The truth about tories and benefits

As a Conservative I'm often accused of being anti-benefits. This is one of the few things that really irks me about the public perception of the Conservative Party, because frankly it isn't that we're against benefits it's that we're against the abuse of benefits. Now a lot of this stems from the recent tax credits issues but it's important to remember a lot of Conservatives were against those changes too because we believe that people choosing to work should rightly be supported.

I'm also sure that none of us are opposed to disability benefits for those that need extra support. In fact I'm proud of the fact that Ian Duncan Smith introduced Personal Independence Payments because unlike Disabled Living Allowance which focused on the disability, PIP focuses on the impact that disability has on your life. Yes some people have lost out under this new scheme but to quote a good friend of mine Jeff Townsend, sometimes there are winners and sometimes there are losers. I wasn't able to receive help under the rules for DLA - my condition wasn't severe enough - but under PIP they took the impact of my condition into account so I get a little bit of help.

The same goes for unemployment benefits. IDS has launched a huge shakeup of the system, he plans to replace a multitude of current benefits with one single benefit called Universal Credit. This new system will be easier to administer and require much less paper work while ensuring people get the support they need after just a single application form as opposed to the multiple forms they need to fill out now. Again I see no reason why Conservatives are supposed to oppose having a system of unemployment benefits - after all everybody needs a little help sometimes - no, what we oppose is the situation where we have a generation of people who have never worked and view unemployment benefits as a life style or something to be proud of. ONS estimates on behalf of the organisation fullfact put the number of able people who have never worked at roughly 1,000,000 people. This is not acceptable and I genuinely don't understand why people believe it is.

Now some people might say that I sound like Norman Tebbit with his (in)famous get on your bike slogan. Frankly I don't see this as an insult though. I see it as a fundamentally true statement that if you can;t find work the odds are you simply aren't looking hard enough.

Over the course of the last 5 years 1,000 new jobs have been created everyday. In fact unemployment is now at a 7-year low of 5.4%. According to some sources this is as near to full employment as our country can be but I disagree. In 2014 the number of start-up companies in the UK smashed records and if we continue to see such wonderful projects as small business saturday, which is encouraging communities to support local businesses, and the government continues the new enterprise allowance scheme I believe we can start an entire generation of business owners rather than benefit claimants.

In shrot though no one really has an excuse for never having worked.

Again I can't stress enough that I am pro-benefits. Benefits were designed to reduce poverty and by large they do a good job of that. Yes, even Gordon Brown's Tax Credits system with it's confusing rules and huge potential for unintended misclaims is serving to help people who need help. That being said I as a Conservative will always fight for a better, fairer system that rewards work and does not tolerate a generation of layabouts that refuse to do anything. I myself have worked multiple jobs in the past to support my family and I would do it again in a heart beat if I needed the money.

Now we just need to instil those values (which were kindly passed to me by my parents) in everybody and perhaps we can all be better off as a result.