Does the rule of law cover the poor?

Belatedly, the disastrous rollout of Universal Credit has become a media ‘talking point’.  I could do with less praise for Iain Duncan Smith in the debate. He is the man the Tories decided was unfit to lead them, but still fit to manage and, as we are seeing, wreck the lives of the poorest people in the country. He deserves no special indulgence.

‘His intentions were good,’ everyone feels obliged to say. As if motives mattered more than deeds, and what politicians hoped for matters more than what they achieved. Duncan Smith’s achievement was to preside over disastrous and expensive experiments with IT systems that did not work, and then establish pilot projects for the new catch-all benefit, which was meant to end the complexity of the welfare state.

The point of pilot projects is to identify faults and remedy them. The Universal Credit pilot projects identified faults and ignored them.  Although it was sold as a reform that would ‘make work pay’, the reality of Universal Credit is that single mothers and families where one adult is in work and the partner wants to find a job will be worse off.