Iain Duncan-Smith.

Need I say more?

Well, I’m bloody well going to.

I know that Norman Tebbit is (technically) still alive, but it looks ever increasingly like IDS not only inherited the constituency of Chingford but His Lordship’s four working brain cells. At least the millionaire IDS moves slightly with the times and knows that the unemployed can’t now afford to save for a bike and have to catch the bus.

Today’s raft of announcements left me spitting cornflakes at the telly. One wonders whether Duncan-Slaphead actually lives in this country.

It’s all very well to say “three strikes and you’re out” and stigmatise the jobless in the way that the Tory party traditionally does. But answer me a simple question, Dunc – where are the bloody jobs? I saw him on breakfast news this morning – asked that very question, and he very quickly and obviously changed the subject. He did, at least, claim that Jobcentre had handled 450,000 vacancies (mostly of the burger-flipper variety), but that is small comfort to the 3,000,000 plus currently out of work or “economically inactive”. (During the six months that my other half was out of work and claiming jobseekers allowance Jobcentre was about as much use as a hand-knitted condom.) And you don’t make the figures look any better by sacking half a million civil and public servants.

On top of that we have the idea of giving the long term unemployed four weeks of manual labour, litter picking and the like – another bloody scheme to give the impression of doing something while actually achieving the square root of smeg-all – rather like the YTS, another failed Tory employment policy. If there’s work that needs to be done then create some real jobs.

The sad fact is that we’ve heard all IDS’s claptrap before.

I knew this lot were going to be bad, but cheeses, this is depressing.