Frances Ryan Thinks The Queen Should Get A Winter Fuel Payment, I Suppose?

…Price said that if she paid privately for her disabled son’s government-funded transport to school, it would cost “up to £1,000 a day” .

He requires a driver and a nurse capable of giving emergency injections.

Price “admitted” – as if asking her local authority to fulfil its duty of care to a disabled child was a point of shame – that her 12-year-old son, Harvey, who is blind and has a complex range of health problems, has a driver to help him to school, and a nurse provided for him.

Well, yes, it should indeed be a point of shame if someone who can well afford it instead expects the taxpayer to stump up the cash.

Isn't that why the winter fuel payment to the rich or those settled abroad (they conveniently forget warmer climes don’t stay that way all year round) is consistently attacked by ‘Guardian’ commentators?

She has the money – why should he get benefits? There’s such a thing as personal responsibility, you know. Disabled people are expensive. Why should the taxpayer pay for her child?

Valid questions, to anyone not a chip-on-the-shoulder disability activist like Frances.

Katie Price is the face of a climate that has learned to hate need: a working-class single mother (of a disabled, mixed-race child), whom we can “legitimately” attack.

Quite unlike the Eton-educated ‘toffs’ the ‘Guardian feels free to attack, I suppose?

That’s exactly why universal benefits matter. Defend the right of mothers of disabled children, such as Price, to get help, and it reinforces the rights of everyone else. That’s how society works.

Strengthen one pillar and the other gets bolder; weaken one and it won’t be long before they all start to crumble.

Good. The sooner they do crumble, so that taxpayers aren’t forking out for the likes of single Marie Buchan with her brood of absent-fathered children, whinging about being ‘forced into work’ the better.