Owen Paterson on welfare reform at Queen’s
Owen Paterson used his visit to QUB last night to articulate the government’s position on the Welfare Reform Bill, with much talk of ‘rebalancing the economy’ and injecting ‘dynamism’ by tackling our ‘broken’ welfare system. In a week when the Work Programme and A4E scandals in GB have raised public anger about the exploitation of the unemployed, the Secretary of State insistently painted the coalition’s economic position as ‘progressive, kind, moral’ and ‘fair’. His secondary message was that Northern Ireland …