Amateur Brain Surgery

A story in the local news this week has prompted quite a fierce response from some of my colleagues in the staff room. Laura Ripley, from St Leonards, has complained that the decision to reduce her disability benefits by £340 a month will result in her putting on the weight she has lost because she can no longer afford to go to the gym or to buy healthy food.

The 25 year old, who has never had a job, was receiving disability benefit due to her weight which had reached 38 stone (532 pounds) by the time she was 20. She had a gastric bypass operation on the National Health Service in 2007 and has managed to reduce her weight to 22 stone (308 pounds).

When she received the notification that her Disability Living Allowance had been cut she is quoted as saying:

“That was the money I used to pay for the gym, pay for healthy food and have my hair highlighted”.

The morning after reading the report in the Brighton Argus my colleagues and I listened to Laura being interviewed by Neil Pringle on BBC Radio Sussex. He had nothing but sympathy for Laura who told the story of how she began to comfort-eat as a child when she was bullied at school. Mr Pringle suggested that there would be many people who would be unsympathetic to Laura’s plight. Something of an understatement.

I and my colleagues at work are nothing less than incensed by this woman’s laziness. None of us can afford the time or the cost of gym membership although we all work full time. None of us would expect to receive hand-outs from the government in order to have our hair highlighted. And Laura’s claim that the cut in her benefits means that she can’t afford to buy healthy food is complete nonsense. She has said that instead of buying low-fat weight-watchers crisps she is now forced to buy a cheaper, more fattening variety. Why is she buying crisps at all and since when did crisps, low-fat or otherwise, become part of a healthy, balanced diet?

Laura appears to be someone who has learned to be disabled instead of learning to stand on her own two feet. This state is supported by inappropriately sympathetic ninnies like Neil Pringle who choose to reinforce Laura’s view that she should be entitled to the financial benefits that she has been receiving. The time has come for this fat, lazy waste of space to wake up to the facts that she is personally responsible for her supposed disability, that losing weight and finding a job doesn’t require benefit payments and that crisps, chocolate and coca cola aren’t part of any healthy diet (the Argus report showed a picture of Laura holding a bottle of coke with chocolate and crisps at her side.)

In conversations with my colleagues over coffee we were particularly struck by the sad fact that we now live in a society where people, like Laura, can relinquish all responsibility for looking after themselves. Did our parents and grand-parents fight and die in horrible conflicts in order for Laura to complain when she no longer receives a hand out to spend on hair highlights? If we had the choice none of us would allow our hard-earned tax to go towards supporting Laura or anyone like her.

Our solution to Laura’s situation would be this: Firstly, provide her with some intense guidance in how to eat healthily and get plenty exercise on a budget. It can be done without the need for gym membership, low fat crisps or hair highlighting. Secondly, we would have Laura live alongside a normal, working 25 year old woman who she would shadow for as long as was needed. She would be required to get up in the morning at the same time, eat the same breakfast, go to work, take normal lunch breaks and manage her finances just the same as everyone else. It would be interesting to see if she complains about not attending the gym when she has been exhausted by a week at work.

Hopefully Laura will see that she is currently nothing but a burden on society and that she has not made enough of a contribution to feel that she should be entitled to the hand outs that she has been receiving. The time for her to wake up and take responsibility for what she puts into her mouth is long overdue.