Making hard work of identifying skivers

THE FRIDAY THING:

THE millions of hard-working souls (of which we have a great number in Oldham) will have a unique perspective on the Government’s sabotaged plan to put a £26,000 cap on the amount of benefits those who are not working can claim.

They will wish that their low-paid and often menial and unpleasant jobs were rewarded with a wage of £26,000 a year and will wonder just on whose behalf bishops and Lib-Dems in the House of Lords, earning (or perhaps I should say getting paid) many thousands a year more should interfere. Certainly it is not for workers on poverty wages.

The majority of us have no arguments with benefit payments for the genuinely needy but the trouble with our welfare system is that it rewards the non-triers and non-doers and encourages them to live off the taxes of people who go out to earn their own wages to keep their own house and home together.

It is perverse lunacy that there are people living in multi-million pound homes with their rents being paid by the taxes of hard working folk living in council houses and other rented accommodation, struggling to pay their own way.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith is right to set a cap on the money paid to those who will not work, but his strategy is undermined because there is no record of how many of those on welfare payments are cheats and frauds, able but unwilling to work and laughing at neighbours who are up at the crack of dawn every morning and going out to work to earn hardly enough to keep home and family together.

Until we can identify the cheats and fraudsters — and I include in that list tax evaders and those involved in the black economy — and halt their criminal activities, we will continue to make the honest, hard-working folk pay through their taxes for the homes and families of those who should be in jail.



SOME things in life are funny, some are frightening and just a few are both. The idea of John Prescott as a police commissioner, for instance, is certainly both.

Putting in police commissioners over chief constables in forces across the country strikes me as bizarre, not least because there is not an organisation on the planet where having two bosses works.

Think Cameron and Clegg, Blair and Brown and plan to leave the country.

Police commissioners (a brainwave of the Government on a par with other brainwaves) are to be elected by the public and anyone (yes, even me) can stand for election to become a police commissioner. Is it true that women find uniforms and the men inside them irresistible?

It was rumoured when the idea of police commissioners was first floated that Jordan, the model turned author who would most certainly float, was going to stand for election but she has since denied it which I think is a pity. There are, after all, pillars of the establishment so why not a comforting two pillows of law and order?

And in a uniform, wow!

Prescott, who is comfortably if not attractively cushioned himself, brings a lot to the policing role (and not just in terms of personal bulk).

He has proved he can handle himself by punching an election heckler in the mouth and, of course, can make a speech at the drop of a hat or should that be the hat of a drop? Though whether anyone can understand it is another matter.

So will the good folk of Humberside see John as a crime-fighting big-gun (a blunderbuss, I suspect which is an obsolete short musket with a large bore and a flared muzzle) rather than a sticky-bun eater? And who will we get to be police commissioner of Greater Manchester?

Roy Chubby Brown perhaps.


FINAL WORD: As well as being responsible for emptying the bins, keeping the streets clean and collecting council tax, Oldham Council could soon take over responsibility for obesity (not among councillors, though) sexually-transmitted infections, binge drinking, smoking and reducing the gap in life expectancy between the richer and poorer areas.

Effectively, it means we are changing nannies from the NHS to Charlie and his team. Will they wear white coats and have stethoscopes round their necks, I wonder?