the original Grumpy Git

The Telegraph this weekend put a number on a quiet British scandal: 625,618 households now receive more in benefits than the average British worker takes home for a year of full-time work. £32,200 is the threshold. Across more than half a million households, on the welfare side of that line. 16,000 of those households, the same analysis says, take more than £60,000 a year, almost twice the average post-tax salary in this country. £155 billion is the running total of the welfare bill these payments come out of. By the end of the decade, projections show, it will dwarf Britain's entire defence budget. We can toss parables of indolence on the poverty line back and forth, but what this ultimately comes down to is incentives. Specific Cabinets have, in specific years, made specific decisions to expand eligibility, weaken assessments, and tolerate a structure in which working full-time on the median wage is a less rewarding proposition, in pure cash terms, than not working at all. Three Conservative governments and one Labour government did this, in slow steps, often in panic over a different problem - like judicial activism, demographic ageing, or some embarrassing headline about sanctions - and the cumulative result is a system that now explicitly fails the moral test that every welfare state in the world is built upon. Work must pay. Not working, except for those who are grappling with categorical incapacitation, must not pay. But in Britain, inn these never-ending years of hurt, it's Opposite Day every day. And the damage is not only the money. The damage is the message. The message that the relationship between effort and reward, the contract on which a productive society rests, has been suspended and inverted. The single mother working two jobs, the agency carer doing nights, the teaching assistant who tops up her hours with bar work, the young professional working doggedly and tirelessly trying to outpace the interest on the student loan debt they were obliged to incur: a vast number of value creators are, at the end of each month, looking at a payslip that is smaller in absolute terms than the entitlement of the household next door which generates none. They notice. So do their children. If we wish for Britain to progress, then the abiding regime in which £60,000 a year in welfare is paid to households that, by the system's own assessments, are notionally available for work, must end. We must rebuild the conditions of eligibility that decades of legal challenge have stripped out to produce this entitlements free-for-all. We must prosecute fraud properly, just as 25 years of Conservative and Labour governments have promised and never had the balls to do. We will treat the welfare state as what it was always meant to be: a safety net for the genuinely unable, paid for by the genuinely able, and not a reward for crafty systems-play. We must say what no one in Westminster has the nerve to say: that a country which pays £60,000 to do nothing and £32,200 to be a teacher has lost the plot, and that no nation has ever recovered from such a loss without first being honest about it.

My Seat Model: SNP: 51 (-13) RFM: 26 (+26) LAB: 16 (-6) LDM: 13 (+9) CON: 12 (-19) GRN: 11 (+3) Changes w/ 2021.

A thug who killed bus driver Keith Rollinson in Feb 2024 is now back on the streets. His widow Sue tells me she's 'angry, upset and concerned for others'. Keith's killer will STILL get a free bus pass - which is a shocking indictment of the SNP's weak justice system.