The one thing the commentators agree on in reacting to James Purnell's proposals to shake up the welfare system  is that few people are being honest.

Polly Toynbee writing yesterday ('Labour's sin-eater and now neutralised welfare reform') doesn't like James Purnell's Janus-faced pitch:

They were headlines to die for, everything that James Purnell had planned. "Labour blitz on dole scroungers" said the Sun, with "Get clean or lose your benefits, junkies told" from the Daily Mail. His prominent article in the Mail on Sunday was headlined: "There is nothing leftwing about expecting everyone else to pay for people who simply don't want to work." My, it was tough, tough, tough. But for bleeding-heart liberals he wrote an entirely different comment in these pages yesterday - "Only we can help the poor" - challenging Cameron on poverty while emphasising the caring elements in his welfare reform green paper.

Actually, although she doesn't like the presentation, Toynbee is generally supportive of the details of the policy.

Deborah Orr in The Independent has more fundamental concerns.  She feels that policy makers aren't being honest about the deeply entrenched roots of the problem - and invokes a Joseph Rowntree Foundation report to illustrate the intractability of the problems - Radical welfare reform? I don't think so

Alice Miles has the more interesting piece - 'Who'll be the first to offer disabled people a job?'.  She says we're all being dishonest if we think that getting many more disabled people into work will be simple.takes

We all cheer the principle, but who is going to put it into practice? When people demand that the disabled - and I'm talking about the genuinely incapacitated here, not the malingerers - should work, they generally mean that they should do rubbish jobs for rubbish money. Fill the call centres with cripples. Dogsbody jobs for the deaf; boring ones for the blind, they can't see anyway. But where are the decent job offers?

She concludes:

...most of all we need a shift in culture and attitude, among the disabled and among those who could employ them: sticks and carrots for everyone. At the moment, the disabled seem to be taking a hell of a lot of stick.