Apparently the “bedroom tax” is on its way out in Scotland.
The “tax” — actually a cut in government housing subsidies for people living in homes with more bedrooms than the government considers necessary for the family size — was widely protested.
I thought this brief article from the Spectator was worth a second look:
The thanks of both Houses of Parliament were on
voted to the soldiers engaged in
the Afghan war. The war was a bad one, immoral in object, reckless in
management; but that was no demerit or business of the soldiers. They did
their work well, and as we should never get soldiers did they not believe
themselves the objects of special public regard, it was right that they
should be thanked. We regret, therefore, that in the Commons
Sir Wilfrid Lawson
and some twenty Radicals objected to the vote, and that the Member for
Carlisle took advantage of the occasion to denounce soldiers in the
abstract:—“A soldier was a man who made a contract with his country to kill
anybody whom his country wished to have killed… who was a mere animated
machine,” and did not deserve honour so much as a policeman. All that is true
only in words. A true soldier is a man who risks his life to give his country
force, but leaves the use of that force to the judgment of the
representatives, who could not consult him without surrendering their own
responsibilities. Did Sir Wilfrid Lawson refuse to pay taxes on account of
the Afghan war? If he did not, he did just what the soldier does, — that is,
he felt it his duty to uphold the social system, even though the force
generated by that system was misused.
