Benefit to society

THE benefits system is in place to protect society’s weakest and most vulnerable and rightly so.

Yet Scots know instinctively that it is not there to featherbed the workshy and those too feckless to make a genuine effort to find employment. Recent reforms of the system have been designed to weed the needy from the greedy and almost 50,000 of the latter have found themselves on the receiving end of a ‘sanction’ – stripping them of benefits for a limited period – after they failed to look for work. The ri ght- thinking majority will welcome the news that this, and other crackdowns on benefits, will result in a s aving to the taxpayer of around £2.5billion a year. It makes the SNP response all the more incredible. Nicola Sturgeon claimed the changes ‘set back the fight against poverty by at least a decade’. How so? Is she really advocating a system where money is taken from the hard-working and handed to those who simply cannot be bothered seeking work? Is that how to eradicate poverty — free money for the bone idle? No one is celebrating the fact that people are having welfare payments stopped, even temporarily.

But if it acts as an incentive to get people to at l east seek a j ob, the advantage to society is undeniable.

Undeniable, that is, except for an SNP shamelessly wooing a rump of voters with much to gain from a welfare system that throws money around.

Posturing about ‘protecting Scotland f rom Westminster welfare cuts’ is crowd-pleasing stuff for some but an ominous message for the majority who work hard and want t heir government to be prudent about where their taxes are spent.