Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

In yesterday's Belfast Telegraph I argued that, while the detail of Iain Duncan Smith's White Paper might be up for debate, the principles behind it certainly aren't: In a world where each government proposal is instantly critiqued by self-interested groups with official-sounding names and subjected to mysterious 'equality impact assessments', a shadow of doubt is soon cast over the stoutest common sense. When the coalition announced it could not afford to continue to pay out £25,000 yearly rents - beyond the wildest dreams of hard-working, affluent families - to benefits claimants, there was an outcry. Even Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, likened the policy to ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Iain Duncan Smith's welfare proposals did not provoke such an overblown response, but the usual critics were out in force, alleging the measures amounted to an attack on vulnerable people. Their claims bear little scrutiny. The Work and Pensions Secretary...

At Unionist Lite O’Neill looks at possible nationalist responses to the government’s deficit plans.  His assessment is that Plaid Cymru and Sinn Féin are beyond help in their analyses, but there is a chance that the SNP and SDLP could, to some degree, embrace opportunities to promote leaner enterprise economies for their respective regions. The SNP’s ’pork barrel’ tactics are, at least partially, a separatist irritant aimed at London.  So Salmond’s party has a decent opportunity to tacitly accept that Scotland’s economy will benefit from substantial rebalancing.  Although the SDLP has shown signs of original thinking on growth, its dependency culture is more deeply ingrained. Take Alex Attwood’s  response to proposed coalition welfare reform and its effects on Northern Ireland, where we have the highest level of economic inactivity in the UK. The government’s view, which will be developed in a report by Ian Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice , launched...