Britain can no long afford to pay the extortionate cost of the welfare state



Britain cannot possibly afford its welfare state for much longer. Most people do not realise that state handouts (£207 billion a year) mop up every penny we pay in income tax (£155 billion a year).



Everything else, the NHS, schools, transport, police, defence, interest on the debt (nearly £50 billion a year, by the way) must be paid for by other taxes, including the vast sums raked in by so-called ‘National Insurance’, or by more borrowing.



As we are more or less bankrupt as a country, such generosity is not noble but plain idiotic. Yet we will not stop doing it. Change is politically impossible.

Unaffordable: Britain pays out £207billion in state benefits a year - eating up the £155billion paid in income tax

Last week’s fuss about supposed cuts in benefits was a sign of the swamp we are in.



There were, as usual, no actual cuts. A hesitant plan to cap future increases was met with angry hostility by many in politics and the media.



Emotions were immediately engaged and slammed into top gear. That is because this immense and unaffordable attempt to substitute the State for the married family is at the heart of the political revolution which began 50 years ago and is now reaching its sad and bankrupt end.



The very idea that people should provide for themselves has become a horrible heresy, a barbaric view that no civilised person can hold. We’ll see.



My own guess is that a hurricane of inflation will, over the next ten years, rip the welfare state up by the roots and leave us impoverished, diminished and baffled, wondering what happened to us.



Here’s what we spend.



One wholly justifiable payment is the old-age pension, which is startlingly mean but still takes up almost £80 billion a year, more than a third of the welfare budget.



Disability Living Allowance (3.38 million recipients) costs £13.43 billion.



Housing Benefit (5.04 million recipients) costs £23 billion; its close cousin Council Tax Benefit (5.9 million recipients) costs £4.92 billion.



Incapacity Benefit costs £3.22 billion; Income Support costs £5.3 billion. Jobseeker’s Allowance costs £5.26 billion.



I might add, because I continue to believe that this particular form of welfare very often hurts those to whom it is offered, that there are now 567,000 fatherless households being subsidised by the taxpayer.



Look at these figures and gasp. Where is the cash to come from? Think what else we might do with it.



I am sure a lot of welfare money goes to people who need and deserve it, whose problems are no fault of their own.



But I am just as sure that a lot of it goes to people who do not deserve it.



And on top of that, I know from my letters and emails how many people there are who have worked and saved all their lives, and who are therefore excluded from the most important benefits, when they need them most.



The working poor, who live next door to people whom they know to be cheating, are the most outraged by these abuses, and the most powerless to change them.



The new political elite, who hope to buy votes and power through handing out other people’s money, will not stop doing so until that money runs out.



And so we ramble merrily towards the edge of the abyss, making lemmings look responsible and far-sighted.

Police shouldn't act like a celebrity squad

Personally I hope that the judge is not too hard on Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn, who seems to have rung up the papers in a moment of madness, and now faces prison for doing so.

If this is enough to get a police officer locked up, then who shall escape?



Pathetic thrill: Police officers were excited about meeting actress Sienna Miller

DCI Casburn was quite rightly appalled by the ridiculous celebrity-worship of the modern police. She saw how her colleagues were pathetically excited about meeting the actress Sienna Miller, to discuss her problems with phone hacking.



These cases are so much more interesting and urgent than a burgled pensioner, or a persecuted and lonely family such as the late Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Francecca, whose miseries were ignored by police until Mrs Pilkington killed herself and her daughter in a blazing car.

Pick on REAL collaborators, not Enoch

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Enoch was wrong. Mr Powell was nearly a great man, but demeaned himself with his rash and foolish catch-penny speech about ‘piccaninnies’ and rivers foaming with blood.



It is a special pity because of his many more important actions, including his brave denunciation of mistreatment of prisoners in colonial Kenya, his academic brilliance and his strong principles.



Whatever he was, Enoch Powell could not have been a collaborator with Hitler, nor could he have been part of a government that rounded up Jews and sent them to certain death in National Socialist concentration camps.



He actively hated Neville Chamberlain’s policy of making concessions to Hitler, and joined up to fight in 1939 as soon as he could.



But modern Leftists, who like to insinuate that all conservatives are Nazis at root, can’t understand that. I think this must be why the author C. J. Sansom thought he could get away with portraying Powell as a Nazi collaborator in his new thriller Dominion.



It’s all very well making up historical episodes that never happened but might have done. But if you bend the truth too far, you betray your craft.



Actually, many prominent Left-wing people in British public life did collaborate with Stalin’s communist tyranny. If I ever take to writing thrillers,



I could have a lot of fun – and stay within the bounds of truth – by taking their actions to their logical conclusion.



In the meantime, I suggest that Mr Sansom says sorry to Mr Powell’s family for this babyish, historically illiterate slur, before the book goes into paperback.

May I volunteer to teach BBC staff our lovely, customary English measures, which they seem so keen to abandon but which are now to be brought back into schools?



The poor things are floundering with the foreign metric system, recently claiming that some cliffs in the Falklands (actually 600 feet high) towered to a height of ‘2,000 metres’.



This is because metric measurements are inhuman, and hard to memorise or imagine.

I am besieged by unhappy citizens distressed by the BBC’s decision to move a favourite programme, Sunday Half Hour, from its evening slot on Radio 2 to a pre-dawn timing.

