Labour's moral squalor | Melanie Phillips

It's hard to argue with this by Melanie Phillips:

'Britain's welfare system, in other words, is inescapably implicated in creating lifestyles of profound amorality and barbarism. It not only subsidises them, but actively creates an attitude of mind which is deeply self-centred, regarding the world as owing the claimant a living, sinking into patterns of indolence, hedonism and squalor, and treating those who should be recipients of love and duty instead as objects to be used for self-gratification and as whipping-boys when they dare make any demands of their own. Worse still, it then perpetuates itself down through the generations in inherited cycles of dysfunctionality, creating a class apart which is simply separated from civilised society.

Those who claim that such an analysis demonises the poor are themselves wholly complicit in condoning and incentivising the neglect and victimisation of children, the abandonment and abuse of women and the spreading of violence and hideous selfishness in ever widening circles of demoralisation and dysfunctionality.

There are many truly poor and disadvantaged people who, through no fault of their own, really cannot escape their straitened circumstances but who nevertheless lead lives of sobriety, orderliness and civilised values. It is hard to exaggerate the fury felt by these people, who are forced to live on welfare benefits, at the way in which people like Philpott not only shamelessly milk the system but are treated as equally deserving as themselves.'

More here http://www.melaniephillips.com/labours-moral-squalor#.UV6yhu4J4dY.twitter