Welcome to Labour’s Britain, where the people who get up early, go to work, pay their taxes and keep the country running increasingly look like the mugs in the system.
The latest example is so absurd it almost sounds like satire.
Millions of Southern Water and Affinity Water customers are now living under hosepipe bans. Use a hose to water your garden, wash your car or fill a paddling pool and you could face a fine of up to £1,000.
Unless, of course, you’re one of the people exempt from the rules. Then the hosepipe can keep flowing.
So let us get this straight. The family paying full council tax, full income tax, national insurance, energy bills, water bills and mortgage payments must watch their garden turn brown or risk a hefty penalty. Meanwhile, another household can be exempt from the restrictions simply because they qualify for a particular tariff linked to benefits and family size.
If you were deliberately trying to create resentment between taxpayers and the welfare system, you would struggle to design a better example.
Nobody sensible objects to support for people with genuine disabilities or medical conditions. Civilised societies help those who genuinely need help. The problem is that modern Britain seems increasingly incapable of distinguishing between supporting vulnerability and rewarding dependency.
And this isn’t an isolated example. It is part of a growing pattern.
Only last week Labour was championing proposals to extend free childcare to unemployed households. Think about that for a moment. The couple who both work full-time are expected to pay taxes that fund childcare for households where nobody is working.
What message does that send? Work harder. Pay more. Receive less.
It is the same message that appears repeatedly across public policy. The worker pays. The contributor pays. The saver pays. The taxpayer pays.
Meanwhile those who contribute little or nothing increasingly find themselves protected from the consequences faced by everyone else. The result is a creeping sense of unfairness that is becoming impossible to ignore.
For generations Britain operated on a simple social contract. If you worked hard, played by the rules and contributed to society, you could reasonably expect to be better off than if you did not. That principle was not cruel. It was not punitive. It was common sense. It encouraged responsibility, aspiration and self-reliance.
Labour appears determined to reverse that logic.
Again and again, the incentives point in the wrong direction. More taxes on workers. More costs on businesses. More regulations on productivity. More benefits and subsidies detached from contribution. More rewards handed out regardless of effort.
Then ministers wonder why economic growth stagnates, why productivity falls and why increasing numbers of people simply stop believing the system is fair. I mean who would want to be a business owner in modern Britain under this Labour Government? Entrepreneurs are leaving in droves.
The most dangerous thing about Labour policies like these is not the cost. It is the culture they create.
A society cannot thrive when the people carrying the burden increasingly feel taken for granted. It cannot prosper when those paying for everything begin asking whether they would be better off doing less rather than more. It cannot remain cohesive when contribution is treated as something to be exploited rather than rewarded.
The anger bubbling away across social media and in workplaces is not really about hosepipes. Nor is it really about childcare. Nor is it about free housing. Free cars. It is about fairness.
It is about the growing belief that in modern Britain the rules are no longer designed to reward effort, responsibility and contribution. Instead, they often seem designed to penalise them.
Nobody is arguing against helping those who genuinely need help. Britain has always been a compassionate country and should remain one.
But compassion without responsibility eventually becomes unfairness. Support without expectation becomes dependency. And a welfare system that consistently leaves working taxpayers feeling like second-class citizens is not a system that will command public confidence for long.
If Labour continues down this road, the question millions of people will keep asking is a simple one:
What exactly is the reward for doing the right thing?
