What the Dickens??!?!?

And yes, I mean the author, as in in the Scrooge quote, "Are There No Prisons? Are There No Workhouses?"

The new Conservative government in the UK is going Charles Dickens on the unemployed:

Ministers have defended their plans to force the long-term unemployed to do manual work or lose benefits.

Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander told the BBC the idea was not to "punish or humiliate" but to get people back into the habit of working.

But the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said the changes could drive people "into a downward spiral of uncertainty, even despair".

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith is to unveil the plans this week.

Under the plan, claimants thought to need "experience of the habits and routines of working life" could be put on 30-hour-a-week placements.

Anyone refusing to take part or failing to turn up on time could have their £65 Jobseekers' Allowance stopped for at least three months.

Of course, the Tories like this because they hate poor people, and their coalition partners, the Lib-Dems love this, because it hearkens back to a time when they had political relevance, those halcyon days before World War I.

With unemployment at the highest levels since the great depression, and unemployment in the UK among the highest in western Europe.

As Deputy Labour leader Harriet Harman notes, "But she said the government needed to understand that to get people back into work, there had to be jobs for them to go to - and at the moment there were five people chasing each vacancy."

I think that Labour doesn't get it. The Conservatives plan to destroy enough so that people will be ready to dismantle the National Health Service for something more disastrously like the US system.

The barbarians are not at the gates, the barbarians are in the gate.