Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Denounce your neighbour

My local council in Brighton distributes a propaganda sheet called "City News", explaining what wonderful things it is doing. The latest issue contains a feature headed "Tip us off on benefit fraud", with a story about a named villain who was caught following an anonymous call to the fraud office, having cheated the council out of £34,000 in housing benefit.

I do not condone benefit fraud but this looks ludicrous in the same week as the news is full of reports of MPs making absurd claims for expenses. A strongly worded letter from the Leader of the Council to the appropriate authorities would be more in order, pointing out that it is difficult for the council's efforts at fighting fraud to be taken seriously when the leaders of the country are doing the same thing on a vastly bigger scale, to say nothing of the robbery of the thrifty that is presently in full swing. The widespread view now is that if you steal a bottle of milk, you go to prison - but fiddle a few hundred billion and the government gives you more - of taxpayers' money. There is a lack of credibility about the whole business.

The suggestion that people should shop their neighbours is destructive of community trust and lays people open to blackmail. It is the same technique as was used by the Gestapo under the Nazis and the Stasi in the time of the East German communists. This is not the way things are
supposed to work in Britain.

There is of course a fundamental problem due to the complexity of the benefits system and the poverty traps built in, which lead to welfare dependency and moral decay. An acquaintance of mine was asked to repay one benefit but would have qualified for a different benefit to which they were entitled, and I know of others who are entitled to benefit but don't claim.

Councils ought to be working through the local government associations to get the legislation simplified and rationalised to get rid of poverty traps, provide proper incentives to work instead of living off benefits, and to ensure that benefits reach all those who are entitled to them. The main beneficiaries of the housing benefit system are in fact landlords, since the system serves to prop up rental levels at artificially high levels. Whether landlords should be subsidised in this way is an interesting question but it doesn't sound quite right to me.

And whilst on the subject of saving public money, City News could usefully be at the top of the list in the next round of council cuts.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...

Battery trains fool’s gold

A piece by the railway news video Green Signals recently reported the fast charging trials for battery operated electric trains on the West Ealing to Greenford branch, in west London. In a comment under the video, I described the project as technological overkill, bearing in mind that before dieselisation in the 1960s it was worked by the tiny steam locomotives of the Great Western 1400 class, a 1932 design based on an 1870s design. The money that has been spent on the experiment would have paid for a small fleet of the old things. Elsewhere in the comments, I was critical of the 800 series trains. This produced a response from the makers of the video, as follows. “I may be grasping at straws here but I am guessing you don't like 8xx series trains all that much and rather wish we still had Kings, Castles and (for the branches) 14xx's. Fair? ” My reply was as follows... Yes you are grasping at straws. The model for long distance stock is the class 180, which is a 23 metre veh...