GEORGE Osborne's comment in his Autumn Statement pitting paid workers against the unemployed was callous even by Conservative minister standards.

It served only to demonstrate exactly how little he knows or cares about the hardship and daily misery his Government's 'austerity measures' are causing.

To sterotype the unemployed as lying about on sofas behind closed curtains while their hardworking neighbours go off to work implies that the jobless are happy in their lives of 'leisure'.

This may be the case for a few but recent surveys indicate that the majority are keen to the point of desperation to find a decent job that would pay them a living wage. To live on benefit is to live far below the Government determined poverty line.

The welfare state is under massive attack from the ConDems with benefits being squeezed while the cost of living rockets. This is obviously not good for people in low paid work either.

The difference is that they are earning their living and with it the self respect and respect from society that this brings. To be unemployed in this austere and competitive climate is to be judged and marginalised and to be excluded from many of the pleasures in life.

If there was any truth in what the wealthy Mr Osborne said, it is hardly surprising that the unemployed lie about on sofas as it has the advantage of being a lot cheaper than meeting your friends for lunch at the pub, taking your children to the cinema or putting a deposit on your summer holiday.

Osborne and co. encourage us to view unemployment as the fault of the unemployed, to see them as being unwilling to work and happy to 'scrounge off the state'.

We are constantly being told how much welfare and unemployment benefit is costing us all. Well, they should have thought of that before thay got rid of hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs. They told us that the private sector would take up the slack and then proceeded to run down the economy to such an extent that it became near impossible to expand a business to take on extra staff.

We now have workfare instead of work and those seeking jobs, in order to keep their benefit, undergo pointless and often humiliating tasks in the name of preparing them for work. Recent figures show that only two and a half per cent of people on this scheme have secured a full time job. Would it be too obvious to enable the funding for such schemes to be used to actually create some real jobs?

Our economic system needs to keep around 10 per cent of the working population unemployed in order to function. It is possible to look at the minutes of past Bank of England meetings where decisions to lower the level of employment are made in order to control levels of growth and inflation.

When an economy is in trouble those that manage it are never the ones to suffer, it is easier to put people out of work and cut down the level of benefit support. Before being persuaded to castigate the unemployed we should ask ourselves if we would like it to be us or our families. Before complaining about the massive level of housing benefit they enjoy we should remember that claimants are being provided with a roof over their heads which is a basic human right and that the benefit goes straight to the pockets of the landlords.

Those in work and those without work should stand together to resist the cuts in services and benefits that are causing so many lives to be dominated by financial worries.

Osborne should have held his hand up, admitted that the Government's drastic austerity measures are doing more harm than good to the economy and stopped making snide remarks about the victims of his policies

– Diana Gash, Claude Mickleson, Roger Drury, Martin Rudland from Forest of Dean Against the Cuts.