They pursue social security fraud, but defraud overseas pensioners of their rights

Set a Thief to Catch a Thief

Every second of every day of every year,
the Government is stealing £20 from frozen pensioners living in former "empire" countries.

Year in, year out, the U.K. Government confiscates the annual pensions uprating of half its expatriate pensioners - those living with their families in Commonwealth countries, thus depriving many of them of the ability to live out their days in dignified independence.

Its excuse is it cannot afford to be honest, although the Government estimated cost of £600 million is almost petty cash, a mere speck of the Social Security budget.

In a debate in the House of Commons, Mr Winston Churchill (grandson of the famous W. S. Churchill) described this practice as "cheating". Stripped of Parliamentary delicacy, and since it concerns depriving pensioners of money to which they are entitled, this means stealing, robbery, thievery.

Now, in a droll role-reversal, the Secretary of State for Social Security , poacher turned gamekeeper, claims to have caught thousands of people defrauding the benefits system, thereby saving many times his estimate of what it would cost to refrain from the petty larceny targeting Commonwealth expatriates. A recent report by the Select Committee for Social Security puts the level of annual fraud in Housing Benefit alone at two billion pounds while the Public Accounts Committee assessed the cost of fraud in Income Support at £1.4 billion.

So now it has the possibility to recover vast sums by better housekeeping, the Department, seemingly more sinned against than sinning, repenting of its former thievish ways, can go straight and at last pay us our full pension entitlement!

Unless of course there is no honour among thieves . . . .

We shall fight on the benches
We shall fight in the courts and the lobbies
We shall fight in the newspapers and on the internet
We shall never surrender

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