For too long governments have been trying to blame "lazy" or "uncooperative" workers for the countries woes, yet they continue to allow the rich to persuede them to lower taxes on the upper echelons of society and give "incentives" (huge piles of cash) to corporations, in some bizzare 'trickle-down theory'.
Something must be done, where are the days of national general strikes - every industry shutting down and only starting again when the people saw proper change.

Of course there are people on incapacity benefit who could do some work, particularly former manual workers if they could be retrained. But tackling the perverse incentives in the current scheme by cutting benefits will doubtless lead to injustices and hardship. Also, the quality of "training" offered on compulsory government schemes is questionable to say the least.

It would be far better to scrap all the personal tax allowance, benefits, student loans, and pensions and give every citizen a guaranteed income without humiliation or investigation.

Very few people live on benefits of any kind through choice. With out creating jobs, fewer folk on the sick just means more folk on the bru, not much of a saving. I always saw the encouraged migration to the sick as NuLab tacitally massaging the dole figures. I'm as smug a doley as you'll meet and I wouldn't sign on the sick because it could interfere with future employment, but I know folk on the sick simply because you get less hassle from the dole and a pittance more money and importantly they have no realistic expectation of future employment to worry about. Backache, depression, whatever is easy to fake. I even know one antisocial control freak who convinced a doctor that his obvious personality flaws amount to a debilitating obsessive compulsive disorder - and good luck to him. This money-saving scheme is likely to cost more than it saves the tax payer unless they save on benefits when genuinely sick folk start killing themselves for the hassle they get.

The New Deal is another expensive joke - it costs the tax-payer £6000 per inmate and the training given is not exactly £6000's worth, not even £60's worth, it's just day prison for poor people and a gravy train for the trainers. I met a couple of folk on the New Deal who wanted to sign up for Iraq, but couldn't because they had previously been on the sick for depression, lucky idiots ('and I wasn't even depressed, I was just after sleeping tablets').

In the same week the real subsidy junkies, the defence companies such as Carlyle group walk off with hundreds of millions of pounds of tax-payers money. Now that is sick.