Jeremy Hunt: Rhyming Slang?

Martin Kelly writes:

The Culture Secretary's physical appearance reminds one of Baldwin's famous observation on his own parliamentary party from 1923, that his benches seemed full of hard faced men who looked as if they'd done very well out of the war. However, while we can't help how we look we can help what we say.

While Hunt's vicious attack on the procreative rights of the poor is nothing but bog standard libertarianism red in tooth and claw, it raises many disturbing questions. If having children is a choice and a poor or below average income married couple have a child that requires, for example, what I am sure is ruinously expensive neonatal intensive care treatment, should they be billed for it? Or should treatment be withheld from children born at 32 weeks' gestation unless their parents can provide evidence of ability to pay?

If the poor are not to be supported by benefits, what alternative does he propose? The separation of parents from their children? The workhouse? Infanticide? What does he want?

The reality of the welfare system is that it is fundamentally reactionary. The only reason it expands is because previous economic policies have failed. All economic policies ultimately fail. This should come as no surprise to anyone who understands that economics is a steaming pile of nonsense used by charlatans to further enrich the rich and baffle the public simultaneously. If nothing else, it is a breeding ground for hypocrisy, however unconscious it might be.

Case in point. Jeremy Hunt's fortune was made from publishing educational directories. For Hunt to bitch about the cost of the poor to the public purse when the clothes on his back have come from publishing educational guides and at least some of the bodies he was helping guide students towards were presumably publicly funded displays a great want of intellectual clarity. Without the public sector and his fellow taxpayers, Jeremy Hunt might just not have a fortune. This disconnect in his own thinking shows Hunt to be little more than a white van man - a better class of white van man, but a white van man all the same.