Parking and Benefits

The Guardian recently gave some examples of the kind of petty reasons that can trigger benefit sanctions.  Many of them appear trivial, and some outside the ability of the person sanctioned to control.  The effect of cutting someone's benefits when they have very limited financial resources can involve real hardship including hunger, and one would think a humane society would be less strict.  It would not be hard, even in those cases where someone has done something wrong, to have some sort of warning system.  Instead, the whole system seems to set out to be as harsh and demeaning as possible.

I am struck by the efforts of ministers to relax parking enforcement.  I suspect the reason for the contrasting attitudes is simply class hatred.  Minister genuinely hate people on benefits, regarding them as an American style underclass (even those most work on low pay); in contrast getting a parking ticket is something they can imagine people like themselves getting.