Thoughts on my old boss

It's always instructive when Tory ministers tells us, in times of austerity, that 'we're all in it together.'

Whilst terminally ill people die before they get their disability benefits, and others are turfed out of their homes because of the 'bedroom tax', some are more in it together than others.

Iain Duncan Smith, for example, lives in a £2 million home, rent free.  He married the right person and now lives in a sprawling mansion in Buckinghamshire.  Now there's nothing wrong with marrying into money - I'm sure my partner wishes she had! - but there is everything wrong with attacking the poorest in our country for wanting, as Mr Duncan Smith calls it, 'something for nothing.'  He is more something for nothing than most.

And our Old Etonian chancellor Gideon 'George' Osborne, a seriously rich multimillionaire who will not alone inherit a very large fortune one day, he will inherit a knighthood.  Nice work if you can get it.

Mr Duncan Smith despises food banks, accuse them of 'scaremongering' and being 'political', as well as refusing to meet with them.  And Mr Osborne suggests the only reason people use food banks is because they get told about them by Jobcentres.

Now, I have never had the misfortune to need the services of food banks but I do know people who have and these people have one thing in common: they work.

Not the stereotypical Daily Mail vision of scroungers by any stretch but people who work hard, play by the rules, something David Cameron is always banging on about, and trying to get on.  But it's not easy on the minimum wage.

A man I know who used a food bank in the Spring said it was the most embarrassing, humiliating moment of his life, having to go basically cap in hand to ask for some food to see him and his family through until his next pay day.

The food bank he used did not just hand him a box of food.  He had to answer a whole lot of questions to prove he really needed it.  I wonder if the food banks themselves have become a little paranoid after certain newspapers pretended that all you needed to do was turn up and you'd get something. That has probably made a miserable time even more miserable for genuine people in need.

Yet the very richest and most powerful in society, with friends who will pay £160,000 to the Tory party in order to play tennis with David Cameron and his Old Etonian pal Boris Johnson, treat the working poor with utter contempt.

There are undoubtedly those who work the system and they need to be brought to book, but there are far more who are getting shafted and are becoming the working poor.

Meanwhile, Mr Duncan Smith presides over the combined disasters of the Universal Credit and the Personal Independence Payments (PIP), pretending that they are both soaraway successes and ignoring the hundreds of millions of pounds he and his department have spunked away, as if it were their money.  But it's our money.

I have no issue with people being rich. I respect those who work hard, play fair and pay their taxes that make society bearable for all of us.

But I have a major issue with the rich who accuse those with nothing as demanding something for nothing.

Future generations will condemn Mr Duncan Smith as being one of the worst secretary's of state in our history. I just wish the current generation would do the same.