Ian Duncan Smith Makes Poverty Disappear.

In a trick worthy of a street magician Ian Duncan Smith has set out his plan to make poverty disappear. The policy, known as "Now you see it, now you don't", involves a redefiniton of poverty using measures other than how much disposable income people might have. It would seem that if you have no money and are unemployed you are not poor. Conversely, if you live in a stately home and can't persuade enough American tourists to pay at the gate to view paintings of your ancestors, then you are. For Ian Duncan Smith, the most evil Tory of them all, poverty is more dependent on such factors as "family breakdown, worklessness, unmanageable personal debt and addiction." Does that mean that the son of millionaire whose father has married five or six times, who has never worked because Daddy pays his bills, likes to gamble his allowance away in Monte Carlo and shoves copious amounts of coke up his nose is poor? What is the diffrence between him and a hoodie from a housing estate hanging about a street corner with a can on extra-strengh lager in his hand? One has money and the other does not. By any sensible standard the difference between being rich and being poor is a matter of how much money you have. Of course IDS's solution to all this is to make poor people even poorer and then make them work for nothing. Far better, the "News in Shorts" believes is to apply his new policy to his career and that of his Tory mates - "Now you see it, now you don't."