The Prime Minister has started an excellent initiative in the Conservative Party's new policy framework for significant and overdue cuts to the welfare budget.

The success of the British economy in coming years very much depends on increased fiscal discipline. This is particularly so after 13 years of Labour's inordinate and misallocated public expenditure that detracted from important areas of economic growth and undermined, through heavy taxation, the potential of small businesses to expand into regional and national powerhouses.

One aspect of protecting economic growth, as this new policy framework realises, is ensuring that welfare is available only for those who really need it.

If we do not cut our welfare expenditure we will undermine our economic competitiveness by unnecessary taxation. The global economic framework is built on, important, inter-state competition. Thus Britain cannot afford to be overindulgent on sentimental welfare spending if it is to ensure an economically successful future.

Key to his proposals is the removal of housing benefit from anyone aged 16-24. This is a move that would increase parental responsibility. It would put pressure on parents who want to their kids to move out early to ensure they have done well enough in education to survive on their own.

These proposals are long overdue, as is curbing a profligate post-war welfare mindset that has for too long hampered both our spirit of endeavour and our economic growth. The Prime Minister must continue to follow them through for a sustained period of freeing the individual from the gargantuan monster of the post-war state.

Oh, You mean, like the care homes for the elderly - or perhaps the Banks - maybe the rail network. Things run by the private sector such as the above, or maybe that private contractor who found jobs for just one in forty unemployed (A4E) and received some £40 millions of taxpayer money?. Yes, really well thought out piece of writing, inspires much confidence in the thought out nature of Daily Mail journalism. In fact you are so good you perhaps should be in the (current) government) No. Wait. Maybe the last one. The Universal answer to the question, just keep applying it no matter what the evidence shows. You must be one of those educated people we hear so much about.
- Norman Speight, London UK, 29/6/2012 9:48
Click to rate Rating 6

Absolutely. Privatisation has worked so well in the past. The railways and water companies are all so much better and cheaper now they are in private hands.
- LordLucan, nambia, 29/6/2012 7:44
Click to rate Rating 18

Privatisation? Are you serious? Have you been reading the news lately? RBS? Barclays? IT problems? Outsourcing to India? Lowest bidders and lowest wages? Private Care Homes? The list goes on and on? For all its' faults, at least within the public sector, we couldn't then further outsource it to (yet) another foreign company.
- David, Torquay, England, 28/6/2012 20:34
Click to rate Rating 19

I must be really thick because I've read his article about privatising the border control agency twice and I've still not worked out how the service will be funded if the tax payer is no longer footing the bill. Is he really proposing that they will just charge people a fee every time they enter the country?

To be fair to this bloke, it might be drivel but he's a proper free market type. I've more time for that than the Talk Sport type who bangs on about free markets and then moans about Arabs buying the royal yacht.

No civilised society should afford prisoners the luxury of five meals.

It should be one or two choices, meat or vegetarian. That is that. There should not even be different meals for religious preference.