Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Tough choices

Sometimes it is a question of priorities.

Sue Marsh writes on the withdrawal of the Youth Premium that treats severely disabled young people who will never work as if they have full national insurance contributions. It costs £11 million a year. She writes:
In Westminster terms it would barely pay for the DWP's paperclips. It is a drop in the ocean of a welfare budget spanning 10s of billions. It only applied to a few thousand of the most disabled children in society (children just like Ivan Cameron, had he lived into adulthood.) But Lord Freud, failed investment banker and Minister for Welfare Reform, insisted that we could "no longer afford it" We could no longer afford to allow such profoundly disabled children lives of dignity and independence. No more security. No relief for worried families that they would be safe once they were gone. A cross-party consensus of decades, stripped away by ministers who didn't even know what they were doing.
This week, William Hague assures us we can afford £10 million for a ceremonial funeral for Margaret Thatcher.
Oh well. There now follows a party political funeral.

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