Opinion:Duncan Smith’s fury as Church’s advert campaign says benefit cuts are forcing poor to food banks ex Mail Online-John Gelmini

A proportion of the people now eating at food banks have received benefits and spent the money on something else.

Dr Alf’s idea of intelligently cutting benefits sounds sensible but sadly will not save money as benefit recipients faced with less will commit crime as is already happening, but because the police and the Home Office are gerrymandering the crime figures people are not fully aware of what is happening.

The extra crime means trials, courts, prisons and more money going to people like G4S and Serco, who will exploit the situation commercially at taxpayers expense.

I know from having dealt with some Housing Benefit tenants in my earlier incarnation that many of these people are poor at budgeting.

However, delays in receipt of benefits is by far the biggest reason for food-bank usage. Some of those delays are deliberate; whilst others represent increased workload spread across fewer staff and fewer benefit offices.

The so-called recovery is really a mirage with 47 people chasing every job and most jobs part-time and low paid.

Many “jobs” have arisen because someone has been made redundant and has registered a business at Companies House.They may not have traded, they may not have made a penny but the Coalition counts the company as a “new enterprise” and each director appointed as a new job.

Numbers like that mean that no matter how well some benefit recipients prepare for interview a significant number will not get jobs and will require benefits, possibly for years.

The economy is simply not producing enough jobs for the indigenous population to do, and what jobs it does create foreigners are better placed and more job ready in most cases than our own people which is why 88% of all new jobs go to immigrants.

The issue then is what to do about our own people who lack skills, motivation, personal discipline and a work ethic who cannot be “bovvered” to get up in the morning or create their own employment or migrate to find work.

There are several choices:

1) The Coalition seems to favor restricting benefits, workfare and scourging them to work by restricting benefits and forcing them to use food-banks.

Doubtless it would like to bring back the “Parochial Beadle” and the Workhouse as well

2) Create a war somewhere, conscript them into the military and ensure that they were killed in large numbers as used to happen in the past with Press Gangs when we were building the Empire

3) Start systems building to address the housing shortage of 11 million houses and assign the able bodied to construction companies using benefits recycling and faster writing down allowances based on Dr Alf’s formula

4) Write to all of them as the Irish Government just has and tell them to leave the country

5) Try a lot harder to create exports by quadrupling the size of the export salesforce, improving writing down allowances,issuing infrastructure bonds to Sovereign Wealth Funds who can the finance the roads, airports, schools and hospitals we cannot afford.

6) Move the long term unemployed en-mass out of the areas where they now live into areas where there is work, stop all further immigration except for scientists and those with special skills and house them in systems built housing and converted shipping containers on industrial estates.

Then using computer matching and benefit recycling assign these people to the available jobs and train the balance to work for themselves or emigrate to where there is work.

Personally I like 3, 5 and 6 but I think we are on track for 1 and 2 because there is clearly no desire to address the causes of worklessness and prevent a 3rd generation of young people being written off.

John Gelmini