Double Standards

Apparently, we're supposed to castigate alleged benefit cheats, despising them for taking tax-payers' money they aren't entitled to. Especially if they are foreign. I recently had the misfortune to see one of those awful programmes about 'Saints and Scroungers' or some such thing, where they gleefully detailed how some Nigerian fraudster ripped off the benefits system. The level of moralising was appalling, reinforcing the insidious notion of 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor. The worst bit was at the end, when some kind of benefits investigator told us, Dixon of Dock Green style, how evil benefit fraud was, claiming that further investigations had found that the Nigerian guy allegedly owned land occupied by a couple of small farms back in Nigeria. Land which they thought might have been bought with the benefit money he'd claimed. Maybe. But they couldn't prove it. Nonetheless, we should all think on that.

Which is all well and good. But shouldn't we also be getting angry about those private sector firms which take huge wads of taxpayers' money to carry out public sector contracts, but don't deliver? After all, aren't they doing the same thing as benefit cheats: misrepresenting themselves in order to claim monies they aren't entitled to? Moreover, the amounts they are receiving from the government are far greater than anything claimed by benefit cheats. Obviously, our old friends G4S come to mind in this respect. How much were they paid for failing to deliver security for the Olympics? And is the government proposing to prosecute them for fraud or, more appropriately, breach of contract? But they aren't the only ones - just look at the subsidies rail operators receive from the taxpayer, despite not providing the service levels they claimed they would. No wonder Richard Branson was so pissed off at losing the West Coast rail franchise - it was a good little earner while it lasted. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that benefit fraudsters shouldn't be pursued. I just think that the same standards should be applied to big business.