Friday 13 August 2010

The Sun hates YOU

TODAY The Sun is declaring war on feckless benefits claimants to slash the £5BILLION wasted in Britain's shambolic handouts culture.

That's the intro to this article in The Sun today.

They go on:

Hundreds of thousands of scroungers in the UK are robbing hard-working Sun readers of their cash.

They cannot be bothered to find a job or they claim to be sick when they are perfectly capable of work because they prefer to sit at home watching widescreen TVs - paid for by YOU.

Despite the fact that the government has a hotline for reporting benefit fraud, The Sun have felt the need to set up their own. If you're thinking of shopping someone you suspect is a benefit cheat it's worth noting that the government number is an 0800 one so the call is free. The Sun's number is an 020 7 one so if you live in London you'll get charged the local call rate, if you live elsewhere in the UK you'll be charged a national call rate. I figure if you're in the business of reporting people for benefit fraud because you think their TV is too big you're probably keen to know what the call costs.

The Sun point out that their campaign has some high-profile support:

Our campaign aims to crack down on fraud and has the backing of Prime Minister David Cameron, who explains below how he is committed to tackling our out-of-control welfare state.

I'm off to nail my curtains to the wall so I don't get seen typing this and reported to The Sun for being a scrounger who's wasting hardworking Sun readers' money on owning a crappy old computer.

Hat tip to @CrippledWriter for tweeting the link to the story.

2 comments:

  1. Lisa, I left the following comment on the Sun site over an hour ago. I’ve no idea how long they take to mod messages; though, I’m thinking that the tone and tenor of my comments won’t sit pretty with Adolf Murdoch’s demonising agenda.

    “I’m both curious and a little perplexed. Benefit fraud is running at around £1.1 per year (some of which is actually not fraud but error on the part of benefit’s agencies in areas such as Tax Credits) less than 1% of benefit paid out. Tax fraud accounts for anything from £40 billion to £100 billion+ (difficult to estimate because the fraudsters pay very clever people to hide the money); yet, this government targets those that steal the least.

    This isn’t value for money. As a tax payer I’m incensed that the government spends scores of millions chasing peanuts; when, for the same money it could be bagging the big boys. A benefits inspector costs the tax payer money as their salaries are twice what they claw back; a tax inspector working in fraud can expect to claw back three times what she or he earns.

    Do the sums. It isn’t too difficult, is it?”

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  2. Did you see the bit where they want to target people who do gardening or buy gardening supplies?

    I think in all the years I've been crippled, all the doctors, specialists, social workers, occupational therapists, and assorted other healthcare or social care professionals I've seen... the only one who HASN'T told me to try doing some gardening was my dentist.

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