My friend Will Clouston, the leader of the Social Democratic Party, dropped round with his wife for a bite to eat this week and showed me an ancient book he had picked up in a second-hand store in Hexham. It was titled Select Fables, with cuts designed by Thomas and John Bewick, and it dates from 1784. One little fable commended itself to both of us:
The wretch, who works not for his daily bread,
Sighs and complains, but ought not to be fed,
Think, when you see stout beggars on their stand,
The lazy are the locusts of the land.
The question isn’t why are so many people swinging the lead, but why on earth aren’t there more?
The writer was almost certainly Oliver Goldsmith, who died the decade before the book was published – people bought it for the notable engravings, rather than the commentary.
It struck me, reading that little rhyme, that we, as a nation, have shifted our position a little on our approach towards the locusts of the land. Today, we not only feed them, we’re also inclined to bung them a BMW, gratis. This thought certainly occurred when I read the case of the West Sussex skank Catherine Wieland.
Skank undoubtedly, but one with chutzpah. Cath suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, emotionally unstable personality disorder and depression, and as a consequence was approved for enhanced benefit payments as well as the famous motability scheme. How, on a day-to-day basis, did these fictional ailments affect her? She said she was unable to make even short journeys by herself, and if she ventured out had ‘panic attacks’. Left to her own devices, she was so stricken with anxiety that she would just lie around the house all day in her pyjamas.
This desolating diary of her life and struggles was subjected to judicial query when she posted, on Facebook, photos of herself on a three-week holiday in Mexico, hanging from a zipwire. It was also noted that she had visited 60 pubs, clubs and restaurants and had attended the Brighton Pride Rally (which made me like her even more, obvs). Someone local to Cath, who seems to have retained the sensibilities of Oliver Goldsmith, reported her, and she was hauled before a court and clobbered with a 28-week prison sentence – suspended, as ever, for 18 months. She was ordered to pay back the £23,000 she fraudulently obtained from disability benefits, and has so far contributed precisely £120.
So many questions occur. What sort of rigour was employed when Wieland presented herself to the disability assessors? Any at all? What proof of disability did they require? My suspicion is that these indolent and indulgent public sector halfwits merely nodded compassionately as they handed out our money.
Perhaps a certain private sector zeal should be introduced to those who do the assessing. Give them £500 every time they move someone off the sick and £1,000 for referring the case to the CPS under a new ‘Dob-in-a-Fraudulent-Skank Bonus Scheme’. I’m telling you, I bet you’d see results. You will not need reminding that the number of claimants of the disability benefit PIP has almost doubled over the past few years, from 2.1 million in 2019/20 to about four million now.
And then there’s the Motability scheme, from which Cath received a BMW. Why would you bung a new car to someone who cannot even make short journeys by herself, in her own words, and is likely to suffer panic attacks? Whatever, this Motability scheme has seen an enormous rise in take-up of late and now not far short of one million people have been given a car, for nowt, or just a pittance, to ease them through their disabilities, real or fraudulent. The scheme is financed by bonds but the tax relief on the cars costs the taxpayer £1.2 billion every year.
I assume qualification for a Beamer (or a Nissan Qashqui, or a Maserati) is dependent upon that previous rigorous assessment. At the very least, when people like Wieland are given a car they should make sure the vehicle is adorned with stencilled locusts.
Let’s also consider an imaginary neighbour of this woman. A man who slogs away at his job for £28,000 saving every penny to make ends meet for his young family. He looks on askance as the woman next door jets off to Mexico for three weeks. And then, when she gets back, the brand-new BMW arrives on the adjacent driveway. The question then isn’t why are so many people swinging the lead, but why on earth aren’t there more? Why do so many people cleave to the old-fashioned notion of going out to work to earn a living and not sponging off their fellow citizens? Perhaps it is because those sentiments expressed by Oliver Goldsmith are deep-rooted and have force, despite the fact that seemingly with every year that passes more and more shed a belief which is, of course, rooted in the Christian religion.
It’s all there in Paul’s writing, 1,700 years before Select Fables was published, in 2 Thessalonians 3:10: ‘For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”’ OK, that’s just about eating, rather than shooting down a zipwire in Mexico, but the point holds, I think. The vestigial tail of Christian morality still wags a little inside us, even if it does so with less force and among rather few people than it did even ten years ago, in our now almost wholly secular country. And in place of that stern but practical morality we have put what, exactly? A refusal to judge, a refusal to blame and insouciance towards the antisocial, towards the locusts.
As Will Clouston left my house he waved goodbye and issued his usual cry of ‘Prepare for government!’. Do you know, in my darker moments I sometimes doubt that the SDP will win the 2029 general election. But one needs to keep a brave face on.
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