As millions of struggling working families fret about Christmas bills and how to make ends meet, let me introduce you to single mum-of-three Emily Cutter, 37, a proud self-styled benefits scrounger unashamedly bragging she has already spent more than £8,000 on her kids’ presents – nearly all paid for with state handouts.
Emily even thanks Chancellor Rachel Reeves for getting rid of the two-child benefit cap from next year – a move that gives more than half a million families at least £5,000 extra in benefits a year at a cost to us taxpayers of £3billion.
Emily says lifting the cap gives her room to spend £2,000 more this year on her student son, 18, daughters Cee Cee, 14, and Lily, seven.
‘I know [working] people moan but honestly they’re not my problem,’ she adds.
Her benefits include £1,500 of Universal Credit, free school meals, a council tax reduction of £1,573 and many thousands more in child benefit.
She doesn’t pay rent as she cannily bought her four-bedroom council home in Taunton, Somerset, for £101,000 at a huge discount under the Right To Buy Scheme when she was still working.
Well, you have to give her some credit – this greedy exploiter of the system is as savvy as she is unscrupulous.
Among the gifts under Emily’s Christmas tree this year will be Gucci T-shirts, Dior sunglasses, an Apple laptop, gaming equipment, Prada outfits, a Michael Kors handbag, £400 of kids’ makeup, an £800 diamond necklace and matching bracelet, Ralph Lauren dresses. Paid for by you and me, because she hasn’t worked since June 2023 and funds her largesse from her eye-watering benefits.
The former marketing executive and model’s epiphany came when she realised that by quitting her job and getting Universal Credit plus extra benefits, she could take home £28,638 tax-free in handouts. In comparison, she’d need to a job earning at least £35,000 to equal what she got from the state.
What’s especially galling is that this woman splashes such obscene amounts on her children at a time when the average UK working family is planning to spend between £50 and £100 per child according to a recent YouGov poll.
‘It might give other people actually looking for jobs a bad name, but I don’t care,’ she boasts. ‘I am an icon.’
This is a woman so unaware of how offensive her behaviour is, she even set up a GoFundMe page begging people to help pay for her family’s summer holiday saying: ‘I would just like a cheeky week in Tenerife, where I can relax with my family.’ She raised £62, not enough for even one lip filler treatment.
Yet what Emily does is highlight how this Labour Government – supposedly on the side of ‘hard working people’ – facilitates scroungers and wastrels even as 7.4million people in working households live in poverty.
It is utterly amoral that Starmer’s Labour Government has pledged billions to such spongers – lifting the two-child benefits cap was a green light to the greedy, the feckless and lazy. Astonishingly, speaking to The Sun, Emily insists life is really tough for her, and that she has to save hard to fund her lifestyle which includes regular lip-fillers and Botox – after the boob op she’s already had when she was still working.
‘I had to spend £1,000 on cosmetic procedures this year, £600 on lip fillers alone,’ she says, using the absurd excuse that ‘looking good makes me a better mother… a happy mum makes happy kids’.
The even greater tragedy is that thanks to women like Emily we are breeding a lost generation of children who grow up with no working parent, no role model to show them how to be a decent citizen contributing to society, working and paying taxes. Only how to milk the shamefully engorged welfare system for all they can.
The most famous political banner of all time, Saatchi & Saatchi’s 1978 poster ahead of Margaret Thatcher’s historic Tory victory, declared ‘Labour Isn’t Working’. It is as apt now as it was then.
As Starmer’s Government with billions of welfare handouts has already staggeringly proved, Labour only works for the shameless and workshy.
