Everyone rejoice: child poverty is a thing of the past! In what can only be described as the greatest victory since D-Day, the Conservative Party have abandoned the tried and failed method of actually fighting a war on poverty and have instead redrawn the battle lines, redefined what poverty is, and declared victory by default.
Military expert and general man-of-the-people Iain Duncan Smith outsmarted those who claimed that the battle against poverty could only be won by providing a safety net for the most vulnerable in society, whilst working to lessen the vast inequality between the rich and poor, by proving that in fact the key to defeating abstract concepts in battle is to define them out of existence.
Spurred on by this historic victory, and buoyed by the weight of support he has received from previously poverty-stricken children from around Great-again Britain, he has vowed to press on.
Next on his hit list is unemployment. Unlike the long list of his predecessors, who foolishly thought that the key to reducing the number of people out of work was to stimulate growth in the economy and therefore create jobs, IDS will once again prove his brilliance by moving the goalposts.
From now on, everyone receiving Jobseekers Allowance will be classed as being employed by the Government. As well as this, anyone without employment who is not in receipt of benefits will automatically be considered self-employed. Finally, any rough sleeper or homeless person who is given any amount of change by a passing socialist will be considered to have an income and therefore not be unemployed.
In passing these changes Mr Duncan Smith will have not only won the war on unemployment, but will have banished the word from our collective lexicon. Unemployment will simply no longer exist, even as a concept.
Sadly, despite eliminating poverty and unemployment (as well as a rumoured change to the definition of homelessness whereby anyone on the streets will simply be referred to as being ‘between homes’), there are currently no plans to use the same tactics in the war on drugs. Indeed IDS’s Home Office counterpart Theresa May seems not to have got the memo about the new re-defining tactic, or has at least horribly misinterpreted it. Instead of defining the problem of drugs out of existence, her new Psychoactive Substances Bill will define everything as a drug, and will inevitably lead to greater conflict and untold casualties.
Still, at least none of those casualties will be unemployed, homeless, poverty-stricken children, because they don’t exist anymore. Right?
