There are times when the statements emanating from members of the current Government simply have to be named for the nonsense they are.
And sometimes named as the dangerous nonsense they are.
The latest is the suggestion by Philip Davies, Conservative MP for Shipley, that disabled people and people with mental ill health issues, should be allowed to / prepared to work for less than the minimum wage of £5.93 an hour.
The ostensible justification is that such a move would make disabled people and people with mental ill health more employable by offering a financial advantage to the employer.
That this creates an entire new pool of cheap labour, based on discrimination seems to have escaped Mr Davies.
That it sends a powerful social signal of devaluation likewise seems to surprise him.
Look at the article in the link, from the Daily Telegraph, which is hardly at the left wing of British political journalism See here
Now Shipley has a different tradition of both politics and theological viewpoint. P T Forsyth was once the Congregational minister there. He wrote a booklet on "Socialism, the Church and the Poor". Wonder what he would have written to Mr Davies as his local MP?
When all allowances are made for the MP's back-tracking and special pleading of good intentions towards those with disabilities and mental ill-health, it remains embarrassing, preposterous and outrageous that an MP should even think let alone articulate such a suggestion.
I'm not questioning his right to hold such views, or to state them. (Though the Equality and Diversity and Discrimination watchdogs are more than interested in a conversation about them).
I am however questioning whether his view has any ethical validity, discerning compassion, or social wisdom - his suggestion seems on the contrary to be ethically vacuous, cynically insensitive and socially reckless.
Downing St has distanced itself from the statement - but I await an outright apology and rebuke that a member of the Government has spoken such, well, such nonsense - I just spell checked this sentence and had originally written nosense, which is also true.
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