ANDREW Poole seems to have been surprised that our MP did not accept his idea that the unemployed (I refuse to use the euphemism ‘jobseeker’ as they are not necessarily unemployed) should be made to pick up rubbish in Southampton Road (Postbag, March 28).

This is the sort of activity undertaken by offenders doing community service.

Mr Poole seems to equate the unemployed with lawbreakers.

At present the unemployed are being criticised and disparaged for something that is no fault of their own.

Right wing propaganda says people on benefits (‘skivers’) have life easy and that they do not have jobs because they have not tried to get one.

The fact is that, in the present situation, the jobs are just not there. When there is a vacancy hundreds of people apply for it.

For the very great majority of unemployed people, being without a job is soul destroying and depressing.

Salisbury’s Trussell Trust was the first to set up a foodbank.

Such banks are now being set up all over the country. What sort of society is this that some people are so desperate that they have to resort to charity for food?

In the streets of a capital city of a country where there is no welfare, I saw two young boys, no more than about nine or ten, ripping open a rubbish bag in search of food.

In another street there was a man with bi-lateral leg amputations sitting on the pavement, begging. Like the paralytic in the New Testament, friends must have taken him to a place where he could beg.

I would rather have some of my taxes go to the (very few) feckless and avoid those sights on our streets.

VERONICA BURTON, Salisbury