There are many who believe that it is the duty of the state to look after the needs of its less fortunate citizens. A belief that the strong should protect the weak and that the wealthy should use their wealth to help the poor. These are not just the views of socialists but views that many of us feel should be at the very core of any civilised state. They are views, surely, that anyone with a conscience and a clear set of moral values would find hard to contradict.

Even at the height of Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was a huge gap between the means of the wealthy and the poor in this country and it wasn’t until 1909 that Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, began to redress the balance with his radical and bold People’s Budget. By the late 1940s the Welfare State was well and truly established with the setting up of the National Health Service and other welfare organisations by Clement Attlee’s Labour government. All these advances were surely for the better, establishing, as they did, the rights of everybody to free education, free healthcare, benefits for the unemployed and allowances for those who were sick or disabled.

However, as so often happens in this country, the pendulum has swung too far. Now, nationally, we have whole families who have no incentive whatever to work because they would earn less than they would receive in State handouts. This isn’t even a recent phenomenon since some families can boast (if that’s the right word) several generations who have never worked. Add to this the fact that this country regularly allows people from all over the world, with no ties or links to the UK, to enter the country and claim the full range of benefits including housing and unemployment and it becomes clear why the system is collapsing and on the verge of bankruptcy.

This week the government, very sensibly, announced that it intended to cap the maximum benefits payable. A figure of £26,000 was announced which to many seemed incredibly generous, equating as it does to a full time  worker grossing £35,000 or so per year. Even then, incredibly, certain politicians declared their opposition stating that it was unfair. Unfair? How on earth can that be unfair? Turn the question on its head and ask is it fair that working citizens should earn less than those who, whether through choice or otherwise, do not work?

We are in the middle of a terrible worldwide recession and unless and until we get to grips with these problems we will continue to slide even further down the slope to economic oblivion.