking to real people and less time talking to each other, entertaining though that is.
1 Comment
April 17, 2008 at 9:44 am
Another naughty thing that Mrs T did was to promote a “me, me” attitude in everyone. We’ll go on paying for ages for her making fashionable and acceptable selfishness and lack of respect for others.
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