Workfare has arrived in Britain, smuggled in with slippery rhetoric

The intriguing thing is whether the recession could lead to a sea change in attitudes to poverty. As a million people lose their jobs through no fault of their own, will we learn again to value the concept of social security? Might people begin to see that beyond the tabloid panics about benefit scroungers, there are plenty of people tangled up in the benefits system who hit hard times through illness, disability or redundancy? With the recession, a whole new section of society will discover the bewildering, petty world of welfare, where benefit levels are set at punitively low levels, well below the government's absolute poverty measure. You can't manage on benefit levels - you are not supposed to; they are designed to force people back into work. But the big question is what happens when there isn't the work? How do you justify that kind of poverty?

from the guardian