Wig spender
WILL 2026 be the year the Government finally accepts it is economic suicide to keep hammering those who work and pay taxes in order to make life more cushy for those who don’t?
It’s no wonder one in four people now self-report as disabled when too often it pays more to be a skiver than a striver.
More than 1,000 people a day claim Personal Independence Payments.
But it turns out that it’s not just the handout-happy Government that is responsible for the ballooning and unsustainable disability benefits bill.
If your claim for PIP isn’t waved through by soft-touch authorities then the chances are that judges interpreting eligibility rules will allow it on appeal.
This “parallel assessment system” by tribunals is widening the range of people who qualify for disability payments and costing taxpayers billions, according to the Policy Exchange think-tank.
They say that tightening just one PIP mobility rule and returning claims to pre-pandemic levels would save the country hundreds of millions of pounds.
Good luck getting those changes past Labour backbenchers who are addicted to taking money from those who earn it and giving it to those who don’t.
Or past bleeding-heart judges who don’t have to fret about where the money is coming from.
Gone to pot
NOTHING epitomises the decline of Britain’s infrastructure quite like the proliferation of unrepaired potholes.
And it is costing motorists dearly.
It is bad enough that compensation claims have rocketed by 90 per cent in just three years, reflecting the exploding number of dangerous craters in our crumbling local roads.
But when three out of four claims are rejected — and those that are successful are settled for just two thirds of the typical repair bill — the local councils which fail to fix the roads are adding insult to injury.
It is the drivers with broken wheels and axles who are left to pick up the tab.
The extra funds injected by the Government to tackle the problem can’t come into effect soon enough.
Adieu, Brigitte
WITH her tousled blonde hair, heavy eye-liner and unashamed hunger for passion, French actress Brigitte Bardot was a poster girl for the 1960s sexual revolution.
Her campaigning for animal rights in later life mirrored her advocacy for women’s individualism in her beautiful youth, but some of her political views as she aged were decidedly ugly.
Following her death at 91, most will prefer to remember her as the sex symbol who Charles de Gaulle once regarded as France’s most important export.
