Medway Messenger, 21st May 2004

No-one has been jailed for benefit fraud in Medway during the last year. So claims Glyn Griffiths, deputy leader of the Labour group on the council.

The issue brings back memories for me. Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away from Medway, I worked as a civil servant in Social Security. My experience of benefit fraud from those days would suggest there are two main motivations for the crime, and they need treating differently.

Those two motivations are desperation or greed. Some commit fraud, because they cannot make ends meet on the level of benefits they have been awarded. These people need compassion. The Old Testament includes laws that call for leniency when sentencing those who steal due to poverty.

But greed is another matter. Defrauding public funds is stealing from your neighbour. If we steal from one another, then the trust on which any society is based collapses. Sentencing should reflect that.

I am asking a lot of the courts if they are to make sentencing decisions based on assessing the motive behind the crime. Yet I think the effort has to be made.

However, none of us can remain morally smug. Greed infects our whole society. When one of the richest men in the world was asked, “How much is enough?” he replied, “Just a little more than I have at present.” He spoke for many of us. We become driven by the lust for ‘just a little more’. It may not lead all of us into crime, but it does take us into murky places.

In the 1980s Madonna extolled this value in her song ‘Material Girl’. “The boy with the cold hard cash is always Mister Right,” she sang. But she has moved on, and now sees the need for a spiritual dimension to life. Her children receive Christian baptism, she explores Jewish mysticism, and she studies Hinduism.

It’s not an approach I can take, because I don’t think you can pick and mix from incompatible systems. But the fact that she now sees life must be more than materialism is something I welcome. Why believe the lie that we are just consumers: don’t you find that demeaning?

My vote goes with the teaching of Jesus: store up treasures in heaven, he says. We only do that by giving a priority to connecting with God and letting the example of Jesus shape our lives.  

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Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration.