Lying Down On The Job
‘GIVE David Blunkett a pair of fairy wings and a Boyzone T-shirt and hed still talk tough. The man just cant resist it.
So even though hes been moved from the Home Office to the more humdrum post of Work and Pensions Secretary, bearded Blunkett still sounds like a hardliner.
The Independent hears Blunkett say that the system for awarding benefits to the disabled is crackers. It is too complicated and open to error and fraud. He wants to derail the incapacity benefits train that allows people to be signed off work without being properly assessed.
And its a two-pronged approach. The first step is beating the corrupt system is to get the disabled back to work, to offer them what Blunkett terms liberation from dependence. Work makes you free.
If we watched daytime television all day, wed all be depressed, says he, choosing to ignore the uplifting effects of observing people worse off than yourself on Jerry Springer, Trisha and such like.
The second way to reduce the cost of incapacity benefit, claimed by 2.7 million people at a cost of a whopping £12 billion, is to check them out the Commons Public Accounts committee estimates fraud in the benefits system at £3bn a year.
Plans for a team of checkers to go out and kick bad legs and push their knees into bad backs will have to wait.
For now, Blunkett and his henchmen are considering using lie detectors. As the Telegraph says on its front page, Blunkett is looking at employing Voice Stress Analysis machines to see if the claimant on the telephone is lying.
The housebound will be familiar with such apparatus from watching the aforesaid Trisha show, in which one loser is wired to a polygraph machine and asked if he has ever slept with his pregnant girlfriends mum.
A spokesman for the department explains: The [lie detector] idea is that we nip fraud right in the bud. Before you make a fraudulent claim, we will have detected that you are lying and the claim will nor go any further.
Anyone who cant see the danger in such a plan and the potential for making the wrong decisions is mentally challenged, and so worthy of lots of disability benefits.
Or is as tough as David Blunkett…’
Posted: 11th, October 2005 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
