Apparently there's going to be a massive shake up in the incapacity benefits system soon.

But I have one question:
just where the hell are all these millions of jobs going to magically appear from?

Because if there is so much easily available work around then why isn’t there zero% unemployment now? With masses of vacancies still begging to be filled? And if there are so many people in work -presumably all paying taxes and their NI contributions - how is there this ‘pensions crisis’ they keep banging on about? The plain fact of the matter is - there isn't.

In case you don't know any recent history - one of our most beloved *choke* *cough* *spit* leaders - Mrs Thatcher in the mid 1980s had the fantastic idea of closing down hundreds of coal mines - and in doing so devastated whole towns of mining communities leaving absolutely nothing in their place. Whole generations where simply left to rot -struggling by on the dole. For years and years the Tory Government sneakily allowed more and more people to go onto Incapacity Benefit - because they then slipped off the official Unemployment figures (which they were always fiddling with anyway - always downwards, downwards, downwards.)

Not only that -but in all these years the larger corporations have been increasingly outsourcing much of their workforce offshore to places like India and China -you know, the whole globalisation thing. For a long time I’ve thought the only thing the British did to make any money is to go around selling each other their houses and run up huge credit card bills, or else work in call centres selling loans and mortgages to each other. Especially since we don’t seem to actually make or produce anything to sell to the rest of the world. So I ask again - where are all these millions of new jobs that these older men and women who’ve been out of work for a long time going to come from? If the Government was making a case that the hours of the working week were going to be reduced by law (instead of being flaunted - isn‘t it the case we work the longest hours in Europe?) - then maybe there might be more work to go around? (I'll wager most business leaders/employers will insist that this couldn't possibly work. Not that any of them have ever bothered to try it or anything.)

I can’t help thinking this is another blatant case of our Government reacting to ‘public opinion’ (which really in essence amounts to what the news media decides to conjure up) without ever actually thinking things through properly. Another PR exercise that’s being made into what will prove to be an unworkable policy. There’s been an awful lot of those recently.