Benefit draw so unfair

WITH Mr and Mrs Tony Blair earning, at a conservative estimate, at least a quarter of a million pounds a year between them, the admission that they top it up by another £1,562 by drawing child benefit for their three children highlights how ludicrous this allowance is.

And more so if one considers that this very well-heeled couple are no doubt being subsidised by taxpayers earning far less.

But it is not just the fact that they do not need it that rankles, it is that neither do most others who are drawing at least £11.45 a week from this state hand-out.

Child benefit paid to seven million families containing 13 million children is costing £6billion a year; money that could be spent far less wastefully - on cutting hospital waiting lists, for example.

For no-one can tell me that all seven million of these families are so poor that they could not survive without this allowance. The fact is that, in most cases, it is frittered on luxuries like foreign holidays - to the extent that many who are entitled to it "save up" the benefit for months on end in order to pay for such things.

You've seen them yourself down at the Post Office, giving the clerk repetitive strain injury with the hand-stamp and collecting a pile of £20 notes.

The genuine poor are those on or below the poverty line determined by entitlement to Income Support. Child benefit should be stripped from everybody else.

And it is no good the government talking of taxing the benefit paid to top-rate income tax payers. That would still mean a lot of public money being paid to people who do not need it.

Mr Blair should have the guts to means-test child benefit so that it aids the actual poor, not hotel keepers in Turkey or Florida.

Teachers need a lesson in reality

I'LL say this for the bolshie teachers - they don't give up.

All the same, they could do with lessons in reality. For what are their latest rebellious antics other than a failure to realise that, just like any other workers, they are open to assessment by their paymasters?

Only last month, we had a remarkable refusal by teachers at a comprehensive in Poole in Dorset to accept being individually graded by schools inspectors.

Their school is notable, incidentally, as one whose GCSE results are well below the national average.

But forty of them made a bonfire out for their Ofsted assessments.

Next came the headmasters who, at their annual conference, rejected government targets for raising the performance of 11 year-olds in English and maths.

The government goals, they said, were "unrealistic."

They want to set their own targets instead.

And they threatened legal action against education authorities which tried to impose a target against a head's will.

But are they not the same as the report-burning Poole teachers, who tried to collectively hide their shortcomings by preventing comparisons being made.

Now the head teachers are resisting the sort of accountability that workers in the real world are quite rightly subjected to by their employers? Teachers are, for all their whingeing, well-paid by the public which, as their bosses, have a right to know whether they are performing well and have systems to determine just that.

And it is not as if teachers at a school whose GCSE results are way below par, or the heads in our primary schools where four out of ten 11-year-olds leave still unable to read properly, have grounds for trying to dodge this.

The fact is that one of the reasons why the government, with its education, education, education election ticket, was given such a strong mandate to set targets and grade teachers was because the voters are fed up with the insulting assumption by teachers that they must do things by their standards - when, like all socialist-inspired levelling values, they deliver mediocrity and worse.

Let's put a brake on this silly scheme

AT LAST, a government minister admits what I've been saying all along - that all this bossy, green car-bashing is badly flawed.

For launching the 'Don't Choke Britain' anti-pollution drive aimed at getting drivers to quit their cars, transport minister Gavin Strang had to concede that public transport just could not cope if they did. Quite. So why persist with the all-out catch-a-bus-instead hounding of motorists and the associated stupid traffic-calming schemes that force them to brake and rev - and, so, pump out more of the pollution that all the fuss is about?

It's been shown scientifically that exhaust emissions are increased where deliberate obstacles like road humps and mini-roundabouts make vehicles slow down and then pick up speed again.

But isn't it a stupid irony that among the worst offenders are those supposedly environment-friendly people carriers called buses that we see spewing black diesel fumes all over the place?

Yet, it gets dafter still - when we find literally dozens of these smoke-inducing speed humps placed along bus routes.

Just look at the overkill this newspaper reported this week in Darwen - where one bus operator was forced to alter his route after being bombarded by angry phone calls from passengers over the rough ride they had because of all the humps that the anti-car council has plonked all over the place.

It was enough to make people sick, the bus owner found when he took a ride. In fact, he was thrown out of his seat on the worst bits - even though the bus was doing the proper speed.

Just when will the government and councils realise the futility of trying to force motorists on to public transport, not only because it is inadequate, but also because the real way to cut congestion and pollution is to divert all the money poured into schemes to slow traffic down into schemes to keep it moving?

Peculiar goings-on in the Church

IT IS a only small crumb of comfort, I know, but the grim disclosures that the Church of England's congregations have fallen below a million for the first time and that 481 of its priests have left since it allowed the ordination of women are offset by news of a peculiar gain.

It is that of a few more women priests than was, perhaps, reckoned for. For we are told that, courtesy of sex-change operations, the church now had two who were previously male vicars and that more may be in the pipeline as there is a secret group of clergy which meets to hold services wearing women's clothes. I do not know what it is about the Church of England nowadays. If it's not randy ministers holding raves or gay vicars celebrating their sexual orientation in Southwark Cathedral, it is another bunch giving a whole new meaning to the notion of men in frocks.

But, like me, I am sure that many of the dwindling flock must despair.

The opinions expressed by John Blunt are not necessarily those of this newspaper.

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