In the right ?
Sir : I am grateful to Colin Bell (26 February) for his reference to my incorruptibility, advise him to learn to spell my name correctly if he wants to make anagrams on it, thank him for his estimate of my intelligence and character although to the best of my knowledge we have never met, smile a bit wryly at the snide pleasure it appears to give him that my novel should have been returned unread by a publisher on political grounds, but disagree with him totally on his views about my campaign to bring back common sense and fairness to our social security system.
So far my social security campaign has gone very well indeed. Since the campaign began last summer, the Government has been forced to institute a wide-ranging review which will appear next September, to promote for the first time ever to the Cabinet a minister, Mr Orme, dealing solely with social security matters, to set up no less than forty new special project studies into abuse, announce intentions to increase the number of fraud investigators, issue various new directives to local DHSS offices on dealing with abuse etc. At the same time, I have succeeded in extracting admissions that social security can pay, amongst a myriad of items, for car repairs, tyres, motor tax, mortgage interest, costs of furniture storage, rent, rates, taxi-rides, HP debts on cocktail cabinets, telephones, fines imposed by the courts, hotel rooms, washing machines, even an alarm clock for a man who claimed the reason he could not get a job was because he could not wake up in the morning, bedding for squatters, holidays, prison visits, free travel to the Republic of Ireland etc; that the DHSS agree that money given for 'essential needs' can be spent on colour television or drink ; that the DHSS do not regard it as fraud if a man gets money from social security specifically to pay his rent, but in fact pays no rent ; that a DHSS office from which £600,000 worth of benefit books were stolen in November did not even have a burglar alarm; that anyone can come to this country from anywhere else in the world and immediately be eligible for social security even if they have never done a day's work here or paid a day's taxes here in their life—and a hundred other things that are an insult to hardworking taxpayers and to the genuinely deprived.
Of course, Mr Ennals and Mr Orme are trying to play it all down, applying generous coats of whitewash. Mr Orme's latest attack on me, to which Colin Bell refers, should be studied carefully by all who enjoy a classic mixture of slippery statistics, evasion, halftruths and false suggestions. I do not expect to win overnight the battle to reform the social security system—a noble ideal that has gone rotten—but I shall not give up, and I shall win in the end because I am right, and most people in the country, apart from Mr Orme and some of his advisers, know I am right.
lain Sproat MP (Conservative) for Aberdeen South House of Commons, London SW1
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