Duncan Smith needs to resign.
Why?
He visited poor areas and caught a new vision for the poor and powerless.
Powerful new views.
Eight years later he became work and pensions secretary. His objective was a universal credit to lift all out of poverty. Yet within two years he was claiming that poverty was not directly due to a lack of money but was the result of bad parenting, drug and alcohol addiction, laziness, and the break-up of families.
These factors should be the new measures of poverty, he announced last week, because they lead to citizens who waste money and become dependent on public handouts.
Why did this U-turn happen?
So, what should Duncan Smith's next move be? He should resign and become a campaigner for the end of poverty. As a Conservative, he would reach a different audience from those of us who preach to the converted. He should set up an independent commission to assess how much family income is required to enable everyone to be included in mainstream society. Then, he should decide how this could be achieved by redistribution from the top to the bottorn - greater equality undermines the very evils Duncan Smith thinks lead to poverty.
This would be the most constructive Tory U-turn
of all.
