LONDON â€" Iain Duncan Smith, a millionaire minister in Britain’s Conservative-led coalition government, was evidently tempting fate when he claimed this week that he could live on the equivalent of $11.50 a day.
Within 12 hours of his claim, made in a broadcast interview on Monday, 67,000 people had signed an online petition demanding that he prove it. That had risen to more than 150,000 by midday on Tuesday.
Mr. Duncan Smith, a former Conservative Party leader, has become the prime target in a backlash against a series of measures to reform state-funded benefits that critics say will lead to a dismantling of the country’s hallowed welfare state.
As minister for work and pensions, he is among the architects of changes introduced by the government of Prime Minister David Cameron as it confronted the specter of an unprecedented triple dip recession.
Enduring recession and a rising benefits bill has prompted governments in Europe to look for ways to trim social spending.
In France, the Socialist government is discussing trimming the level of universal credits that go to better-off families, while in struggling euro zone economies like Spain and Ireland governments have been forced to trim payouts to the poor and unemployed.
In Britain, the debate has turned into an us-and-them argument in which defenders of the welfare system have accused the government of targeting the poor at the same time as extending tax benefits to the wealthy.
A government frequently lampooned as a “cabinet of millionaires†has also been accused of dividing up the country between “scroungers†and “strivers†by demonizing welfare beneficiaries.
The government claims people in work will actually be better off as a result of its reforms.
But that did not prevent British churches from joining the clamor of protest during the Easter weekend to accuse the government of targeting the most vulnerable in society and creating a false picture of the poor as lazy.
A headline on Monday in the left-leaning Guardian newspaper on the new measures read: “The day Britain changes.†It listed the introduction of changes in housing and disability benefits, cuts in legal aid support and measures to reform the health system that critics have described as a back-door privatization of the state-funded service.
George Osborne, the Conservative finance minister, on Tuesday defended the government’s welfare reforms by insisting the changes were designed to “make work pay.â€
“For too long, we’ve had a system where people who did the right thing - who get up in the morning and work hard - felt penalized for it, while people who did the wrong thing got rewarded for it,†according to his prepared remarks.
Meanwhile, Mr. Duncan Smith is left to decide whether to pick up the gauntlet laid down by a benefit recipient, interviewed by the BBC, who challenged the minister to match his experience of living on £53 a week.
The left-leaning Mirror said that the minister, who was behind a so-called “bedroom tax†on housing welfare beneficiaries who have a spare bedroom, lived rent-free in a £2 million aristocratic country house. Sky pointed out that his after-tax income was £1,600 a week.
Among signatories to the online petition calling on the minister to live for a year on £53 a week, Carrie Dunn of London wrote: “Multimillionaires telling the very poor how easy it is to survive on such a limited income need to put their oodles of money where their mouth is.â€
What do you think Is the criticism fair Do European governments have any alternative but to reform their welfare systems And, if change is inevitable, is an unfair burden being placed on the backs of the poor
