The welfare rackets
Sir: I think the SPECTATOR has some responsibility for checking the simple facts before publishing letters. I refer to the letter of Anthony Gaddum (20 September). Unemployment benefit cannot be obtained for five years, only for eighteen months. And why pick on bank managers? In common with other people who retire at sixty they can justify accepting insurance money because they have well and truly paid for it in the past.
Geo. E. Assinder Windywalls, Little Hallingbury, Nr. Bishops Stortford, Herts
Sir: It is a pity you have let the inaccurately titled article 'The truth about the welfare rackets' (6 September) appear in the News of the World just when this paper is widely advertising its heartless rehashing of the Profumo affair in a series of articles written by a Miss Christine Keeler.
One might have hoped that you would at least have avoided adding to the public pre- judice based on unsound judgment which articles in the News of the World often generate, by confining the comments made
by Robert Odams to your own readership.
You have already printed letters of protest about the undeserved slur cast on Britain's welfare beneficiaries when, in point of fact, the number abusing the services provided is very small indeed, and they are rightly being weeded out in each district under existing regulations.
Perhaps, in fairness, you will now consider employing an anonymous snooper in the Inland Revenue Department to tell us about the efforts of tax dodging and other financial wangles tried on by people at the other end of the social scale, and how many, it is thought, get away with it? It should not be too hard either, to dig out evidence via a City spy about those who, since 1964, have been selling Britain short abroad, and what their unpatriotic behaviour may have cost the country. The combined activities I name have doubtless already involved infinitely greater sums than those bound up with the irregular behaviour of those few people who misuse the social services.
No one can condone bad anti-social conduct by any section of the community. To exaggerate and stress it in one part of society, however, while ignoring it in another is unfair. Perhaps, in your case, having regard to the headline above your editorial, this has the objective of creating hostility to the Government as well as enabling you to have yet another unfair dig at the Prime Minister. If this is so it is unworthy of you and it will surely fail in its purpose.
T. C. Skeffington-Lodge 5 Powis Grove, Brighton
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