MPs and Expenses

I sat bolt upright in bed the other morning when I heard on Radio 4 that the new intake of Westminster MPs were complaining they were being "treated like benefit claimants " under the new expenses regime.

This complaint is wrong on so many counts. The first thing this implies is that it is fine to treat the poorest in our society, ie benefit claimants, like benefit claimants.

Perhaps I'm being naive, but I'd assumed that the unemployed, the elderly, the sick and the disabled are entitled to the benefits that they claim. I tend to be of the opinion that how a society looks after its poor and its disadvantaged is some kind of barometer of how civilized it is. Surely it's a measure of its national attitude, of how much it cares about its own.

So why then is it deemed fine to treat people who are in need of support from the state so poorly? To understand this I suppose we have to fall back on the vernacular of Radio 5 or the tabloids.

I'm certain we've all read those stories of Mr So-and-So, the scrounging benefit cheat. The man who runs his son's football team two or three times a week whilst claiming untold thousands from the state. He is able to claim this money due to his crippling arthritis which patently renders him unable to work. Now I'm not for a moment suggesting these people don't exist, but I feel they are very few and far between.

They run these adverts on the telly to phone this number and grass up your neighbour as a benefit cheat. I've yet to see an ad where you can ring up the taxman and tell him you suspect your neighbour of fiddling his tax returns.

Don't get me wrong, fiddling the social is wrong. It's shabby, cheap behaviour and the state should do what it reasonably can to prevent it. But that shouldn't give the state carte blanche to treat ALL benefit claimants as badly as it does. We do hatred so well in this country and benefit scroungers are up there in our national consciousness with illegal immigrants (if you listen to Radio 5, that is).

We should be glad of our Welfare State and we should have a drastically different attitude to paying taxes. I want to live in a society that looks after its citizens. Does my attitude sound too simplistic?

Another thing I learnt this week, courtesy of Miranda Sawyer in the Mirror, is that 18 out of 23 members of the cabinet are millionaires (23 people doesn't strike me as many people to be responsible for running the country but there you go). I just hope that none of those millionaires were whingeing about being treated like benefit claimants!

Rather than MPs complaining about expenses, somebody should be complaining about the abysmal way benefit claimants are treated.