Sowing the social wind with cruel treatment of the poor

councils like Barnsley MBC abandoned socialism when Labour’s Local Government Act 2000 gave a mainly unemployed elite delusions of professional grandeur. Perhaps an update of your survey of last year’s first-time imposition of up to 30 per cent of council tax on benefit claimants will reveal how many other Labour councils have abandoned Christian charity and electoral nous.

Only three Yorkshire councils imposed no council tax on benefit claimants in 2014-15. Most of the rest, including Barnsley, levied 15 per cent. My house-owner son has had to pay £2.50 per week, reducing his Jobseekers Allowance to £69.50. Barnsley Labour councillors have resolved that a demand for double the benefit claimant council tax will land in letter boxes a month before the elections. My son’s weekly income will be reduced to £67 before his Mineworkers Pension is deducted.

We have one of the highest ratios of benefit claimants in the land. It is unlikely that any extended family is unaffected. During the Great Depression into which I was born, there were three responses to such thoughtless cruelty: revolutionary politics, suicide (lethal drug abuse and alcoholism have added to 
today’s mix) and crime. Revolutionary politics are dead; the hopeless aren’t killing themselves fast enough. We’re sowing the social wind and reaping the social whirlwind.

Robert Reynolds, West Bank, Batley.

A friend of mine has said he has been cut off from receiving unemployment benefits – “sanctioned” is the term – because he failed to sign on at the appropriate time. Sadly for him, the fact that he mentioned he would be at a job interview and so couldn’t sign on, doesn’t seem to be relevant.

Then you get yet another banking scandal and yet another banker apologising. Most people wonder why this bad behaviour isn’t sanctioned, such as with a jail term. But it never happens.

Then you hear of Tory Chancellor George Osborne using taxpayers’ money to make a legal challenge against the EU. What was the EU doing that Boy George didn’t like? Oh, just a minor matter, like regulating the huge banker bonuses.

Then you realise that half the funding of the Tory Party comes from the banking sector.

The question is...when will you realise this is unacceptable and you’re going to do something about it?