Pay them and they will come

A perennial problem in politics is whether you pay miscreants to behave if the cost of treating them is higher. Why not pay drug addicts to go clean, given that the cost of handling their eventual addiction could be several times the payment? The answer comes down to one of morality. Why should junkies be given cash we routinely deny to pensioners who have paid taxes for their lifetime?

That’s why I think Liam Byrne, a minister for whom I have high regard, has made a grave error in promising  up to £4,000 to bogus asylum seekers who agree to go home. Cheaper that the £11,000 of enforced returns, he says But let’s go back to the pensioners: this winter at least 20,000 of them are likely to die from the cold (and related illnesses).For a few hundred pounds, they could keep their flat warm all winter. Yet there was no extra winter fuel allowance in the pre-Budget report (it is not, you see, an election year).