When is a scrounger not a scrounger? Answer: when his state benefits are helping to keep him in a nice house with a ?400,000 mortgage. I have been trying to square the government’s tough new proposals on welfare reform, which will involve slashing housing benefit and forcing single mothers of one- year-old children out to work, with its announcement last week of a mortgage rescue plan to allow homebuyers to take a two-year holiday on their mortgage repayments if they suffer a loss of income.
But I am afraid I am not doing very well. Whichever way I look at it, it appears to me that a different standard is being applied to the middle classes than it is to the poor. Worse, I have a horrible feeling that this might be caused by a desire to seek middle-class votes.
It isn’t, after all, just the government that is minded to look more favourably on handouts for the middle classes than it is on those for the working class. Yesterday David Cameron declared that he will put an end to the ?something for nothing culture? – a phenomenon which he linked with Karen Matthews and council house-dwellers like her. Yet last week the Tories didn’t have a bad word to say about the government’s proposal to offer homebuyers something for nothing. Far from it, their main concern was that the mortgage rescue plan would not prove generous enough.
