Did benefits culture turn Mick Philpott into killer?
Debate dividing the nation
Published: 18 hrs ago
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THIS week’s political hot potato has been benefits.
On Monday, a series of welfare cuts began with the pruning of housing benefit – with Work And Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith insisting he could live on £53 a week if he had to.
Yesterday, the PM backed George Osborne for linking the case of child killer Mick Philpott to Britain’s welfare system – despite Labour’s outrage. The father of 17 was pocketing £68,000 a year from benefits and earnings from his wife and mistress through their children.
Jailed ... Mairead and Mick Philpott were found guilty of six counts of manslaughter
Here, two leading voices debate whether benefits were to blame for turning Philpott into a monster and what implications the welfare row is having on British politics.
YES says Trevor Kavanagh, Sun columnist
LABOUR’S screams of protest over child killer Mick Philpott betray the truth about a party which has made as much of a living out of welfare as Philpott himself.
'
Welfare party is over' ... Trevor Kavanagh
Gordon Brown used taxpayers’ billions to buy Labour votes in a political scam as complex as the “slice and dice” loans fraud that brought the world to the brink of economic meltdown.
When he’d finished, people earning as much as £60,000-plus could claim handouts from money stolen from their own taxes.
Welfare spending doubled.
Across Britain, unshaven, unwashed people such as Philpott lived in shellsuits, lined their walls with plasma TVs, parked untaxed Range Rovers in their drives and spawned children subsidised by you and me at £13 each a week.
The judge who sentenced this contemptible coward explicitly linked the tragic deaths of his six children to his greedy pursuit of an ever-higher income stream from the state.
Yet the Labour Left effectively accused her — and anyone who agreed with her verdict — of “demonising” the poor.
Nothing could be further from the truth. And it should worry Marxist-born, union-subsidised Labour leader Ed Miliband that most people believe the judge was right. His party has ditched the post-war Attlee Labour dream of a welfare safety net to help the truly poor, and hijacked it as a weapon to bludgeon the wealth and job creators.
Before “Brown’s bubble” burst, people believed we could afford to throw billions at scroungers who stayed in bed breeding while everyone else went to work. Hard times bring hard truths.
And hard-working Sun readers have lost sympathy with the millions who blame depression, back pain or alcohol and drug addiction to live off our taxes.
Is this a grotesque exaggeration, as The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee would claim?
Or can we see the evidence from the 880,000 who have quit incapacity benefit rather than take a medical?
These scroungers are having a laugh at our expense. The devil makes work for idle hands. People such as Philpott waste away their days with booze and drugs, beating their wives and going dogging.
BBC stooge David Bennett gambled away a legacy and was then allowed falsely to tell Radio 4’s Today programme he lived on £53 a week.
The simple truth, as Labour Treasury minister Liam Byrne admits, is that Britain is broke. We must borrow every penny we dish out in welfare. The welfare party is over.
NO says Polly Toynbee, Guardian columnist
BE outraged by Mick Philpott, but reserve some of your anger for George Osborne.
Don’t let a desperate politician use this evil man to disguise what the Government’s £21billion benefit cuts are doing to genuinely needy people, in our name.
'Philpott milked the system' ... Polly Toynbee
Philpott is a child-killing, wife-beating monster who milked the system.
We need to protect benefits against cheats and thieves. But freak cases tell us nothing about what is now happening.
Let’s get the facts straight. Official figures show fraud amounts to only 70p for every £100 paid out. Child tax credits mostly go to families in work, whose pay is too low to make ends meet.
Most of those needing a top-up are in work.
Osborne says he is on the side of the “strivers not the skivers”, but he doesn’t admit he’s also cutting credits for working families.
Five people are chasing every vacancy, in some areas 20. And 1.3million jobless young people can’t get their foot on the ladder into work. Skivers? How dare Osborne blame the unemployed for his no-growth economic policy?
The test of social security is how it treats the sick and disabled. Decent people would be shocked to know a third are now being ruthlessly cut off benefits.
“Work capability” tests are now so severe that last year more than 1,700 people died within weeks of being declared “fit for work”, official figures show.
Take Martine White, from Burnley, Lancs. She’s a partially blind and deaf thalidomide victim awaiting spinal surgery. She uses a wheelchair and stairlift but has lost her £110-a-week benefits, and been declared ready for work training.
Soon another third of disabled people lose their disability living allowance.
Attention focuses on Philpott but these unseen sufferers show the truth of what’s really happening to our benefit system.
Read more:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepag...ick-Philpott-into-a-killer.html#ixzz2PiC8r6uh
