Richard Littlejohn on Gordon Brown's Client State

Seven million households are now dependent on benefits for at least half their income. That's one in three. Among single-parent families, the figure rises to almost two-thirds.

Welcome to Brown's Britain. The Chancellor's much vaunted 'enterprise' culture is exposed as the sham we always knew it was.

If you add in the six million people or more on the public payroll, more than half the country is living off the State. Or rather, living off the other half.

Gordon has turned parts of Britain into Soviet- style ghettos, where the majority either work for the Government or live off handouts.

This hasn't happened by accident. It hasn't just crept up on us. It is Gordon's deliberate policy. He set out in 1997 to build a client state, utterly dependent on New Labour largesse.

As I've remarked before, this is naked vote-rigging. The plan was always to make as many people beholden to the public purse as possible.

Then, come election time, Labour can turn round and warn that if people are stupid enough to vote Conservative, they will lose their jobs, their benefits and their homes to the 'Tory cuts'.

Gordon may pose as a champion of the free-market but is an old-fashioned taxand- spend Scottish socialist who has presided over the biggest expansion of the state since the end of World War II.

Herbert Morrison, the leader of the old London County Council, promised to 'build the Tories out of London' with a massive subsidised housing programme.

Gordon has been using taxpayers' money to bribe the Tories out of Britain. And it has the Conservatives running scared of their own shadows, afraid to criticise the strangulation of our economy by the unproductive sector for fear of being called 'heartless' and 'nasty'.

continued: Daily Mail