James Purnell Is Incapable

I would normally ignore James Purnell, with his Nineties haircut, his exceptionally slappable face, and his tiresomely affected lower-middle-class accent. He almost makes David Miliband look like an intellectual. Though not quite.

But Purnell now wants different welfare systems in different parts of the United Kingdom. Already, people in Scotland (especially), Wales and Northern Ireland get to live in what is still recognisably a British country, complete with publicly funded public services, proper local government, free university tuition, free long-term care for the elderly, and even the free prescriptions of the early Attlee years. Whereas here in England, we have to endure the continuous experiments of the nutters on the London think tank circuit, with no way of voting against them and in favour of sanity or decency instead. (An English Parliament, alternating between New Labour and the New Tories, would not improve this one iota.) And now Purnell wants to make things even worse.

Purnell and his media cheerleaders have absolutely no concept of poverty. With inflation as it is, people faced with the prospect of the halving of their income that would be a move from incapacity benefit to the dole would go so far as to injure themselves in order to prevent this from happening. Is that really what Purnell and his supporters want? Do they even care?

The fact of the matter is that, in order to meet government targets, many people who deserve incapacity benefit are already refused it. Purnell might try addressing that. And then addressing quite why it is that quite so many people are (and they are) medically unfit for work.