Geraldine Dreadful MP Writes... to Iain Duncan Smith

Dear Iain Duncan Smith,

I read with exhilarated wee-coaxing fury the latest disgusting pseudo-fascist outrage from your despicable office, and the migraine headache it has given me has driven me to cancel a Constituency Surgery in beautiful Hammer East Combined Whippet Education and Child Training Centre. For letting down the people of Sickle and Hammer East, you should be ashamed of yourself.

I read with incredulity your proposal, which for all I know may even have received royal assent by this stage, which would result in Social Welfare Claimants receiving one payment each rather than the ‘Gemischteseis’ of payments they have come to expect from successive glorious Labour governments.

First of all, though as a hated Tory you might not know this, these are called Social Welfare for a reason. Claimants spend pleasant mornings or afternoons at DHSS Offices (or whatever they’re called now) exchanging banter with one another and counter staff, and getting to know one another, and one another’s children, and indeed, their children’s children. They begin to value the State through being welcomed into the State’s buildings, and they appreciate the value of loyalty to the State rather than slavery to hated multinational ‘employers’. Their love of the State is percussed in every dull thump of a rubber-stamp onto a welfare payment form.

Your disgusting proposals would limit visits to the Social Welfare office in some cases to one trip per fortnight. I cannot begin to impress upon you the social catastrophe this would represent. Some of my own campaign team for the last election tell me they rely on their thrice-weekly trips to the Sickle Jobs Plus for company. At the recent Sickle Town Hall Public Meeting ‘Nick Clegg: is he the Devil or some sort of Sub-Anti-Christ’, at which I was delighted to be joined on stage by People’s Champion Gerry Robinson, some of the seven people attending expressed a resigned dismay, some of which I can only attribute to depression occasioned by your pulling a stunt like this. It’s all very well for you, a rich Tory. Some of my constituents can’t afford to keep up repayments on their houses, but you run around with two surnames.

A further result of your despicable proposals would be the reduction in the aspirations and education of our young people. How can we begin to instill hope in our young people if they are told they may never receive more than one single payment, when their siblings and parents have had multiple payments to look forward to? Where is the incentive in mathematics, for young people to learn how to add up the value of welfare payments and, for instance, calculate how many weeks they must wait to buy a 3D TV to watch the Olympics on in 2012? How will they learn to fill out forms as deftly as they have learned in the past? And where will the thrill of departmental errors and overpayments come from, when multiple payments are scrapped? I’ll tell you where.

From personning the barricades in fervent revolution to overturn the vile contemptuous lickspittle CONDEM government, in a frenzy to return their birthright of multiple welfare payments. And possibly a council-sponsored street party to welcome them back.

Yours Sincerely,

Geraldine Dreadful MP


* With thanks to Ben Archibald at Nabidana.com

We'll have some more leaked correspondence from Geraldine next Thursday.