Melanie Phillips is not my favourite columnist - no - she has to share that honour with Peter Hitchens!In her article of the 26th April, "How welfarism is destroying Britain" she comments
"....welfarism detached behaviour from its consequences. It held that material needs MUST be met, regardless of behaviour. It did this to avoid making the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor that was associated with [so-called] Victorian callousness towards the poverty-stricken."
This is one more social truth which the PC brigade will not allow us to tell; nor even to discuss rationally.
Yet ironically perhaps, success in combating welfarism began in the USA where Clinton's programme of restricting welfare to a limited time period - predicted to cause social catastrophe by the bleeding-heart left - actually succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
Welfarism causes: moral decay, social atrophying, loss of incentives to work, incentives to 'work the system', crime, apathy, irresponsibility, fecklessness, illegitimacy and fuels the rise of the underclass. [In my definition, 'underclass' has more to do with social attitudes than actual lack of the necessities of life.]
As we encourage the able-bodied to rest on benefits, as a consequence we then must import cheap labour.
Our whole social base is simply unsustainable. Well done Melanie for daring to highlight this. Well done to Frank Field the eminently sensible Labour MP and the gifted, American social scientist, Charles Murray who addressed a Civitas meeting on this topic on the 26th of April.
I suspect that just like the EU, this is a topic which the main parties will continue to flee from until it is too late and society implodes.
LINK: http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/live/articles/columnists/columnists.html?in_article_id=450789&in_page_id=1772&in_author_id=256
