Before Conservative county councillor Richard Davies blindly toes the party line with anti-welfare state sabre rattling, he should consider the facts about Grantham’s employment (or unemployment) problems first.
Where are all the jobs simply for those forced out of work by the Tory-led coalition, never mind anyone else, going to come from?
Are they on the sites of the town’s defunct major manufacturers, destroyed by the Thatcher government’s devastating monetary policies?
A few, perhaps, but nowhere near as many as have been lost.
Could they be in a town centre riddled with more retail outlet gaps than a colander has holes?
Maybe local authorities ripped apart by coalition cuts could provide the answer; hospitals with not enough nurses, schools lacking the right level of teaching staff and so on.
The list could be almost endless before we even reach those the Tories callously refer to as ‘layabouts’ and ‘lifelong malingerers’.
I would suggest to Coun Davies that even these are far less costly to our economy than coalition-backed mega rich tax evaders.
And rather than continuing to blame the Labour Party’s past policies for their own current shortcomings, he and his own cronies ought to consider how many benefit cheats it takes to equal the financial defects caused by one rogue banker and his unearned bonuses?
Yes, the Conservatives do have an unrivalled track record, but not of delivering positive, but rather, I would suggest, negative, monetary results for us all.
And to allege that the new rules on benefits are just to target those people who need them most is, in my opinion, a blatant lie.
One final point. When talking about incomes, perhaps it is not about those in the public sector or on jobseeker’s allowance being overpaid, but their counterparts working in the private sector, who are exploited by being underpaid.
Maybe their low pay should be increased to the level of the public sector, rather than the other way round.
Why not?
Peter Clawson
Welham Street
Grantham