Benefit Freud

I assume that David Freud is one the dynasty. He can’t paint, and he’s not witty enough to get onto Just A Minute, so he has to do this instead. If he is not one of the dynasty, then, well, he can’t paint, and he’s not witty enough to get onto Just A Minute, so he has to do this instead.

Ask yourself whether or not the Government’s “welfare” “reforms” have been successful. Ask yourself whether or not they have really happened at all. Ask yourself what they would be supposed to achieve, even if they were ever to materialise. They are not about getting people into work. There is no work. No, they are merely about cutting people’s benefits in half by taking them off Incapacity Benefit and putting them onto plain, old JSA. But that is all.

We know that David Cameron is fully signed up to this, as to all other aspects of current government policy. That is the point of him: to ensure that nothing changes during his single term, so that everything is just fine and dandy for whichever Miliband, or Cooper-Balls, or Purnell then takes over, having used the four or five years to purge the Labour Party, once and for all, of what little within it still resembles the Labour Party.

Not least, speaking of Purnell, Cameron will be keeping him on in his current position, so that he will once again be Freud’s boss. So Purnell may very well segue into 10 Downing Street in 2014 or 2015 without ever having left the Cabinet or even lost the Labour Whip (which still exists, despite what in historical terms is now a near-total lack of votes on the floor of the House of Commons).

After all who is to stop this? I sometimes get people squeaking about “his CLP”. But the whole point of a CLP is now to do whatever the MP tells it to do; they now barely exist even where there are Labour MPs, and as good as not at all where there are not. That, and to provide people who can be relied upon to wet themselves with excitement at being in the same room as Caroline Flint, or Andy Burnham, or some other such stellar luminary.

The idea of having their MP in the Cabinet would delight any CLP beyond words, entirely regardless of which party the Prime Minister came from. And the idea of calling out the MP, no matter what he did, would in any case never occur to them.

Of course, the shadows of shades of constituency-level organisations in other parties are just as bad. Which is another reason why Cameron will have no difficulty, either in keeping on a Labour MP in good standing as Work and Pensions Secretary, or in appointing a Labour peer in good standing (Andrew Adonis) as Education Secretary. His prolonged standing ovation from a room overwhelmingly containing MPs, MPs’ staff, party employees, think tank employees and media types would be in no danger whatever.