£50,000 divided by 3 years = £16,666 a year.
Multiply by 17 years = £283,333.

Not bad wages for a couple of spongers.

A soldier returning home after being injured whilst serving Queen & Country during a tour of duty with serious injuries, living on an army pension might see things differently.

Perhaps the next 17 years on the minimum wage working with underprivileged children or the socialy disadvantaged sector would make some people feel that the balance has been redressed.

As I was writing this Article I had very mixed feelings myself, not least because I have known a Winger for some years who did some bird. He got caught and paid the price before I knew him and I only learned about it long after I met him. I didn’t think any differently of him after I found out about it than I did before.

Maybe we tend to think of this type of crime as victimless and maybe even something which is fair game to try to get away with, like not declaring income for tax, or paying for goods or services in cash to avoid paying VAT. I met a retired Customs Fraud Investigator who was quite happy to do that when it came to paying his own bills, yet he had to take care who knew where he lived in retirement because in his time he had put some very dangerous people behind bars. So on one level at least, few if any of us are entitled to adopt a tone of moral outrage about fiddling the system. It’s not in the same league as predatory paedophilia, that’s for sure. I don’t see it as any worse (or any better) than MPs fiddling their expenses to get as much as possible out of the system as possible – they know what they have been doing has been morally wrong and that’s why lots of them are dreading the details coming out. People see an open opportunity to exploit a situation and they do it.

But Kevin did claim benefits for 17 years and he did it by telling great whoppers rather than little porkies, at a time when he also had enough about himself to run his own business. And it seems more than likely that he was claiming them falsely for more than just the last three of those years. And when he did get caught, he got his Club’ name in the newspapers in a bad way as well as his own. So I don’t have any sympathy for the sentence he got or the fact that his assests will be confiscated to recover as much as possible of what he fiddled.

But I would not hold it against him after he has done his time and paid back what he fiddled and I wouldn’t try to stop him joining my own GoldWing club once he’s done that either. It was the other news story I referred to, which may not apply to Kevin at all, that really got up my nose. The fact that prisoners who are being released early because of overcrowding gets three times as much as a Job Seeker because they are losing their free board and lodgings in prison is really crazy.