Here’s a scenario for you (which you’ll be able to see for yourselves on BBC Two tonight).

A farmer needs labour to help harvest his crops. He’s prepared to pay £7 an hour for workers to follow behind his tractor and collect the veg in his fields. It’s long hours and hard, dirty work.

Lazy, useless local people turn their noses up at the work, deciding they can’t be bothered to get off their backsides (other than collecting their dole money), despite the potential to earn £25,000 a year.

Maybe they think the work is demeaning, or perhaps they are just bone idle.

"No mate I'd prefer to sign-on than do that," says one of the village idiots.

"I don't want to work in like no cornfield," adds another.

But the work still needs doing, so the farmer is forced to go further afield and employ eastern European workers to get it done. Local people then start moaning about the number of foreign workers coming to their town.

Is it just me or is there is a startlingly obvious solution to this problem?

Stop the benefits of the scroungers who refuse to do the work. More people in gainful employment, less immigrants for people to complain about, not that there is anything wrong with immigration. In this case nobody could claim immigrants are 'taking' jobs because local people were offered the work first but refused to do it. (I don't actually buy into immigrants 'taking' jobs anyway - if you're a hard worker with the skills to do a job then what have you got to worry about?)

Unemployment should not be a lifestyle choice. It should be a temporary stop-gap measure between education and work or between one job and another job.

I’m not talking about families here where one person remains at home while the main bread-winner goes out to work. Not everyone needs to work. What I’m talking about is the permanently work-shy single people or entire families who live off benefits.

The welfare state was established to give a temporary helping hand to people genuinely in need – it was not meant to be a convenient and easy opt-out for chavvy types who choose not to work.

If work is available and if a ‘jobseeker’ is physically capable of doing the work then they should be forced to take the employment. They should not be allowed to pick and choose – they should just be made to pick, whether it is fruit, vegetables or whatever else.

And if they refuse then they should lose their unemployment handouts. If they still refuse then take away the rest of their benefits or kick them out of the homes provided for them.

Then see if the slackers can still afford their cases of beer, designer sportswear, satellite TV and other perks of being kept by the state.

Sometimes there will not be enough jobs to go around and not everyone will have the education, skills or experience to be suitable for every job that comes their way. But you don't need any brains to cut vegetables in a field, and when this most basic of jobs comes along people should be made to do it or face a consequence.

Being a useful member of society works both ways. If someone wants to behave like a social outcast then they should be treated as such.

People will probably say “you would do it if you could” or accuse me of just being spiteful because I’m envious.

No, I wouldn’t do it myself because I have more pride in myself than being a lifelong leech living off the contributions of other people. When I had a brief period of employment once, I worked like crazy applying for jobs, attending interviews etc to get myself into work as quickly as possible.

And no I’m not envious – just angry that people have the lack of morals to do it and angry that the system allows them to get away with it. The system is really too soft.