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Left must deal with the new Chingford Polecat
Neil Clark: The Archbishop and Labour MPs may be angry, but IDS has White Van Man on his side
In my copy of Birds and Wild Animals by H Trevor Jones, the polecat is described as "a furtive hunter, now rare, but still found in the Welsh mountains".
Since the book was published in the 1952, it seems that Mustela putorius putorius has moved eastwards - and seems particularly fond of a town on the Essex/London border called Chingford.
The original 'Chingford Polecat', first sighted in the 1970s, was, of course, Norman 'On yer bike' Tebbit, the abrasive working-class Tory cabinet minister who introduced legislation curbing the trade unions and who castigated the work-shy.
Today's Chingford Polecat is Iain-Duncan Smith, who took over Tebbit's seat at the April 1992 general election. The former 'quiet man' of British politics, IDS is now Work and Pensions Secretary and sinking his fangs into the long-term unemployed.
IDS's plan, leaked over the weekend, is that those deemed to have lost the work ethic will have to do unpaid work for the community for 30 hours a week or risk having their £65-a-week Jobseeker's Allowance stopped for at least three months.
The proposal has already been condemned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Labour MPs and trade unionists as harsh and unfair and even a form of slave labour.
The plan, complete with Duncan Smith's "Play ball or it's going to be difficult" accompanying message, is pure Polecat Politics. But that doesn't mean that it won't be a vote winner.
The original Chingford Polecat's aggression towards trade union radicals and those he considered to be work-shy may have appalled traditional upper-class one-nation Tories and those on the left, but it struck a chord with Tebbit's upwardly-mobile Essex constituents.
Although coming from working-class backgrounds themselves, they had, in the words of Dr Peter Dorey of Cardiff University, "little political sympathy for those who remained poor or unemployed".
Norman Tebbit spoke in the language that ordinary people understood, and there's no doubt that, unpalatable as his views were to some, his Polecat Politics helped Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives win working-class votes in the south-east and dominate the political landscape in the 1980s.
The question that David Cameron will no doubt be asking himself is whether the new Chingford Polecat will prove as big an electoral asset to the Tories today.
IDS, unlike Tebbit, does not come from a working-class background. It's one thing for a self-made man from north London to relate how his father "got on his bike" to look for work; it's quite another when the Sandhurst-educated son of an RAF group captain exhorts (in a posh, upper-middle class voice) the unemployed of Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales to get on a bus to Cardiff to try and find work there, as IDS did recently.
But while IDS might never be able to strike the same chord with White Van Man that Tebbit did, it would be a big mistake for Labour - or the left in general - to underestimate him or his appeal.
There is, rightly or wrongly, a widespread feeling among many working-class voters that too many people in Britain are on the take, preferring to live off benefits rather than do an honest day's work.
IDS's strategy is to exploit this resentment, and to deflect people's anger away from the bankers and financial speculators who have caused our current economic predicament, and towards the benefit scroungers and the work-shy.
The best way the left can respond is not to defend a system where around 8m Britons of working age are economically inactive , but instead support a policy of full employment, with the aim of getting every able-bodied person of working age back into paid jobs.
IDS's commitment to free-trade and globalisation means that he'll never be able to get 8m Britons back to meaningful work. That is his Achilles heel. And if they're smart, the political polecats of the left - if there are any - will be getting ready to sink their fangs into it. ·
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I think Tom Sutcliffe has made a valid point. People who receive a wage or payment from the government (because they cannot find work) are surely seeking work in the long run. It is normal practice that if you pay someone, something is given back in return. And to make people become familiar again with this expectation or for the first time is they haven't been fortunate to work before is not a bad idea.
I seem to be missing something crucial in this story. Job-seekers will be paid �£65 a week and while they are "looking" for a job - or "resting" as actors call it - they will in future be expected to do something for their money. Speaking as someone who never claimed unemployment benefit even when I was no longer with a job - because I was often self-employed, and I made myself ineligible in 1965 by giving up a teaching post as I thought I was going to be going to Drama School, which as it turned out I didn't, instead being unemployed (writing and singing a bit for my supper, but making almost no money) - I don't see how you can call it slave labour to work in some way in return for the taxpayers' money that the state is handing out to you. Call it job-seekers' allowance if you will, but actually it's wages, part of the social wage - and usually one has to do something to get wages. So what is all the fuss about? Plus, if you are doing something useful for society you will feel better in yourself. Many people who are retired, lollypop ladies and gents, work for nothing. Most people who are doing useful voluntary work are unpaid. So on what grounds does Rowan Williams deign to suggest that it would be bad for the soul if these unemployed but wanting to work people were to do something rather than nothing, when they were actually in fact being paid something. "Nothing will come of nothing," King Lear's words, did not apply to this situation. But they fit don't they? Assuming people are doing something that the state (society) appreciates their doing, then the question might well arise how much they should be paid for it: in other words what is a fair allowance for someone who is seeking the job they ought to have but tempoarily doing what they can get? Unfortunately the state will probably not be good at using people this way. But aren't there an awful lot of things that need doing, human labour-intensive things that the Big Society notion is all about. And of course Rowan Williams doesn't like that either does he! But just exactly what is so socialist about sitting on your tod waiting - except in the case of the godly ones in the divine ante-room: "They also serve who only stand and wait...." as Milton put it. And he was blind when he thought of that, and IDS is not planning on forcing the blind to get stuck into the task forces, is he?
This article oozes a rather sad class obsession that I thought most serious journalists in the UK had grown out of.
"The proposal has already been condemned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Labour MPs and trade unionists"
Sounds good.
Well, well. History does repeat itself, and in my lifetime. So poignant, so much like garlic after a large spag bol. I was a manager of a small Wolverhampton-based Community Programme. Remember them? The back-to-work via doing good for the community programme, set up by the great Thatcher herself? Remember all the churches who enthusiastically got involved and helped run the community programmes? No? I do. I worked for one. The chairman of the group was a Methodist minister, and a great many of the Wolverhampton churches mucked in by having gardener-handymen and old folks visitors based in their churches. I wonder why the Archbish of C. cannot remember all this. Perhaps he is loosing it.