We even take care to label some benefits for the intended recipient, like a menu of benefits. Child benefit is a good example. The clue is in the title. Yet it seems for so many of our poorer families in this country the child does not benefit at all – but rather the overweight mother guzzling McDonalds with her large brown Primark bag bulging at her feet.

We have created a culture of entitlement as a direct consequence of lacing it with benefits that provide everything an individual could need. For the grand effort of idling to the benefits office in your pyjamas, this state says you can have as many children as you like, live in the house that you like, do as little as you like, even smoke if you want to – and we will pay for the after effects of that to be treated too.

Benefits need to be seen as a privilege and not a right and individuals should be made to earn them through collective effort for their community and wider society. I am fairly certain if the privilege of state support was handed out at the top of a good few flights of stairs, far fewer claimants would bother to pitch up. Equally, I am sure a good few of the disability benefit masses would jog on up there with a spring in their step.

For starters there is the name. Viewers sitting in sofa land are starting to wonder just what trade the ‘Apprentices’ are actually learning. And after twelve weeks of selling everything from carrots to cremations, can it really all end in a business plan as light on content as the suitcases they wheel into the boardroom each week.

Since last year’s fiasco with Terrible Tom of the curved nail file and losing his title as Enterprise Tsar, Lord Sugar has been relying on his friend Nick ‘Countdown’ Hewer to keep his morale up: ‘You know Alan, Tsar also spells Star, and that’s just what you are’.

Viewers on the other hand are pining for Margaret and her reassuring shoes and ways. With Margaret around there was always the hope that dignity might prevail. That the motley crew of sales managers and single mums would think at least once before dressing up as a yoghurt.

Whether Apprentices, or Entrepreneurs, there are a few rules to this game . Use your ears before your mouth. Even if your mouth is twice the size of your exaggerated ego. Never explain why someone is worse, explain why you are better. And if anyone asks you to dress as a yoghurt, imagine what Margaret would have said.

Just what is the point of all these slipper clad wrecks, washed up in the land of the living? They make it more difficult for me to get a doctor’s appointment for my young children, they cloy up the NHS to breaking point and they are not prepared for a life that has gone on well beyond anything regarded as decent or reasonable.

This is not a cautionary tale. I have no edifying reassurance about the wisdom of the aged, no fable about the old, nor have I come to see beyond my heartless economic view. I just wonder why are we so desperate to sustain life beyond its normal course, to the point of making certain resources unobtainable for the young, out of reach of the real living and rammed full of the not yet dead.

As we progress through life, surely the onus should be shifted from the state to the individual, requiring proof that they have provided for their elongated ‘old age’, making individuals accountable for their desire to live to the point of senility with mobility.

It is time to privatise the geriatric sector, and make the individual accountable for their care when they can no longer reasonably provide it for themselves.

Those able to speak will argue ‘I paid my taxes, I have earned the right’. But those taxes only take you so far. They do not provide for a life that requires an army of agency support just to keep it hygienically clean whilst it continues to breathe.

If medical advances have edged the elderly into the living incapable, clearly those medical advances need to be privatised in order to restrict them to only those that are financially able to take accountability for the outputs of this medical excellence.

A country where the old age masses outnumber the revenue generating minority is not a sustainable one, and our current population model is under question. Maybe not by Guardian readers, maybe not by the pro welfare Socialists, but certainly by business people like me who wonder when they will be able to access medical treatment for their children and taxpaying families under 60.

When you think about it, the commercial environment is measured in equally simple terms – terms to do with assessing profit and growth. Just as these are the motivating force of any business, so are individuals intrinsically linked to this motivation through their pay.  Employee surveys state that ‘salaries are not the only consideration’ but then ‘promotion also matters’. We may not state that money is our motivation, (and it is not considered survey etiquette to do so) but it is consistently the primary force that drives people from their bed to plunge head first into the subway and beyond.

And with more than 2.62 million unemployed, who can blame them. The labour market is carrying surplus and all work is good work – particularly if it is paid and sustainable. My role in education is to make young people more employable: equipped with skills employers want. Their biggest concern is not trying to get a good job; it is trying to get any job. They recognise the competition is sitting next to them in crowded lecture halls and bustling campuses. To this anxious crowd, unpaid internships feel like a good job – one I spoke to had been an unpaid intern for over a year. 

As my mother’s Woman’s Institute group are very quick to point out, ‘in this world there are good people and bad people, and the latter don’t live around here’.  So how do we make the moral decision on what is good work or bad? What is the role of a professional bailiff? Is that not good work? Not a good person? From a commercial perspective, they reduce debtor days and are incentivised against performance targets. Manageable, profitable, results oriented. Or what about the firm engaged to manage a headcount reduction program. From a commercial perspective they reduce exposure to employability law, and operate to a fixed cost. But would it pass this noble formula for good work laid down by the Good Work Commission? I doubt it.

Perhaps the answer depends on whose shoes you are standing in? Because increasingly it seems that we are obligated to stand in the shoes of the long term employee. As the CEO of an organisation, the boardroom is cast aside, the board table upended, the management accounts filed away, and in its place we are supposed to focus with close to parental adoration on our employees. Take their temperature, check their pulse, offer them the comfortable chair and ask operations to whistle up some afternoon tea. Are they feeling ok, are they feeling content in their work? Are they happy? Offer them a snap survey to check. ‘Employee engagement’ is like giving more hormones to HR.

As an employer I feel like the employee has some kind of magnet to which political will is inextricably drawn, such that all legislation – and there is oodles of the stuff – is increasingly reading like a manifesto for how to make your employee happy. Strangled by TUPE, paternity, maternity, flexi time, job share, part time, sickness benefit, employability law and the plethora of rights that manifest themselves with the arrival of any new employee, I wonder just how small business is supposed to be David’s engine for  growth when it is spluttering for legislative air.

Occasionally I find myself wishing that ‘feet alright, post getting though’, could be enough for my own business too. 

@KTHopkins

Ed proved enormously irritating from the off. He seemed less like a finance professional and more a committed soup fanatic, determined to make soup above all else.  Jim astutely pointed out they were going to make soup ‘like they had never made soup before’. Indeed.

Just like M & S, Melody was so much more than just a team leader. She christened the team, she led the team and she took the team to victory – and all with perfect make up and perfectly polished nails. Not only that, but with all with the blessing of Al Gore.

Like many animals going in for the kill, there is a certain moment when you can smell that your prey is weak and that their time is up. For Ed, pulling out the line ‘I am the shortest in the competition’ was that moment. Being vertically challenged is not something you mention in front of the Sugar.

 ‘Roll with the punches’ said Ed. More a question of needing to take cover under fire.

1)    Not needing to be popular

Lady Thatcher accepted that difficult decisions made you unpopular. George Osbourne thinks he is unpopular because of his plan for cuts. No George, you just have one of those faces we want to slap. Thatcher on the other hand, was unpopular because she knew better.

2)    A working mother – but no one knew

Not till Mark Thatcher started doing strange things with models and fast cars did any of us even realise Thatcher was a mother. Did she ask for flexi time, maternity leave, short days, child care support? – did she hell. Would she have belonged to mumsnet?  Never.

3)    It was never about her

Thatcher was a Prime Minister that just wanted to get on with being Prime Minister. She wasn’t softening the American market for advisory positions, she wasn’t writing memoirs and competing for nonfiction chart No.1, she wasn’t trying to map out a future lecture circuit. She just wanted to be PM.

4)    She didn’t have a prat for a partner

Unlike Prince Phillip, Dennis knew better than to try to speak to the natives. He was the unseen dream. Nowadays, it seems no one knows their place. Cherie was a gurning monstrosity with the steeliest ambition at No.10; Mrs Sarkowsy is a fool if she thinks we buy this demure coy nonsense – you stole a husband love. And old ‘green fingers’ Obama is more powerful than Opra.

5)    The handbag

We knew Thatcher was real because she carried things about. In a handbag. We like that. And she looked like she might wield it in anger if required. And we liked that even more.

6)    Cool lines

Alan Sugar gets fed his through an ear piece. New politicians get theirs written for them. Thatcher has one liners all of her very own – and they kept the boys in their place for years.

7)    Private not public

Just like her family life, Thatcher believed our society needed to be private not public. And she went about privatising everything. Her faith in the ‘invisible hand’ to deliver a slap on the bottom to the nanny state was impeccable

8)    Peter Mandelson

She would never have employed Peter Mandelson. Not once, not twice, not ever.

9)    The special relationship

She nurtured our ‘special relationship’ with the States; she may even have been instrumental in its longevity. But she never fawned on the other side of the Atlantic. She never wanted Ronald as her best friend and never acted like the clingy guy at the party.

10) The lady is not for turning, or burning.

When the IRA tried to blow up Thatcher in Brighton, she did press at 4am, got M & S to open early so the conference delegates could get new clothes, and cracked on. Stoic, brilliant, irreplaceable.

Tom Daley, the pocket sized diver from Plymouth got into trouble with his school mates for being an irritating twerp. He had to move schools.

The Alabama man that killed his new wife whilst on a scuba dive got into trouble with the police for being a murderer. He will have to move home – from a house to a jail.

And now poor old Eduardo, the Croatian striker for Arsenal, gets into trouble with the SFA and the whole of the Celtic supporters club for taking a wee dive to win a penalty. He will have to be moved emotionally – from smug bastard to repentant Croat.

It seems those dying earlier this century had grand designs on how they wanted to be physically remembered. The tombs of the long deceased are concrete mega lumps, occupying more square footage than a regular sleeping man ever could. These people died. And they wanted you to know about it. And whilst they are now nothing more than a body, in life they were SOMEBODY.

Nowadays, what with all that climate change, organic farming, the population trust and the price of oil, we are inspired to curb these grandiose statements of death. People get put in little pots no bigger than the box of matches that helped cremate them.

Some husband and wife teams reunited in the graveyard have the husband buried in his cumbersome concrete mega structure (for they perished long before the sprightly female) and the wife, perched on top in her modern little box.

I am not sure what the thought is that I am left with. We can either celebrate the prudence that we have found in this age of worthiness – or the fact that that women end up on top in the end.

I want to be scattered to the winds. It would be cool if my kids remembered me as a breath of fresh air.

1) Mobile home owners are incapable of sitting still. Whilst waiting in line for the ferry one guy hovered his car and shook out his carpets whilst the missus made two cups of tea and rearranged the plastic flowers.

2) They like to strap on extra bits. Extra bike racks, spare wheels, additional luggage compartments by Thule. They are never happier than when they find somewhere else to stow the additional clutter they otherwise would not have brought. 

3) They like to express their affinity with the out of doors in every way possible. Footwear is robust and waterproof, clothing is Patagonia and replete with utility belts and furniture can stow away. I saw an entire picnic bench collapse into a large family sized box of matches.

4) Nudity is nothing. Living with nature means acceptance of nature as far as this lot see it. If you shower in the communal block, you are part of the commune of life and you may as well let it all hang out. What’s the odd bum or boob when you are weeing in a bucket?

5) It seems to help if your unsightly home away from home is called something fast like ‘speedie’ or ‘zippy’ or  ’whizzie’. Even when they are on their side in ditch after a nasty gust of wind they can imagine how fast they might have gone.

6) They are mercilessly self sufficient. A restaurant on a caravan site is about as populated as a pub in a nunery.

The men’s game is fast, punishing and raw – unless you are Fed in which case it is pure beauty. The women’s game is laboured, pedestrian, a touch sulky and a way too chunky. I mean chunky in the physical sense.

Some of those girls are look more like Ann Harvey than Ann Summers and frankly it ‘aint pretty. Their ample midrifts are flumped over larger backsides and supported by thighs twice the girth of the Umpires chair. 

I don’t get it. They are the elite of their sport, masters of their game and vying for the ultimate tennis tiara – and they cannot be arsed to hit the salad. If they are  burning as many calories as they surely must be, then how is it possible to still be a touch on the lardy side? What the heck are they eating to maintain these extra folds in the face of extreme physical exercise?

If the lovely Roddick can manage to shed a stone from his well toned physique at the advice of his fitness coach, surely they could have a crack at shifting a couple each? They could even do it together: Weight watchers @ Wimbledon.

I am sitting on the sofa writing this. And I just ate a bag of minstrels. But then again, I am not about to squeeze myself into a white mini dress and bend over alot.