Ken Clarke may be in the dog house for telling the Daily Telegraph the brutal truth – that the worst of the cuts have yet to be felt, that the government is going to find that difficult and that middle England still hasn’t properly grasped the scale of what is to come.
But that assessment pales into insignificance compared to a chilling warning that Chris Grayling, the work minister, has allowed his department to issue.
Announcing how many bidders there are for his shiny new Work Programme, his department’s press release declares it will be “the largest welfare to work programme the UK has seen since the 1930s”.
Since the Thirties? The Great Depression? Just what it is that is about to happen that Mr Grayling knows about, but we don’t?
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey