I have written before at this site, and I’ll write it here again, that I believe that in any other free society but the UK those who held office in the last government would now be arraigned on charges of malfeasance whilst in public office and would be facing hefty gaol sentences. Regrettably, we in the UK have no laws which can be used against those holders of public offices who deliberately, and by design, fail to do their jobs in order to further their own, usually hidden from the public, political agendas.
One such person who, in my opinion, should now be in gaol is the former Work and Pensions Secretary, Yvette Cooper. She knowingly and deliberately, some would say wilfully, allowed a situation in which well over one hundred and fifty thousand people every year for many years claimed state benefits to which they were not entitled. The cost runs into tens of millions of pounds – if not hundreds of millions.
Tens of thousands of workers with no right to be in Britain have been claiming benefits thanks to an extraordinary loophole in the law. Ministers have discovered that Labour allowed 155,000 illegal immigrants to qualify for sickness benefits and maternity pay. Government sources put the cost to the public purse at ‘tens of millions of pounds’. They say the shambles is a damning indictment of how Labour lost control of both the benefits and immigration systems with taxpayers left to foot the bill.
It’s worse, however, than that bald paragraph states because it is impossible for Yvette Cooper and her predecessors not to have known about this situation. Her entire Department knew about it for years – and about much, much more that has yet to emerge – and must have informed its Minister on more than one occasion as that is the protocol.
...someone could be illegally in the UK and able to claim Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), paid to those too sick to work, as well as statutory payments such as maternity or paternity pay and sick pay.
That is not the kind of situation that the professional administrators in the Department of Work and Pensions would have remained unaware of for very long and it beggars belief that they would have neglected to tell their Minister. However, and quite incredibly, the local offices of the Department where potential claimants would have registered failed to ask for any proofs of identity and entitlement because, under current guidelines approved by the Minister, they are not allowed to.
A Whitehall source said: ‘It cannot be right that people who aren’t eligible to work here can get benefits that are a substitute for earnings. ‘This is a classic example of where the welfare system has been allowed to get completely out of control. It is difficult to track because these are illegal workers, but the cost is likely to be in the tens of millions.
The current Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith will outlaw the practice in welfare reform legislation expected to be unveiled this spring.
However, the European Commission has warned ministers that the rules may infringe the human rights of EU citizens and are ‘not compatible’ with EU law. It has started legal proceedings against Britain to have restrictions on welfare claims by incomers scrapped.
Of course we know why Labour Party former Work and Pensions Secretaries did nothing about this situation – it’s because the left wing Labour Party deliberately set out to encourage as much immigration as it possibly could in order to wreck as much of Britain and its culture and the way of life of its indigenous peoples as it possibly could, for our British socialists actually hate Britain (and here, and here, and here) and its attempts to be a free, meritocratic and capitalist society with a carefully administered social safety net.
British socialist have colluded with every vile manifestation of the E.U. and many of them, particularly Neil Kinnock, have practically hijacked the Brussels’ gravy train and disgraced themselves by their own cupidity and arrogance.
Mostly, however, British socialists are fundamentally divorced from reality. Even today in Parliament they can only just bring themselves to talk about the deficit (which they created), that is to say they can only talk about the difference between the tax take and government expenditure which is approximately £160 billion (US$220 billion) every year, and not about the National Debt which they allowed to spiral out of control to nearly 74% of GDP by running government at a deficit year in year out despite being warned that doing so was probably illegal and most certainly morally wrong.
The socialist approach to government finances since 1997 means that Britain’s National Debt now stands at nearly £1.4 trillion (just under US$2 trillion) and is growing at an unsustainable and alarming rate thanks to the operating deficit left to us by the last socialist government. Remember as you read these figures that Britain’s economy and population is one fifth those of the USA. That means that every man, woman and child in Britain owes about £40,000 (US$65,000) – or, to put it another way, every working person owes just over double that!
Interest on the British National Debt will be almost £60 billion (US$105 billion) this year which equates to just over £2,000 (US$3,200) per household. All the figures in this article are from the UK Office for National Statistics and are probably several months out of date already.
The staggering thing about all this socialist profligacy is that it is EU wide – there is scarcely a country in the Union the finances of which are not saddled with unrealistically high levels of national debt, falling tax revenues and budgets committed to ever increasing deficits. There isn’t one single country in the Union that has managed to bring immigration under control neither has any country in the Union managed to bring its spending on its social safety net under control.
Can it get any worse? Yes, of course it can. Just consider this: the European Central Bank (the financial organisation in charge of the Euro and charged with bailing out countries such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland is itself actually in debt to the tune of US$1.5 trillion and, by its own admission, it doesn’t know how or when it is going to be able to pay any of it back. The Bank is relying on some magical future economic upturn so that it can dun its clients and pay its creditors. Just recently the Bank doubled its capital base by borrowing 10.8 billion Euros (US$14.6 billion) from the 16 Central Banks in the Eurozone!
No matter how one looks at the figures the kindest thing one can say about this ludicrous and socialist inspired way of doing business is that it is fantasy finance carried out with magical money. There is no attempt to grow economies and the tax base and no attempt to encourage growth by strategically lowering taxes in the right areas – the fell and dread hand of socialist sorcery lies heavy on Europe.
In Britain we recently elected a government of a different hue – a slightly right of centre Conservative government which had to reach a coalition agreement with a rabidly left wing minority party – the Liberal Democrats (neither liberal nor democrats but everything has to be called something in politics). The LibDems, as they are called, turned out to be as shocked at the state of the nations finances as the incoming Conservatives and have been, because of that, fairly reasonable coalition partners. It goes without saying that the socialists still just cannot see what they have done wrong and they, as Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, are busy being anything but loyal and are stirring up unrest in the country by maintaining that things are not as bad as they seem and that the Government’s emergency austerity programmes aren’t needed.
Some of us, however, are desperately worried because we remember 1976 – the year that Britain went bankrupt (under a socialist government, needless to say) with well under, very well under, one third of the current level of debt in real terms and with a larger tax base and a smaller government share of economic activity!
And we hadn’t let in over a million potential terrorists and child abusers to worry about back then. Nor were we having to finance illegal foreign benefit scroungers at the jackbooted behest of unelected officials in Brussels together with the so-called judges with no legal training or experience who run the European Courts.
Posted on 03/13/2011 10:46 PM by John M. Joyce
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