MIDDLE class families face no longer being able to use child benefit to buy wine, it emerged last night.
Ministers have spent two months searching desperately for ways to cut the UK’s soaring welfare bill before finally realising they should just stop giving money to people who obviously don’t need it.
A senior source said: “We looked into who would be adversely affected by scrapping the £87 a month child benefit for middle class families and realised pretty quickly that it was Oddbins and Majestic.
“We may as well have been paying them directly, so all people would have had to do was drop by once a month, show them a photo of a child and pick up their free case.”
But Helen Archer, a woman who doesn’t know what a job is from Grantham, said: “I use my child benefit for Oliver’s trombone lessons. Two years and he’s still absolutely fucking shit. Thank Christ it’s not my money.”
And Emma Bradford, a part-time locum GP from York, added: “My £87 a month goes towards the accountant who is helping us avoid inheritance tax.”
Meanwhile old people’s charities have warned that scrapping the winter fuel payment for middle class pensioners could force them to burn their Bill Bryson collections in their garden chimeneas.
A spokeswoman for Old UK said: “Thanks to the recession the average middle class pensioner couple is already down to just 27 holidays a year. Many of them in Scotland.
“Removing the winter fuel payment will simply cause a vast bonfire of gentle, but keenly observed transatlantic humour, or force thousands of people to stay in Magaluf until early April.”
