I have to confess that I view each new government initiative to cut red tape & improve business efficiency with detached bemusement – one of the main failings of the political class is that they have no sense of irony. One look at Tax & Waste Brown is enough to verify the extent to which No-Labour (in particular) has eroded the work ethic. However what every posturing politican refuses to acknowledge is that fifty years of over generous state funded welfare payments has made poor Blighty increasingly work shy.

Quite how sending, what is it now, all school leavers to some fourth rate provincial (cough cough) university is going to make UK Plc more competitive in a global marketplace, remains somewhat of a mystery to your humble correspondent. That’s just what this country needs … more fashion design graduates & media studies majors. Ever tried to get a plumber recently? Can we agree that we do seem to have somewhat of a surfeit of experimental anthropologists specialising in diversity studies … while if you can actually find a stonemason, he’s almost certain to be Polish.

The real problem of all of these humanities students is that they expect to be supported by, well just about everybody else. None of them seem to want to do anything that constitutes work while they are college or come to that, even after they graduate. Why should fund all of their tuition fees, as well as their living expenses. I mean, how can you expect to pay off the overdraft during the summer holidays if you are spending three months each summer clubbing in Ibiza

Why don’t people want to work anymore? I put it down to the UK’s bloated social welfare programmes removing the incentive to work. Devil’s Kitchen is a little more forthright on how ZuNu Labour has not only removed the incentive to work, but also employed destructive policies that have further disadvantaged those they are supposed to help …

What Labour has done is to artificially inflate wages, via the minimum wage, and not raise the Personal Tax Allowance. In this way, they have raped the poor for more money than ever before … And they have done this through a system so complicated and opaque that even those who administer it have no idea who should be paid what; the result is the gross overpayments—£1.9 billion here, 1.8 billion there—and the threatening demands for repayments of large amounts of capital from those who could never afford it.

Instead of letting the poor keep their own hard-earned money, Labour has made them supplicants to the state. The same is true of pensioners: instead of raising the state pension in line with inflation, NuLabour have forced them to beg for some crumbs from the goverment's table. It is a disgusting and immoral way to act towards those who have worked and saved under successive governments. Further, Brown changed the way in which inflation is measured, which gives a much lower figure, and thus allowing The Gobblin' King to justify his meanness.

… & that is what has removed the incentive to get up in the morning & go to work. Times have certainly changed since the Reformation in the 16th century, when the concept evolved that work defined your value in & to society. Furthermore, it was a benchmark indicator of moral standing & character. It’s a long way from there where we have descended to today