Mick Philpott is clearly a loathsome man. He killed six of his 17 kids by setting fire to a house in order to frame one of his ex-partners. He is off to prison. The true victims of this awful crime are the six children who died. But Philpott is also a victim of the bleeding heart liberals who try to defend a welfare state that is a cancer at the heart of Britain.
Philpott used women to breed 17 children and then milked them all for benefits. He was trousering £60,000 a year in benefits tax free. That would you require you to earn c£100,000 a year. And that enabled him to lead a life fuelled by drink, drugs and doing no work at all. The lefties would tell you that all the children (and Philpott) were living in poverty. But it is a poverty which saw all the kids housed, fed and clothed and Sky TV in all the homes with Philpott still able to fork out vast amounts on drugs and booze (and I bet lottery tickets as well).
The left will defend this system by saying
a) Philpott and offspring lived in poverty (they define poverty as being on less than half the national average wage and so Philpott (wages nil) qualifies and so the answer is to hand out MORE benefits
b) Philpott is an exceptional case. And so is Heather Frost. And so is the Iraqi housing benefits queen. And so no doubt are the 900,000 folks who have stopped claiming incapacity benefits once they knew they had to take a medical. They are all exceptional cases.
Benefits were meant to be a safety net. But as Philpott, Frost and all the others show they are now deemed an alternative lifestyle. Murderous Mick famously appeared on the Jeremy Kyle show (where else?) saying that he had a right to a bigger council house. Frost has her rights too. The Iraqi housing benefits parasite is now “slumming it” in a £1.5 million Islington pad paid for by the taxpayer as she too has “rights.”
But rights should come with obligations and the left seem to forget this. One such obligation should bed that you put back into society what you take out. You have no right just to take and live off the sweat of others. The left think it is evil for a capitalist (who risks his capital) to live off the sweat of others but not for a welfare parasite (who risks nothing) to do the same.
This is a cancer that is eating away at the heart of Britain. It is a luxury we cannot afford and so at one level the cancer gnaws away at the finances of the increasingly bankrupt nation. But it is more insidious than that in that it has created a whole class of people who believe they have a right to NEVER work and just to take, to live a lifestyle paid for by the labours of others. Eventually the others will say that enough is enough. Why the hell should we pay more and more in taxes to fund the Philpotts and Frosts of this world?
I offer three solutions:
1. You should be unable to claim a cent in welfare benefits until you have paid 5 years NI contributions.
2. Anyone convicted of any welfare fraud should receive a lifetime ban on any future benefit payments
3. Child benefit should be abolished at once. It is costly to administer and this can be offset by increasing income support for anyone with children by £25 a week – irrespective of how many kids you have.
4. And because poor hard working families should be encouraged to work rather than sponge, no tax should be payable on the first £20,000 of all earned income.
None of this will happen. Everyone will say that Philpott is an evil man (he is). Few will accept that we have created a system which is creating new Mick Philpotts (okay non murdering versions) every day. And without drastic reform that will continue and the cancer of welfarism will spread until it finally destroys this country.