Wanted: domestic servants for the political classes
Are politicians and top civil servants hoping to drive single mothers and disabled people into domestic servitude by cutting their benefits?
Are Government ministers, top-ranking civil servants and quangocrats on the look-out for pliant, underpaid and cowed domestic servants? Do they pine to put young single mothers to work in their kitchens or, better yet, use their underemployed hands to scour out their lavatory pans? Apparently so, for there can be no other explanation for the petty, pointless and ultimately vicious welfare 'reforms' announced late last year.
The overall goal of these measures is a simple one: to push single parents and disabled people off benefits and into the labour market. And those single parents are overwhelmingly women, almost invariably of little education and limited skills.
The new policy means that once their children turn 12 they will have their benefits reduced if they do not participate in 'work search activities', notably attending job centre advice sessions and going for job interviews.
Jobseekers' allowance is now about £60 a week - just over £3,000 a year - so the effect of a cut on the children in such a family is very, very harsh. Such likely consequences as truancy, disruptive pupils and a strong incentive to resort to theft have been arrogantly brushed aside. But more important are the defects in what is on offer for those who take the idea of bettering themselves seriously.
Many, if not most, of those affected lack basic skills like literacy, numeracy and IT, let alone job-specific skills. It is therefore somewhat pointless to equip them with presentational skills for interviews for jobs they cannot hope to be offered.
This is especially true right now, for whatever the circumstances were when this scheme was devised (by a banker, recruited presumably as a diversion from helping bring about the current financial catastrophe), the financial incentives offered to those 
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