Feckless scroungers

The anti-public services and anti-welfare state brigade are having a field day, using the recession as an excuse to kick the most vulnerable and deprived citizens in the teeth and remove as much state support from them as possible.

Politicians and columnists alike are bemoaning the 101 evils of welfare. It goes to the undeserving. It stops people working. It makes them lazy. It stops them standing on their own two feet. It's beset by fraud. It encourages single motherhood and large families. And on and on.

None of these hysterical claims  are true. They're disproved time after time by thorough research and a look at the statistics. But this doesn't stop the halfwits and ideologues from digging up anecdotal and untypical stories to make sweeping and utterly false generalisations about the entire rollcall of claimants.

Stories of massive families living in mansions. Stories of the alleged disabled running marathons. Stories of workshy scroungers lying in bed all day. Stories of widescreen TVs and new cars provided by the taxpayer.

This ferocious black propaganda is smoothing the way for the government to cut benefits to the disabled, the sick, the unemployed and struggling families on a colossal scale, with the passive agreement of large swathes of the misinformed general public.

There's been much publicity about the family of 17 on state benefits, publicity that ended in tragedy a few days ago when six of the children died in an arson attack. What was the point of singling out this family for criticism? None, except to suggest they were feckless, irresponsible layabouts.

Large numbers of innocent people who genuinely need help are being penalised because of this politically-motivated smear campaign. And those doing the smearing are mostly well-off and highly unlikely to need any state benefits themselves. Their callousness and viciousness is breathtaking.

PS: May 31. The parents, Mick and Mairead Philpott, have been charged with murdering the six children. 

Empty plates

More and more Britons are now so hard-up they're resorting to charity food handouts to avoid starving. Often embarr-assed and apologetic, having tried desperately to fend for themselves, they ask for the handouts to feed themselves and their children.

The number of people getting emergency food boxes has risen from 25,000 two years ago to 60,000, which includes 20,000 children. If the trend continues, by 2015 there'll be half a million people being fed.

The handouts are provided by the Trussell Trust, a charity that manages over 70 food banks around the UK.

Despite what the government says, this is a wealthy country crawling with billionaires and multi-millionaires, yet the gap between rich and poor is still widening and Rolls-Royces glide past those who don't know where the next meal's coming from.

It's no longer just the homeless who need food handouts. Now it's also working people whose incomes are so low they simply can't pay all the bills. Increasingly they're having to choose between heat, light, food and clothing because they can't afford all of them.

Parents are skipping meals to feed their children. Tiny portions are the norm, if there are any portions at all. Whether food is cheap and filling is more important than whether it's nourishing.

It's a shocking situation. And what's worse is the fact that people are less and less sympathetic to the plight of the badly-off. Just 27 per cent think the government should spend more on welfare benefits and only half think it should provide a decent standard of living for everyone.

The rest presumably think it's your own fault if you're poor and struggling to survive. You're probably poor because you've been feckless, reckless and bone-idle, so why should anyone else help you?

I despair of the selfish, hard-hearted, indifferent society I live in, where comfort and good fortune is taken for granted and the problems of the less fortunate are pushed out of sight. So few people recall that wise old saying "There but for the grace of God go I."

Slumming it

Every so often some journalist or politician looking for attention decides to see what it’s like living on welfare. You know the kind of thing – “My life on a fiver a day” by Terry Twatt.

It’s always completely bogus. They’re not really living on a fiver a day because they’ve got a nice stock of Armani togs and all their hi-tech gizmos back at their real home in some fashionable urban neighbourhood.

They know they’ve only got to survive a week of low-life grot before they can race back thankfully to their normal life and resume shagging their sleek, perfectly-honed bedmate.

They don’t even have to keep it up 24/7 because they can always sneak home for a few hours and make up some plausible diary entry about the Tesco budget loaf being eaten by giant rats.

They know full well that one week in a grubby hovel is not the same as a life-sentence of poverty, dead-end jobs, greedy landlords and constantly struggling to make ends meet.

They don’t have the crippling back story of mountainous debts to loan sharks, four children to feed, a winter’s worth of fuel bills, and windows being broken by the local yobs.

A week of slumming it is about as realistic as having a few pints and pretending you’re an alcoholic.

Instead of grabbing their flea-ridden fleeces and pretending to be poor, Terry Twatt and his ilk would do better to tell us just why poverty is so entrenched and why a long string of British politicians have failed to give the residents of one of the world’s wealthiest countries a decent standard of living.

And why the fat cats running our big companies are paying themselves more and more while the wages of their overworked employees are steadily shrinking.

But that would be far too controversial. And not nearly so entertaining as a bit of down-in-the-gutter make-believe.