IDS: Labour hate people who get up early and go to work
IAIN Duncan Smith has launched a scathing attack on Labour’s ‘politics of hate and envy’ and claimed the Conservatives are ‘the real party of work’.
The Work and Pensions Secretary said Ed Miliband was standing on ‘the most Left-wing platform since Michael Foot’ and was ‘peddling lies’ about the Government’s record.
In an interview with the Daily Mail, the former Conservative leader set out a moral case for the party’s policies, which have reduced welfare dependency and got two million more into work.
‘Labour doesn’t understand work. They don’t understand the importance of work in a cultural, social and health sense,’ he said. ‘Instead they’re saying “here are the people we hate”. They hate people who get up early in the morning and work to get a business off the ground, they hate people who take risks, hate people that earn money, hate people that create jobs.
‘They are reinventing the politics of envy. It’s the politics of fear. It isn’t a message of hope.’
Mr Duncan Smith called on fellow Tories to ‘bang the drum’ in the next fortnight to champion the Government’s achievements – and per- suade voters that Britain’s best days lie ahead if it sticks to its current economic course.
Hailing the ‘staggering’ increase in employment, now at a record high, he insisted: ‘All these people who have gone back into work are lives saved, in my book.
‘Everything I have done – the cap on benefits, work experience, changes to sickness benefits – we really do care about people. We want to catch people when they fall, but we must get them to rise out of welfare dependency.’
Mr Duncan Smith said Labour had made a ‘staggering misjudgement’ when it claimed the Government’s austerity measures would put one
million people out of work. ‘They have been out by a factor of three million. In fact there are two million more in work,’ he said.
‘We know Ed Miliband and Ed Balls were party to the government that misjudged the public finances so dramatically. Not only did they not fix the roof when the sun was shining, they smashed the tiles off. That meant when the crisis came we were least prepared.
‘They think governments create jobs. They don’t. The government can set the conditions by which businesses can thrive.
‘What Labour does is start to force up taxes, spend far too much, lose control of the pub- lic finances. The economy suffers, people lose their jobs and the lowest-paid bear the brunt.’
Mr Duncan Smith claimed that having lost the argument on jobs, Labour was now deliberately misleading people about the nature of the employment created.
‘They peddle lies about the jobs. Actually 80 per cent are full-time, 60 per cent are managerial level jobs; 60 to 70 per cent are going to British-born citizens, compared with the 90 per cent going to foreign nationals under Labour,’ he said. ‘These aren’t my figures – they’re Office for National Statistics figures.’