On yer bus, IDS tells jobless
By Peter Wozniak
Iain Duncan Smith has raised the spectre of Norman Tebbit’s infamous “on yer bike” moment, by suggesting that people make greater efforts to travel to find work.
The work and pensions secretary was speaking in an interview to Newsnight about unemployed people in the Welsh town of Merthyr Tydfil.
“Many of them had become static and didn’t know that if they got on the bus an hour’s journey, they’d be in Cardiff and they could look for the job there,” he said.
The comment raised instant parallels with (now) Lord Tebbit’s notorious exhortation to the unemployed by referring to how his father “got on his bike and looked for work and kept looking ’til he found it”.
The parallel was not lost on his interviewer and when pressed Mr Duncan Smith attempted to distance himself from the analogy, but stood by his main argument.
“We need to recognise that the jobs don’t always come to you, sometimes you need to go to the jobs,” he added.
Labour, unsurprisingly, was keen to compare Mr Duncan Smith to the former Conservative chairman, in keeping with its narrative that the coalition government’s approach is similar to that of Margaret Thatcher.
Douglas Alexander, the shadow work and pensions secretary, commented: “Like Norman Tebbit before him, Iain Duncan Smith seems sadly to have retreated into the Conservative comfort zone of blame and disdain.
“Iain Duncan Smith still doesn’t seem to understand that to move people from welfare into work requires there to be work available.
“The Conservatives are cutting jobs, cutting help for childcare, cutting working tax credit that makes work pay and even cutting support for buses.”
Union leaders also showed their displeasure at the welfare minister’s comments.
Bob Crow, head of the RMT union, said: “With the cuts to bus services in many areas that will come as a direct result of Ian Duncan Smith’s government’s spending plans jumping on the number 9 into town won’t even be an option.
“This rubbish from the old-school Thatcherite right is nothing less than a calculated insult to the half a million public sector workers who stand to lose their jobs from the ConDem cuts and many more in the private sector who will get hit by the knock on effect.”
Mr Duncan Smith is pushing for radical welfare reforms, consolidating dozens of benefits into a single universal credit and allowing newly employed people to keep more of their benefits.
Though funding for this reform was spared in the spending review, £18 billion will be chopped from the welfare budget overall.
