By GB News (World News) | Created at 2025-03-28 21:21:13 | Updated at 2025-03-31 14:52:56
2 days ago
Residents in a town left behind by deindustrialisation have called on a Donald Trump-style figure to "smash" Britain's benefits bill.
In a part of Stockton-on-Tees, an astonishing two-thirds of working-age adults are economically inactive, making it the area with the highest rate of worklessness in the country.
According to the 2021 census, 67 per cent of adults in an area north of the high street do not work, dwarfing the national average of 16.6 per cent, excluding students and retirees.
"Everything is easier if you go on benefits," stay-at-home mother Chelsea Robinson, 28, who is not on welfare herself, told The Telegraph.
A St George's flag painted on the side of a property in Stockton-on-Tees
GETTY
Stockton boasts beautiful Georgian architecture and a proud industrial history
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
But deindustrialisation has devastated Teesside's once world-leading chemicals, steel and shipbuilding industries.
Young people can no longer leave school and walk into apprenticeships that become jobs for life - and the town's Norton Road, with its vape shops, takeaways and boarded-up pubs, serves as an example of just that.
Pensioner Kathleen Atkinson, 77, blames industrial decline. "The industries that their parents had don't exist any more," she explains.
John Duff, 55, an out-of-work construction worker, disagrees. "There's loads of work if you want it," he says.
He warns that some falsely cite mental health issues to claim benefits, a claim mirrored by Labour's mass benefits crackdown last week.
The Government's welfare reforms will reduce eligible PIP (personal independence payment) recipients by 800,000
HOUSE OF COMMONS
The Government's welfare reforms will reduce eligible PIP (personal independence payment) recipients by 800,000 - a per-person saving of £4,500 per year.
Deborah Pitt, 63, who receives PIP and Universal Credit for arthritis and heart problems, is terrified.
"It is scary," she says. "They're taking the pensioners' benefits away, and now they're going to take the disability benefits away."
At the General Election, Reform UK came second to Labour in Stockton North.
And Ian Robinson, 55, an out-of-work plasterer, has heaped praise on Nigel Farage's party.
"Just smashing the benefits, aren't they? No one wants Starmer, he's a s***head. We need a Donald Trump, don't we?" Robinson said.
