Prime Minister’s speech on welfare: 19 April 2024
It doesn’t have to be like this: the house falling into scattering light, and voices abandoned between missed phone calls. We can change, queuing in silence for tickets to the other side. We must change, waiting to manifest transience to transcendence in our day-to-day routines. The opportunities are there, beyond the smoked glass doors, deep within the hyenas’ cage, thanks to a plan that has created almost a million vacant spaces where once we laid our sated bodies. Look, my friends and respected foes alike, the rewards for working are there, for all to see but none to touch. This is our moment to see our true selves, thanks to our tax cuts and increases to the National Living Wage, and such is our luck, to be skewered on the second hand as the clock claps to midnight. And now, if we can deliver the vision for welfare I’ve set out today, we can all marry princes or rich widows, or at least hold our heads up in the race of rats, leaving the poor and the punished to eat our dust. When no one draws the dole, or draws blood, or even draws conclusions, then we can finally fulfil our moral mission, to restore hope. Sign your name here, then here, and again here, in the cold condensation of your companions’ dying breaths, and we’ll give back to everyone who can, the dignity, purpose and meaning that comes from work.
Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor
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