Home is where the work is

I have already told the joke on this blog about people who live in a council house in Hampstead having another council house in Wales that they go to at the weekends, but now the Tories and MiniTories seem determined to make that lunacy reality, with their latest wacky wheeze.

According to Iain Duncan Smith (remember him? The Quiet Man? With a lot to be quiet about?) people who are on benefits and living in a council house in, say, Sunderland should be willing to up sticks and move to a council house in Plymouth, in search of a job.

I can only see two problems with this. There are no spare council houses. And there are no jobs. Apart from that, it’s a great idea, a bit like world peace and unlimited funds for Donkey Sanctuaries. In practice though, if you actually believe in this crap, how do you feel about Santa Claus?

The other issue of course, even assuming it worked and there were itinerant troops of welders ranging the countryside, looking for work, moving from town to town, is what happens to their original home areas that they left behind. Even more decay, urban neglect, eventually degenerating into a sort of scrubby badlands as nature takes over again.

Yes, when the nettles grow through the broken windows of the housing estates of South Yorkshire, Iain Duncan Smith can rest easy, knowing that he has finally completed the work begun by Margaret Thatcher in 1979.