Don't Be A Quiet Man, Ed

Is satire now impossible? The Paralympics are being sponsored by a company engaged to give effect to the Government's entirely non-clinical weekly target for the number of people to be taken off Incapacity Benefit, as everyone still calls it. 50 per cent of its rulings are already overturned on appeal, with that figure rising to 80 per cent where there is proper assistance from the CAB or some such. It would be 100 per cent if the process had not physically and mentally exhausted most of those who were subject to it.

IB-as-was is seriously hard to get, and DLA is almost impossible. Anyone who manages it really does need it. Anyone who didn't would long before have given up trying, as in fact does many a person who needs it but is too ill to carry on with the process. If anyone is shocked that quite so many people are now on these things, then they need to ask why quite so many people are now that ill. I would be entirely unsurprised if the effects of the new procedures actually caused the number of recipients to go up. The question is why that many people are now that ill. How has Britain changed since the 1970s? Whose fault is that? And what can be done to put it right?

All in all, over to Iain Duncan Smith, who has pursued his social conservatism, his patriotism and his observant Catholicism to the point where it has become a genuine, active, still-unfolding critique of the neoliberal order that has in any case collapsed around our ears. IDS has developed this since he was removed from his party's Leadership in a putsch played out almost entirely on the rolling news channels, with Conservative MPs reduced to impotent bystanders along with everyone else outside the Golden Circle of the Murdoch Empire and the BBC.

Thus was removed a man who had united his party over Europe, taken it to parity and beyond in the opinion polls, made it the largest party in local government, and thus threatened to turn the 2005 General Election into a proper contest, not only between parties, but between the ideas of "the centre ground" as self-servingly defined by those media and a genuinely alternative philosophical basis for practical policy-making. He simply had to go. And he did.

How much more vigorously are those same forces seeking to impose the same fate on a Leader of the Opposition who is already there as a critic of their preferred economic arrangement, and who if anything seems to be on the journey from there to patriotism and to social conservatism. (And to Catholicism? Stranger things have happened.) Ed Miliband must stand his ground. He must make his own the issue set out above. And he must respond unflinchingly to the wearily predictable shrieking that the economy would collapse - what, again? - as a result of yesterday's extension to agency workers of the right to use the staff canteen.

Specifically, he must renew John Smith's never-realised promise to make employment rights begin with employment and apply regardless of the number of hours worked. And he must state emphatically that if a New Labour Government did not manage to do so much as that in 13 years, then there was never any point to New Labour, while if another Labour Government has to wait for the EU to do this sort of thing, such as yesterday's reform, instead of getting on with it and with a great deal more within and through the Parliament of the United Kingdom, then there will be no remaining point to the Labour Party.