About the Centre for Social Injustice

“The only way we can keep families together is to make them poor again or reintroduce shame.”

Lord Framlingham, 28 February 2018

In 2002 after a brief and disastrous stint as Conservative Party leader, Iain Duncan Smith ventured to Glasgow, where he claimed to have an epiphany about the causes of poverty. In 2004 he founded a think tank, the Centre for Social Justice - an utterly cynical name for a think tank whose mission was to blame the poor for their own poverty and devise policies to make them even poorer.

As a one-woman band, I cannot hope to analyse the full extent of damage wrought by the Centre for Social Justice. I do not seek here to understand whatever religious, economic or other rationale justifies the loathing and contempt Iain Duncan Smith and his collaborators feel towards the sick and disabled. I am reasonably certain it comes from pure sadism, from the sheer pleasure of kicking people when they’re down. But, as a single mother of a teenage son, deliberately harmed by Iain Duncan Smith, I focus on the damage deliberately visited upon single mothers and our children.

The purpose of the Centre for Social Justice is encapsulated in the words of Conservative peer, Lord Framlingham: “The only way we can keep families together is to make them poor again or reintroduce shame.”