FORGET whether mobile phones addle your brains, there's a bigger health hazard plaguing Britain - the millions of people going down like flies with so-called disability and needing injections of £67 a week of taxpayers' money in order to survive or, otherwise, find their own beer money.

This rebellion by nearly 100 Labour MPs against the government's proposals to cut back incapacity benefit - via, horrors of horrors, a means test - so that it goes to those who really need it is a disgrace. And they know it.

For what pestilence has descended on this country so that, in the past 20 years, the number of poorly people unable to work and on benefit has tripled to nearly three million and the state's bill for giros for the sick and disabled has gone up by four times to £25 billion?

I'll tell you - none. But it is really sick that skivers and scroungers are piling aboard the benefit gravy train - when 40 per cent of them are on early retirement with their handsome company pensions topped up by people still doing a day's work and when the same proportion are in the country's top income bracket.

Just like the scandal of ever-increasing child benefit - one of Labour's current vote-for-us boasts - being paid to the well-off, so, too, is the rocket in incapacity benefit claims an outrage. The fact is that the Tories used this benefit as a dodge to keep the dole figures down. Now, there are more "on the sick" than on the dole - and while many have genuine disabilities, lots are far from incapable of working - particularly the "stress" cases who, assisted by complacent or soft doctors, have made malingering a source of income.

No-one can tell me that those Labour MPs who voted against the government's reforms are convinced that the explosion in incapacity benefit claimants is down to natural forces. No, they are wimps afraid to grasp the welfare reform nettle in case they are branded as heartless.

Well, despite the setback last week in the Commons, the government says it will stick to its guns. So they should, but, you watch, this will get watered down just like the docking of benefits to the army of single parents did.

But, though there is nothing wrong with the notion of a means test so that this benefit goes to those who really need the money, what is wrong with the government also introducing stringent health checks so that it goes to those who not only need this help but qualify for it on the grounds of genuine incapacity?

For while it might just about be tolerable for people who are not really unwell to get incapacity benefit - because they need the money - how will these people ever get "well'' if it means they have to come off this benefit, unless medical tests are made more strict.

That so many Labour MPs are prepared to condone such widespread skiving and happy to top up the company pensions of the well-off early retirement army is what I call heartless.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.