Patrick Wintour (Extracted from "Turn off TV and work, Blunkett tells claimants", The Guardian, 11 October 2005)

"David Blunkett yesterday promised to liberate benefits claimants from dependence, insisting the way to overcome depression and stress was to stop watching daytime television and get back to work....

It was a paradox, he said, that although work was now physically less demanding, four times as many people claimed incapacity benefit today than were on the equivalent invalidity benefit 25 years ago. The rise, to 2.7 million people, suggested "something very strange had happened to our society", Mr Blunkett told a seminar."

[Ed: There's nothing "strange" about it at all. What Blunkett carefully didn't say is that by far the most of the rise in people seeking incapacity benefits in the UK has occurred in the last seven years of the "re-distributive" government. However, to let "New Labour" off the hook, this is occurring in all developed countries because politicians have increasingly had to bribe their electorates to make sure that they vote for them the next time. However, the modern phenomenon is also a function of the steady disappearance of large numbers of satisfying middle-skill jobs with reasonable incomes which started to occur in a serious way in all developed countries at around 1985 due to automation and computerisation -- the result of the "productive process" (to use one of the few correct observations of Karl Marx). This is the principal problem in all developed countries and politicians still haven't grasped it yet.]