Duncan Smith To Replace Welfare System With Beatings

Still in his dressing gown, work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith called an urgent press conference at 7 o’clock this morning to explain the idea that was fixed in his head when he woke up.

“Listen, because this is completely brilliant,” he exclaimed to yawning journalists. “There’s all this money we pay to people who don’t do anything. And I woke up thinking, ‘Why don’t we just stop doing it?’ There you are. Brilliant.”

After eventually shushing the cheering Daily Mail reporter, astonished correspondents asked the minister what he proposed in place of benefits.

That's the way to do it

“What? Oh, I don’t know,” replied Mr Duncan Smith. “I had the answer when I woke up – but, wouldn’t you know it, I’m damned if I can think of it it now. It might have been a special place where they have to go to be beaten with a stick by a policeman. Or was it allowing anyone with a job to clout them with whatever comes to hand? I’m sure beatings were in there somewhere.”

When asked if he was seriously proposing clubbing the disabled as they starved to death in the gutter, Mr Duncan Smith frowned and mused, “Hmm, that Clegg fellow might draw the line at that.”

“Perhaps we can defer the cripple-beating until after they’ve starved,” he conceded, before going back to bed to work out the details.