The post you are reporting:
Paul - you are right of course £35,000 is the starting point, to end up with a net income of £26,000. If people not working can take that much ghome, why would they want tio work ?
Lord Carey, an ex,ArchBishop of Canterbury has publicly denounced the five bishops who advocated voting against the cuts ib the House of Lords; he also said that Labour and the Lib-Dems were promoting a loss of aspirations amongst the young where they feel there is no need to try to get out of the welfare system.
The main points that struck home to me, were:
"When the Church of England bishops voted against the Government's proposal to cap welfare benefits at £26,000 a year, I have no doubt they did so because they believed it was their duty to speak up for the very poorest in society — especially those voiceless children who, through no fault of their own, might suffer as a result.
As the bishops pushed for an amendment to the Government cap which means that families can still claim £50,000 a year in benefits, they must have known the popular opinion was against them, including that of many hard-working, hard-pressed churchgoers.
They also knew that the case for welfare reform had been persuasively made, even if they didn't agree with it.
Yet these five bishops — led by the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds — cannot lay claim to the moral high-ground.
The sheer scale of our public debt, which hit £1trillion yesterday, is the greatest moral scandal facing Britain today.
If we can't get the deficit under control and begin paying back this debt, we will be mortgaging the futures of our children and grandchildren.
In order to do this, we desperately need to reform our welfare system.
Opportunities to do so in times of prosperity have been squandered and now we are forced to do so at a time of high unemployment, under the guise of cutting expenditure.
As a result, our burgeoning benefits bill is increasingly stoking social division among this squeezed middle, who feel resentment at 'hand-outs' given to the long-term unemployed.
The truth is that the welfare system has gone from the insurance-based safety-net that William Beveridge envisaged in 1942 (designed to tackle the 'Giant Evils' of 'Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness') to an industry of gargantuan proportions which is fuelling those very vices and impoverishing us all. In the worst-case scenario it traps people into dependency and rewards fecklessness and irresponsibility.
The Bishop of Ripon and Leeds pointed out that 'Christianity, along with other faiths and beliefs, requires us to think most of those that have no voice of their own. Children are one of the most evident examples of that.'
The Right Rev John Packer outlines his motion to exclude child benefit from the Government's £26,000 cap on welfare payments
While I quite agree with the sentiment, I can't possibly believe prolonging our culture of welfare dependency is in the best interests of our children.
The debate this week about welfare has centred around material poverty — on how many thousands of pounds per year each family receives, and if children have to share bedrooms. Yet young people raised in workless households suffer far more acutely from poverty of aspiration than from any material poverty.
These children have no role models to illustrate how liberating a lifetime of work can be — materially and spiritually.
Instead, their greatest gift to us, their children, was their unfailing work ethic, and their belief that our lives could be more prosperous than theirs if we applied ourselves.
The biggest tragedy of the culture of welfare-dependency into which Britain has slid is the way it has squeezed such hope from people's lives.
Many people cannot see any prospect for a better life for their children and are trapped in despairing and dreary circumstances. If we cannot make the rewards of hard work more appealing than a life spent on the dole then we will have failed a generation of children.
It is this determination to break the cycle of dependency among such families that I think is the most important aspect of the Government's so-called cuts programme.
'Committed Christian': Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith is right to reform Britain's welfare system so it rewards work, not idleness
He, like many others in recent years, has come to realise that we have betrayed the poorest and most vulnerable by merely throwing money at them, be it income support or housing benefit, with no strings attached.
We have not tackled the root causes of poverty — the twin failures of aspiration and education — and have instead condemned generations to a lifetime of grinding envy and hopelessness.
Mr Duncan Smith's most important insight was also the most obvious. In order to encourage the jobless to join the workforce, employment has to pay significantly more than a life on benefits. Reform cannot stop there, however.
I have no doubt that, although the bishops were wrong in their opposition to these cuts, they will nevertheless continue to represent the poor of our country.
But instead of opposing the Government's welfare reform, I hope they will lend their support to the most important battle of all — that of preserving hope against the despair and pessimism which blights our workless communities."
Roger