It’s hard to imagine what it is like living on £53 week after week

WHAT is it about this Government and their incredible ability to put their feet in their mouths?

Iain Duncan Smith’s frankly preposterous comments that he could live on £53 a week “if he had to” is insulting to those many thousands who have no choice but to, given that he gets paid £2,587.79 a week, all right £1,581.02 after tax.

It’s easy for the likes of IDS to brag about being able to live on £53 for a week, taking a 97 per cent reduction in his income (Yorkshire Post, April 4). Maybe he actually believes it. Just jiggle a few things around, cancel a few dinner parties, park the Jag in the garage and cycle everywhere, cut out the sirloins and those clarets, watch the TV instead of going out, cancel the newspapers and go to the library to read, and you’ve pretty much done it. But what happens when next week comes along; and the next; and the next; and still £53 is all you have to live on, it gets ever harder.

As George Orwell wrote in The Road To Wigan Pier more than 70 years ago: “A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t.”

I remember another Right-wing Tory, Matthew Parris MP, who took part in a World in Action documentary requiring him to live on £26.80. The experiment came to an embarrassing end when he ran out of money for the electricity meter.

The fact is, if you’ve never had that little to live on, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like.

When I was unemployed in the early 1980s, I found out first-hand that the realities of being poor are hugely different to the fleeting version the well-off put themselves through for charity, or worse, merely to prove a point.

From: Gordon Sanderson, Roughbirchworth Lane, Oxspring, Barnsley.

yet again we have an example of one law for the rich and another for everyone else. Another giant company, this time energy giant SSE, is found to have cheated the public, and no one is held accountable (Yorkshire Post, April 4).

I had one of these lying salesmen trying to con me on my doorstep a couple of years ago. Someone at SSE must have been orchestrating this nationwide scam. Would the politicians like to tell us why no one is in jail for this? Would they care to explain why benefit cheating is called fraud but corporate cheating is not? Don’t tell me the people at the top didn’t know what was going on in their own company.

Why is it that the biggest financial criminals on the planet consistently walk away with a little slap on the wrist and a company fine which is usually a fraction of their profits?

The public should stop doing business with these fraudulent companies. That would send a message the politicians don’t seem to have the will to.

From: Godfrey Bloom, Ukip MEP for Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire.

OUR Government, as I understand it, will not send money to Pakistan because their politicians do not pay tax.

May I suggest we do not send money to the EU on the same basis? The EU civil servants also pay no tax. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.