The Logic is Inescapable...

So, Mick Philpott lived in a council house and claimed benefits.  He was also had a history of violence and was responsible for the deaths of six of his children.  Therefore, anybody who claims any form of benefits is a violent criminal.  The welfare state is the root cause of criminality.  At least, that's the crude reductionism the Chancellor of the Exchequer, (backed up by the Prime Minister) has been promoting over the past few days.  But before dismissing this out of hand as arrant nonsense, the crudest form of opportunistic propaganda designed to justify the government's relentless assaults against the disadvantaged, let's look at another example.   It's generally accepted that Lord Lucan, a hereditary peer, one of the aristocracy, murdered his children's nanny and attacked his wife before fleeing justice, never to be seen again.  Lord Lucan was a very wealthy man with a seat in the Lords. It clearly follows that all members of the House of Lords, all aristocracy with inherited wealth and titles, are also violent criminals.  Their wealth and titles are the root cause of criminality.  Therefore they should be stripped of both and the House of Lords abolished. 

You know, I'm beginning to like Osborne's brand of logic!  Let's try applying it to other scenarios.  This weekend I was subjected to the sight of a BBC interviewer reducing a teenage girl to tears over things she posted on a now defunct Twitter account three years ago, (if only they'd apply the same rigourous technique when interviewing Tory politicians).  The 'justification for this was that the girl is currently 'youth crime commissioner' for Kent and the likes of the Mail on Sunday have dredged up tweets she made when fourteen, arguing that they show she is unfit to occupy this publicly funded post.  So, on the basis that anything you did or said, no matter how long ago it was or how immature you were at the time, should be used to judge your fitness to hold public office in later life, why aren't we revisiting Cameron and the allegations he tried drugs when a student?  Previously, he has refused to answer these allegations when questioned about them on the grounds that when he was a student, he hadn't then decided to go into politics, so anything he did before that decision was irrelevant.  But apparently not, it seems.  So, Dave, did you inhale? 

Still not convinced of the value of Osborne's reductive reasoning?  One last example then.  The right keep telling us that it should be lawful to use torture on terrorist suspects if the information obtained could avert further terror attacks.  Because, obviously, information obtained under duress is always accurate.  In which case, we must also admit to the existence of witchcraft.  After all, those confessions of witchcraft which led to the execution of many 'witches' back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were obtained using pretty much the same sort of techniques favoured by those the CIA 'outsource' their interrogations to - so they must be true.  Matthew Hopkins was fully justified in his campaign of persecuting half the population of East Anglia - the are was clearly full of old ladies and ill-educated young girls having sex with the devil and blighting their neighbours' crops with their magical powers.  So let's not condemn Osborne for is ill-informed views - let's credit him with legitimising a whole new form of logic we can use to twist the facts against him and his ilk!