This is definitely a tale of social class intertwined with gender inequalities and sexism, the judiciary reflects those power relatioships. Will be interesting to see what sentence Tom Wise gets. And there’s this whipped up sensationalism and stigmatisation created by NL in attacking the poor as when it comes to benefit fraud it’s ‘lock ‘em up and throw away the key’ mentality. Yet the more ‘invisible’ crimes and depending where you are in the social class pecking order you are more likely not to penalised as much if any.

The travesty that still garners little media/government attention (wonder why?!) is tax theft, evasion and avoidance. Benefit fraud is a drop in the financial ocean compared to what gots ‘lost’ in tax theft.