The Sketch: Simon Carr

Great news! The Throw-Up Unit has seen a 47% rise in long-term volume

I found myself approaching Work and Pensions question time with less than my usual relish, it's hard to say why.

Alastair Darling was going to be there. And his angry homunculus, Ian McCartney. And that woman with a voice like a weary blowfly, what's her name? Eagle? Maria Eagle. A gallery of grotesques.

What was wrong with me? I shan't be going to the Speaker's party, you know. I can't, as a matter of fact. No, it's a bit early for me. I'm not very well. I've got to work late.

I've got another party to go to. All right, all right, he hasn't asked me. It's quite hurtful, actually. I've always defended him to my colleagues (oh, they would have been much more unpleasant about him without me). And he does this. Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

But there we were, with Work and Pensions. Easily the most boring occasion in the parliamentary calendar. The rubbish they talk. The inconsequential pap. You'd call it gibberish but that implies too much content.

Maria Eagle responded to David Milliband's request for more voluntary-sector involvement in employment matters. She said he was right to mention other organisations, especially in reference to the experience of voluntary organisations with expertise in the area where New Deal job brokers enable people without work to get a proper chance to be assisted into work by organisations that included private and voluntary organisations that ensured a proper access for all and was working very well.

A ministerial commentary that had the consistency and quality of throw up.

As encouraged and facilitated by the Throw-Up Unit, which has produced a 47 per cent increase in the volume of long-term throw-up, thus making it one of the most productive government programmes in existence. No mean feat considering it's competing with employment programmes such as Step Up. And Work Step. And Work Right. And Right Employment. Skills Good. Job Search. Access Now. Programme Go. Inclusion Plus. Assist Support. Study Up. Round Peg Round Hole. Intractable Challenge (I've been making it up for a while now.) And, back to reality, the New Deal and the New New Deal.

The New New Deal? Don't ask.

The Tories made some good points here. John Baron mentioned research that estimated 70 per cent of New Deal beneficiaries would have found work anyway (thus putting the cost of each New Deal job at £15,000). Paul Goodman noted that of 522 New Deal graduates in his constituency only 201 went into unsubsidised work. Andrew Mitchell asserted that more families were classified poor now than were in 1997. And David Willets revealed the existence of devastating research which trashes the Government's entire record in the area.

None of these preposterous schemes do much, and most of them don't do anything at all. The only people they provide employment for are deadbeat ministers.

Minister Darling responded by suggesting Mr Willetts had difficulty sleeping, what with the amount of research he had been reading.

The sketch writer of the Daily Mail blew his nose loudly. It was a rhetorical improvement on what the minister was saying.

The high point for the Government came in an announcement by Nick Brown. "Random assignment will not be used as an evaluation tool for disabled people," he said. It was quite astonishingly boring. Connoisseurs of boredom now abed will have wept not to have been there for Work and Pensions.

Only the vindictive were rewarded by Points of Order when David Winnick intervened on the Speaker to call him a useless, whistling goon (I scarcely paraphrase at all).

Simoncarr75@hotmail.com