You may know this (I definitely didn’t), but if you’re on Universal Credit and pop along to the café at the Tower of London, you will receive your fish and chips for £8.50 while the rest of us have to pay £16.95.
Mind you, that’s nothing compared to the money you will save as a UC family of four if you fancy spending the day looking round the Tower.
For us, the cost would be £111, but if you’re on benefits, it’s £4. Unbelievable.
I am grateful to Spectator journalist Michael Simmons for revealing this research, which I found quite astonishing. As he points out, if looking at animals is more attractive than looking for a job, the Zoological Society offers those on UC a family ticket to the London Zoo at £26 rather than £108.
And it’s not a minority that goes to the zoo on your money. London Zoo sold 300,000 UC tickets in 2024/25 with only a screenshot or PDF required as proof.
The discounts don’t end there. HMS Belfast (£68 discount). St Paul’s Cathedral (£61), Westminster Abbey (£60) the Cutty Sark (£54).
The reality is that Starmer and Co have no interest in those who pay their way in society. Their entire focus is on welfare claimants. The United Kingdom has become a freeloader’s paradise.
I have written before about the huge imbalance between those who work and those who have made a lifestyle decision not to bother.
A family with three children with at least one parent claiming the average rates of Universal Credit, housing and health benefits, including Personal Independence Payments (PiP), will pick up £46,000 from the state.
This compares with £28,000 after tax for a minimum-wage family with one full-time and one part-time parent.
As Michael Simmons points out, to take home the same amount as a three-child family with combined benefits would require a salary of £71,000 before tax, rising to £90,000 to match the benefits of a family of five children.
We must end this freeloader's paradise where spongers get half price fish and chips - Kelvin MacKenzie | Getty Images
This can’t be right.
The subsidies don’t end with a day out at the zoo. Council-run leisure centres are the same. Swimming pools, gyms, and sports facilities all offer discounts.
Throw in broadband, reduced council taxes and subsidised utilities, and there’s a benefits bill that the think tank Onward reckons is £10billion a year.
When I last looked, we didn’t have 10p. Last week, the standard Universal Credit allowance increased by 6.2 per cent, double last year’s inflation rate.
That compares with the average earnings of 4.1 per cent. Even worse, Labour has guaranteed the allowance will rise above inflation for the next three years.
Where’s the incentive to get off your arse and work? You might say this is good politics by Labour as it guarantees at least somebody (anybody on benefits) will vote for them in ’29. I don’t agree.
Voters hate the idea that they are going to work while their neighbours are lying in bed doing nothing, and at the same time making more money. I can’t imagine the size of the defeat they will face in the General Election.
Things have to change. In the first instance, we should adopt the Danish system where you pay an insurance and when you are out of work, receive 55 per cent of your salary, which reduces after three months and disappears completely after two years.
The effect is that the Danes have 3.1 per cent unemployment compared to our 5.2 per cent, but perhaps more importantly stops the UK position where millions of benefit-claiming Brits have been out of work for more than five years.
Last year at the Labour conference ( that must be the biggest annual collection of no-hopers), Reeves said the following: ‘’I believe in a Britain founded on contribution.’’
That is balls. She believes in a Britain where you make all the contributions, and somebody you have never met and wouldn’t want to meet picks it up.