Politics
iain duncan smith

Iain Duncan Smith mocked for saying people kept going to the office in World War II

Iain Duncan Smith mocked for saying people kept going to the office in World War II

People sure had it tough in the Second World War, from rationing to bombings, to making a Monday commute to the office - apparently.

In a piece for The Mailon Sunday, with the headline “In the 1940s they kept coming to the office – even when Hitler’s bombs were raining down”, former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith said “all too many” civil servants and government employees “have failed to see Covid as a challenge’.

“And instead of rising to that challenge, as the wartime generation would have done, they have thrown their hands up in despair – before locking the doors and scuttling off home, of course.

“When I think of all the brave civil servants who went to work in the 1940s, determined to do their bit regardless of the threat from falling bombs, I wonder what has happened to us as a nation,” he wrote.

Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter

The comments are the latest remarks from a Tory MP encouraging workers to get back to the office, after Boris Johnson, the prime minister, said earlier this week that colleagues would “gossip” about them if they didn’t.

In this instance, though, IDS has been mercilessly ridiculed online – primarily because, er, people didn’t have computers in the 1940s, the internet wasn’t invented and the Blitz wasn’t a highly contagious virus:

Heck, even history professors were pointing out the Chingford and Woodford Green MP’s nonsense:

IDS’ article wasn’t the only bit of content from the Mail to trend on Twitter on Sunday, as its front-page headline, “Home working left Britons at Taliban’s mercy” also raised eyebrows, and led to ‘Pret’ trending on the social media platform:

I never knew writing articles from my bed while eating a packet of Hobnobs could be so detrimental…

challengeworksecond world warofficegovernmentiain duncan smith
The Conversation (0)