Paying the price

Iain Duncan Smith's welfare "reform" is nothing more than another Tory attack on the sick, the poor and the vulnerable (your report, 24 May).

Whenever politicians talk about reform, what they really mean is cuts. Mr Duncan Smith states that there are five million people on some sort of unemployment benefit in this country, which is true. The question Mr Duncan-Smith must answer is how he is going to create five million jobs in the middle of the worst recession for 20 years. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition is planning to slash 700,000 jobs within the civil service over the next four years.

Mr Duncan-Smith is an arch-Thatcherite who supported the ideology which mistook the off-shoring of UK manufacturing jobs to third world countries as "free trade". It was this off-shoring which saw highly-skilled, well-paid jobs leave Scotland and the UK only to be replaced by the service and financial sectors. Now that the financial sector has collapsed, we have university graduates working as bar staff, waiters, in fast-food outlets, call-centres and other menial transitory fleeting jobs which offer little security or career opportunities.

The price of Thatcherism's off-shoring and privatisation made the rich richer and the poor poorer. Benefit claimants are just the latest in the population to suffer because of the greed of the bankers who were allowed to get away with their thievery by politicians like Duncan Smith who endorse neo-liberal economics.

ALAN HINNRICHS

Noran Avenue

Dundee