not making a contribution that could help drive economic growth

Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, said that banks were not solely responsible for the financial crisis as “they had to lend to someone”.

The minister, who played a key role in drawing up David Cameron’s economic strategy in opposition, also claimed that people who took out loans were “consenting adults” who, in some cases, were now be seeking to blame others for their actions.

...

“People say to me, 'it was the banks’. I say, 'hang on, the banks had to lend to someone’,” he said. “People feel in a sense that someone else is responsible for the decisions they made. Of course, if banks don’t offer credit, people can’t take it. [But] there were two consenting adults in all these transactions, a borrower and a lender, and they may both have made wrong calls.

“Some people are unwilling to accept responsibility for the consequences of their own choices.”

A key ally of Chancellor George Osborne, Oxford-educated Mr Hammond is tipped by many as a successor to him.

He has an estimated personal wealth of around £9million. His stake in property company Castlemead has been estimated to be worth up to £6million in shares and dividends.

I don't think this is worth starting a new thread for, but I've noticed another disingenuous phrase that Tories have clearly been told to use is that they will support/help "people who want to get on". This presumably means people who want to get filthy rich, or filthy rich people who want to get even richer.

The one job Cameron landed in the private sector was arranged by his wife's mother, Lady Astor, who was friends with Michael Green, then executive chairman of Carlton. Green gave Cameron a starting salary of £90,000. He has no more had to stand on his merits than James Murdoch had to interview for a job at News Corp.

More people are visiting food banks every day. There are now over 200 operating across the UK, serving everywhere from the densely concentrated poverty of Tower Hamlets to the rural poverty of Okehampton and the isolated highlands around Inverness.

The biggest is in Coventry, where over 7,000 people have walked away with packs of tinned food, sugar and tea since it launched last year. In a time of economic decline, the number of people visiting food banks doubled to 128,967 last year.

With no sign of the economy recovering, experts predict that they will be serving over half a million people by the next election. Two more open every week.

“Inflation in food, rising living costs and falling wages all push people to count their pennies, and a huge volume of people are finding that they can’t make it to the end of the week,” says Chris Mould, executive chairman of the Trussell Trust which operates the only network of food banks in the UK, “After two or three years of hardship people run out of people to ask for help, and savings have all diminished. This country is facing some hard truths.”

Everyone has their own story about why they came to a food bank, but two big factors play a part in most of them.

Some 29 per cent of visitors say that they have been forced to look for help because of benefits changes. Even if you’re entitled to help under the government’s new system, a six-week delay is standard.

In that space, some of the most vulnerable are left with nothing. But benefits are not the only reason. Low pay is more commonly cited as a reason for seeking help than unemployment, with some 19% of foodbank visitors finding that their wages cannot meet basic costs. Visitors have been let down by the market as well as the state.

"There's only one growth strategy - work hard! And do more with less - that's the 21st century ... We're trying to rescue the work ethic just in the nick of time.

"With the introduction of the universal benefit next year, with the cap on benefits that we're bringing in, this is part of making sure we are recreating the work ethic for everybody in Britain.

"I think that these reforms will be seen in the 2020's as being as important to this country as the trade Union reforms and privatisations were of the 1980s. This is as fundamental as that.

This is the purpose of the coalition government."