Ever since the Election six weeks ago and the formation of a coalition government, there has been continuous sniping and niggling and suggestions that the alliance is under severe stress and etc. etc. I have to say that the BBC is the chief source of this rumour mongering but many of the newspapers are all too ready to join in. I sense that many of the general public - those who have jobs and work for a living - are in favour of this alliance and its attempts to tackle the astronomical debts. But whole armies of people are wheeled out in front of TV cameras to say why they think its wrong to cut back on the orgy of spending. Tonight's Question Time was a case in point. It seemed a highly biased audience suffering from serious levels of economic naivety. There was criticism of the limits put on housing benefit. It has, as far as I understand it, been fixed at £400 per week max. I think that is perfectly reasonable. Why should I and others be asked to pay taxes in order to shell out more than £400 per week to a family of the work-shy and bunches of immigrants. No immigrant should be able to get any benefit at all until they have been here for some years and contributed to taxes. Even then I would want to know why they were here and not working. We have had more than one story of non-working immigrant families with six + children who have been getting £1500 per week plus in housing benefits - and then demanding that we should give them even more for bigger houses so that they can knock-out a few more kids. Meanwhile they kit themselves out with new cars and 50 in screen TVs. It should stop - now - at once. A limit of £400 per week is generous. It would meet the mortgage payments on a house of over £300,000 and, again, I don't see why we should support payments way above this.
All these people who think that we should carry on chucking money at public services should tell us in the clearest of terms who pays for it and how. It is no good to make the simple statement that somebody else should pay.
I am not anti-state but I am anti-handouts to the workshy and the shirkers. If they won't work, ultimately they should starve.
Today, we had another burst of nonsense about the rise in the retirement age. All that the government is proposing is to bring forward by ten years the proposal by the previous government to raise retirement age to 66. I retired when I was half way through my 68th year. Raising the retirement age to 66 makes little difference. There are many above the age of 55 who have effectively retired anyway because they have no job. There are others who carry on working past 65 anyway. It is yet again a collective blindness. But there are two problems. The miniscule state pension - almost the worst in Europe. And the guaranteed pensions of public sector employees. Public pensions are unaffordable. If public sector workers want generous pensions, fine, they just have to pay for them. A report at the week-end suggested that public sector workers got paid more, worked shorter hours, had more holidays, retired earlier and had pensions paid for by the rest of us. It's got to stop.
I have no doubt I will feel some pain from this government's austerity measures but I think that what they are doing is right. One day, we may be able to stop spending the £44 billion per year that we lash out on interest payments on the public debt and spend it on something useful. After all that gargantuan waste costs more than out annual defence budget.
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