Quote of the day

Iain Duncan Smith in The Telegraph (here):

“It’s like incapacity benefit, we’ve got to be careful because these are vulnerable people. There has been a lot of nonsense talked about it in the last few months, lots of letters asking about it. It’s now just beginning to seep in what we are doing. There are all sorts of scaremongering going on about how we are getting rid of it, slashing it, cutting it. The reality is that for the most part that’s not true.”

But the newspaper also suggests that that the 2 million benefit recipients are justified in their concerns:

An official impact assessment of the plans, released this month, reveals the scheme will cut benefit payments by £2.24 billion annually – and lead to about 500,000 fewer claimants.

That meets my definition of slashing it.