The John Blunt column

WHETHER it means taking money off single mums, disabled people, parents or nanny-employing millionairess executives drawing a scandalous £20,000-a-week in maternity allowance, I'm all for Tony Blair's benefits cuts for anyone who is not on the breadline.

After all, welfare is meant for the real poor, not the well-heeled.

Press on with it, Tony.

And let the carping Tories, who let the social security bill balloon to £100billion a year, take note that Maggie Thatcher gives her full backing to this long-overdue benefits blitz.

But I wonder how many older voters have spotted the immense irony in New Labour's latest target in the welfare shake-up - the plan to cut their state pensions.

And, horrors, it conjures up the era of the 1930s when flint-hearted inspectors entered the homes of the poor and ticked off their possessions and docked their dole according to what their furniture, pots and pans and clothes were assumed to be worth.

Yes, the dreaded Means Test - dressed up now as an "Affluence Test" - may yet be applied to the state pension despite recipients having contributed to it all their lives with their National Insurance "stamps."

I have nothing against it. Not when there are millions of far-from-poor retired folk drawing as an incomes top-up weekly state pensions way in excess of anything they contributed - so that, just like the prosperous middle class child benefit drawers and rich mums on maternity benefit, they are, in effect, getting social security they do not need and, moreover, at the expense of taxpayers and the genuinely poor. That's neither fair, nor affordable much longer.

WITH a profit of £3billion last year, BT hardly needs advice on how to make money. Nor how to make their customers pay through the nose - as with the 40 per cent rise they have announced in the cost of calling directory inquiries.

A whopping 35p a time, it will cost you. And 80p if it's an overseas number you're after. I can't think of any other operation that charges customers for advice on how to spend money with them.

But wasn't privatisation of our telephone system supposed to bring an end to monopoly? Yet, here's BT hanging on to one in the form of the directory inquiries service and milking it for all its worth - and when phone users are already paying hefty rentals for the numbers. It's high time the government blew away this money-grabbing monopoly if BT won't stop abusing the principles of free enterprise. Ring your MP to complain. And have the number free on me - 0171 219 3000.

Euro food censor fools

CRACKED, isn't it - that in the name of the EU's obsession with conformity and dearer food that the government actually has snoops going round checking up on the shape of eggs and threatening huge fines to people selling misshapen ones?

Yet, that's what Burnley market stallholders David and Julie Barrett found out when food inspectors warned them to stop selling the odd-shaped eggs which they shift by the hundred each week and which are popular with pensioners because they are cheaper.

Carry on, they were notified, and they could be fined £2,000.

But what's up with the irregular eggs, apart from their shape? Nothing, it seems.

For the officials told Mr and Mrs Barrett they could either give them away or eat them themselves. But selling them was a breach of EU regulations. Well, what with Brussels meddlers already interfering over the shape of bananas and cucumbers and where such things as Eccles cakes must be produced, it should come as no surprise that this addled bureaucracy extends its tentacles to eggs in East Lancashire.

But, silliness and wastefulness apart, is this sort of thing what democracy is all about - that we have officious food censors ruling what people can eat and sell? It might sound over-dramatic, but isn't it a breach of human rights to ban people from selling and then eating wholesome eggs, bananas or cucumbers just because of the way they look? Someone should take this issue to the European Court and have the madness unscrambled. We didn't join the EU to be bossed about by feather-brained fools.

Don't meddle with nature

BABY Danni Bowler makes legal history. Aged just 21 months, she has won legal aid to sue a manufacturer of breast implants in a claim that she was poisoned by silicone in her mother's milk.

If she succeeds, it will, we are told, pave the way for thousands of actions from women and their breast-fed children who also say they have suffered illness as a result of silicone implants - and for a pile of even more legal aid money to pour from the taxpayers' pockets into the lawyers'.

In Danni's case, the suit follows her mother having an implant in 1993 because her left breast never developed properly.

But I wonder how many of the thousands of artificially-enhanced would-be litigants watching her daughter's case were similarly unfortunate and how many deserve full damages for either themselves or their children having been fed a poison - when, in the first place, what many were at was feeding their own stupid vanity.

And it remains a mystery to me, when numerous other countries have banned this cosmetic implant folly on health grounds, that our government still allows it and the opportunity for thousands of women with more self-regard than sense to come demanding money from the public purse to help them run to the courts when things go wrong - as they will when Nature is foolishly meddled with.

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.