A poor outlook (From York Press)

A poor outlook

11:20am Monday 15th October 2012 in Letters By Reader's letter

THE transition from council tax benefit to council tax support pits the poor against the even poorer.

Picture a Roman amphitheatre.

Not the Hollywood version, where muscular, oiled, gladiators fight for sport, but the real kind, where history informs us that disabled people of all types (people with learning difficulties, physically impaired people, and those who were blind and deaf) were forced to fight one another in bizarre and horrid afternoon “pantomime to the death” for the entertainment of the wealthy and privileged.

The truth of the matter is that the poorest 7,000 residents of York are now pitted against one another in a consultation/decision-making process that the Government is forcing local authorities to make in order to stem the shortfall between council tax receipts and specific grants to cover the most vulnerable within society.

We have inadvertently wound back in time to the days of the “undeserving poor”. Being permanently sick and/or disabled is of course a “lifestyle” choice. Who wouldn’t choose it?

Perhaps the only way to properly publicise this damaging change is to promote gladiatorial contests between our most vulnerable citizens as a tourism promotion for “Boris Island”.

Felicity Fairer, Dringhouses, York.