Time that those of us who work hard and live within our means are rewarded rather than robbed - Sarah Todd

My great grandfathers and their sons spent their time digging ditches, laying hedges, picking potatoes by hand, working all hours to build up farms. Buying and selling cattle or horses, whatever they could to get some extra money in to improve their land and livestock. Grandmothers selling eggs at the roadside. Working all hours.

Farmers don’t have the monopoly on this. Britain has at its heart so many good, honest people who have worked hard and improved the quality of lives for their families. Homes bought early on in marriages can now be worth a lot of money. Good for them. They worked hard and invested wisely. Why should any profit be taken off them to pay into a system that never seems to be supporting them?

For so many families life has always been paid out. When nursing care has been needed, savings have been used. Hard-working people sit in armchairs at the end of their lives coughing up their savings, while those that have not worked or bothered to put any money aside are sat in the very same armchairs opposite getting it all paid for.

As a family we have a year left of paying out for university. This columnist’s 18-year-old car is forever getting driven into conversations, but somehow those with new cars and holidays - we haven’t been abroad for over five years while we’ve had children in university - seem to often get full maintenance grants.

Is it because other people pay for things on credit? Our kitchen is over 30 years old, but where is our reward for being industrious and not spending money like 1960s football pools winner Vivian ‘Viv’ Nicholson who famously told the ‘papers she would “spend, spend, spend”?

We haven’t been to a concert in years and The Husband still wears some suits and shoes he had before we were married 27 years ago. If we ever go to Scarborough, he treats himself to some new glasses from the pound shop on the seafront.

It’s long overdue that the thousands of people like us, who work hard and live within our means, start being rewarded rather than robbed.

Future generations will be sitting in care homes not paying in a penny because they spent it all when they were younger on trout-pout lips, drugs, tattoos, and teeth from Turkey. It’s easy to imagine the old folks’ homes of the future having translators for the illegal immigrants and other experts to advise on residents’ gender preferences and so-on. Wonder who will be paying for them?

Meanwhile, the rest of us will more than likely have to sell our homes and be left with none of our hard-earned assets to pass on to our families.

There is a gravy-train running through our country and it’s worrying to wonder how the brakes are ever going to be applied. One thing is for sure, hard-working everyday people shouldn’t be paying for it. Fair enough the mega-rich and those businesses, such as power companies, making disgustingly huge profits. Not those who own a decent-sized house or work 365 days a year running the sort of traditional business or family farm that Yorkshire is made up of.

The news is of little interest at the moment. Even before the huge intrusion of privacy into the death of the former One Direction singer Liam Payne boundaries had begun blurring and settling down with a good book had replaced tuning in to the nightly news. As an aside, for our mainstream television stations to broadcast pictures of his room and recordings of telephone calls to the emergency services is beyond contempt.

An old copy of Dame Jilly Cooper’s classic tale of the showjumping circuit Riders has been the recent tome of choice. What joy to read of the rogue Rupert Campbell-Black sending hearts-a-flutter in the fictional county of Rutshire. Good old-fashioned fun before the world was turned topsy-turvy by political correctness.

Before Ms Reeves can get her hands on this correspondent’s hard-earned cash, she is going to spend some subscribing to the digital channel that is screening a new version of Dame Jilly’s follow-up novel Rivals. Maybe Viv Nicholson was right all along…?