The "benefits lifestyle" has always been a myth and it's an even bigger one now. Housing benefit, probably easily the largest element of payments to recipients (many of whom are in work anyway), goes straight into the pockets of landlords who are already enjoying all manner of tax reliefs. Out of work benefits have always been meagre. And let's not forget that Thatcher started the culture of pushing perfectly fit people on to incapacity benefit (when she was closing down whole industries and destroying communities) so that they wouldn't show up in the unemployment figures. The biggest recipients of benefits in this country are the huge, obscenely profitable employers who not only employ armies of accountants to avoid tax but also pay so little that the rest of us have to subsidise the wages the pay via in-work benefits. Round here, a couple working full time on the average wage for Cornwall (which is pennies per hour above the legal minimum) can hardly afford to rent a bog-standard two-bed house on an estate. They got on their bikes and are "doing the right thing." Trouble is, Teribus, you read the right papers for you but the wrong ones for the facts.