Poor Must Accept Benefit Cuts: Clegg on Collision Course with Own Party by Backing Welfare Axe
MAIL ONLINE: Nick Clegg has waded into the row over welfare reform by warning that benefits should not be there 'to compensate the poor for their predicament'.

On the eve of the Liberal Democrat conference, the Deputy Prime Minister backed the Coalition's programme of welfare cuts and dramatically shifted his party's policy on the subject.

He said the billions spent on welfare should be used as an 'engine of mobility', instead of just leaving people 'stuck on benefits, year in, year out'.

His comments are likely to infuriate his party's left-wingers, who have publicly accused the Coalition of targeting the vulnerable and Mr Clegg of breaking promises to ensure all cuts were 'fair'.

The issue is likely to prove a flashpoint with the LibDem Left when activists gather in Liverpool from Saturday for the first time since joining the Tories in government.

But Mr Clegg made clear he considered welfare reforms to be essential. In a newspaper article, he said: 'A fair society is not one in which money is simply transferred by the central State from one group to another.

'Welfare needs to become an engine of mobility, changing people's lives for the better, rather than a giant cheque written by the State to compensate the poor for their predicament.

'Instead of turning the system from a 'safety net' into a 'trampoline', as Labour promised, people have been stuck on benefits, year in, year out.' Read on and comment >>> Jason Groves | Thursday, September 16, 2010

Iceland's New Poor Line Up for Food
THE TELEGRAPH: "I don't tell my children where I get the food, I'm too ashamed," said Iris Aegisdottir, an Icelander who has been going to a food bank every week for a year to feed her three children.

Protesters outside the Icelandic parliament in Reykjavik demand that the government do more to improve conditions for the recently poor. Photograph: The Telegraph
The crisis that brought down Iceland's economy in late 2008 threw thousands of formerly well-off families into poverty, forcing people like Iris to turn to charity to survive.

Each week, up to 550 families queue up at a small white brick warehouse in Reykjavik to receive free food from the Icelandic Aid to Families organisation, three times more than before the crisis.

Rutur Jonsson, a 65-year-old retired mechanical engineer, and his fellow volunteers spend their days distributing milk, bread, eggs and canned food donated by businesses and individuals or bought in bulk at the supermarket.

"I have time to spend on others and that's the best thing I think I can do," he said as he pre-packed grocery bags full of produce.

In a small, close-knit country of just 317,000 people, where everyone knows everyone, the stigma of accepting a hand-out is hard to live down and of the dozens of people waiting outside the food bank in the snow on a dreary March afternoon, Iris is the only one willing to talk.

"It was very difficult for me to come here in the beginning. But now I try not to care so much anymore," said the weary-looking 41 year-old, who lost her job in a pharmacy last summer, as she wrung her hands nervously.

The contrast is brutal with the ostentatious wealth that was on display across the island just two years ago, as a hyperactive banking sector flooded the small, formerly fishing-based economy with fast cash.

Back then, the biggest worry for many Icelanders was who had the nicest SUV, or the most opulent flat.

But today visible signs of poverty are quickly multiplying in the Nordic island nation, despite its generous welfare state, as the middle class is increasingly hit by unemployment, which is up from one to nine per cent in about a year, and a large number of defaults on mortgages. >>> Marc Preel, in Reykjavik for AFP | Thursday, April 08, 2010

Read more on Iceland >>>

A Nation Divided by Riches: The Result of Thirty Years of Screwing the Poor – A Policy with Dire Long-Term Consequences
THE TELEGRAPH: The wealth gap is at its widest for more than 40 years, creating ghettoes of the richest and the poorest that have virtually nothing to do with each other, a report finds today.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation also found that in parts of the South-East the "average" family is an endangered species. The result has been an increase in "urban clustering" of poor people in cities with wealthy households concentrated on the outskirts. Income divide at widest for 40 years (more) By Christopher Hope

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH (19/02/2007):
Blair's wealth gap: voters want City bonus curb By Patrick Hennessy and Melissa Kite

The Jodeph Rowntree Foundation

TELEGRAPH SPEAKERS’ CORNER:
What can be done to heal Britain's economic divide?

I am all for people being able to become rich, but it seems to me that this country has encouraged unadulterated greed. There is no concern for the people who simply cannot get bonuses on the level of the City's so-called "high fliers". For most people, they just have to struggle along whilst a relatively small number at the top of the pile, simply because they have had the chance to enter the City or kick a football, get all the benefits. They cream it all off. This is not fair. And a country which encourages such unfairness will, in the long-run, live to regret it. Civil unrest will surely ensue.

They used to say that (absolute) poverty was the breeding ground for communism. I would go as far as to say that (relative) poverty could well become the breeding ground of communism, too. That beast - communism - is just lurking in the shadows. We need to be vigilant.

By creating a dependency culture, and at the same time allowing obscene pay rises, mega-golden handshakes (for jobs usually not well done), and even more obscene City bonuses, this government, and several governments before it, is setting the scene for an ugly future for us all.

Nobody is worth some of the ridiculous pay awards that some of these people are 'earning.' It is a total disincentive to work and effort for the vast majority, since they might as well give up, knowing darned well that they will never achieve such dizzy heights.

The world has been here before, albeit in smaller magnitude. We need to take heed. No society can be healthy when this group feels insulated and superior to that group. This is a recipe for division, bitterness, and strife, and takes the concept of capitalism to the Nth degree. – ©MA

Mark Alexander