UK ESA question?

No one has been ripped off.....

Welfare benefits are a privilege......you should be thankful for what you get.....!

@Guitar.....thank you for your kind words.....I feel much chastened....!

Now shut up and listen...... People in India, in Africa, in South America, all over the world, would love to have the benefit of an enlightened, tolerant and generous society such as ours......

We pay taxes because we feel a civilised country has a responsibility to protect the vulnerable and less fortunate..... You and others claiming welfare do so because of an accident of birth.... You are lucky you live here! You should feel privileged.....if not then you are an ingrate, and the reason many people loathe paying their hard earned money in taxes to scum like you....!

Wessex - you are a moron welfare benifits are a right which we have worked for and paid for and large numbers of people have in point of fact been ripped off.

I totally agree with Wessex. Be thankful for any benefits you receive you wouldn't get them anywhere else.

The whole benefits question is an absolute mine field. We do have people who through no fault of their own, cannot afford to live, this could be because of a physical or mental defect, an injury later in life, and of course for some poor souls, an accident at birth.

I carried out some constituent business on Tuesday and in the house a large portion of the ground floor was occupied by what could have been a hospital room transferred into a house. In the centre laying all but motionless was a 25 year old man. Starved of oxygen at birth, he needs 24/7 care. His Mother tried but failed to get compensation from the Hospital for what happened.

As we talked she showed me the work that had been done to the property in order to make it a safe and practical environment for her son.

The cost to her over the past 25 years would not have been possible but for donations, direct help from the relevant NHS departments and her total devotion.

I doubt that anyone who stood in the room with me would have challenged her right to help. Yes it is a right, it is a right because of where we are, because of the civilisation that we have. Wessex is also totally correct to point out that in other parts of the world, no such system exists, and I have no doubt that this lady's child been born in any one of dozens of other Nations, he would have passed away long since.

Some might argue that such an outcome would be the best thing, but I can assure you, despite all it has cost her, including a marriage, this lady would not buy into any such argument.

Sadly, we have a benefits culture, there are those that believe the state owes them a living, there are those that have not intention of ever doing a stroke of work that might lead to tax being paid, so anything they do, is over the brush and just supplements what they claim from the state.

I think when we clamped down, we should have looked a lot harder at the indolent members of society, who are capable of doing more, albeit in jobs they might not want, but who chose not to.

However, we have to understand that there are other factors involved. It is true that many who want to get back into work, are prevented because working would bring them less than they get on benefits. By earning a wage, they may not get help with some things, and having to pay them out of their salary would leave them worse off. Sometimes worse off to the state of being in poverty.

The failure to increase wages in line with the rapidly increasing cost of living is in no small part to blame for this.

What of ESA then, a perfectly reasonable system, but one which was very easy to target when it came to cost cutting. I know personally some people who should not get anything from this benefit. Yet they do.

I know one person who had his benefit stopped and is now challenging it, he has got a condition, but frankly it is not yet at the point where it prevents him working. Whether or not he will be able to get a job is another thing, but perhaps if he had stayed in work to begin with, he would not be facing the problems he has now.

We have to strike a balance and we have to set levels at which benefits are payable. The benefit budget is staggering and only the most foolhardy amongst us would not accept that a significant amount of money is going to people who have no place claiming it.

Successive Governments have slashed this and cut that to try and save money. But always a bit here or a bit there. In my view, we need a radical review, we need to establish the cut off lines across the piece and then with perhaps 12 Months notice, advise those that would lose benefit that it is going to happen.

However, people have to have somewhere to live, and they have to be able to afford to live there.

People have to eat, so they have to be able to afford to buy food.

We have to have energy to run our households so people need to be able to afford it.

Governments over the past 40+ years have failed to build anything like the number of houses we need.

They have failed to create the infrastructure to encourage businesses to grow in the wider regions.

They have destroyed manufacturing because of EU emissions rules, which we then bend out of shape by having things made in the far east or China, where no such controls exist, and then ship them back here?

We have mass immigration of cheap labour, making it easy for companies to keep wages lower than people need just to cover the basics.

We give away Billions per year in aid, most of which never gets into the hands of those that need it most, yet we allow ten's of thousands of pensioners to die each year because they cannot afford energy or food costs.

We need benefits in the UK, but we do not need an enforced benefit culture. Government today, in the past, and going forward need to recognise that they have much to answer for in this respect. Only at Government level, can we sort this out. Not just chipping away at this benefit or that, but changing the environment altogether.

Hate to use this for a political broadcast, but you will not get anything like that from the Tory's, Labour, Lib Dems, or Greens. You just wont.