Daily Inspiration Quote by Elaine MacDonald

The sting in Elaine MacDonald’s line is that it names a prejudice that usually hides behind “common sense.” By repeating “many” twice, she turns the sentence into a quiet indictment of scale: this isn’t a fringe attitude, it’s ambient. And “still” is doing heavy lifting, implying a stubborn cultural hangover - a moral reflex that survives policy reforms, new data, even public health crises.

Her most loaded word is “undeserving.” Public services are supposed to be rights-based systems, built on citizenship and need, not virtue. “Undeserving” smuggles in an older, punitive logic: help must be earned, suffering must be audited, and the state’s role is to sort the righteous from the reckless. The subtext is that austerity doesn’t just cut budgets; it remakes character narratives. People don’t lose support only because the funds aren’t there, but because a story circulates that they don’t merit it.

“Users of public services” is also a strategic phrasing. It’s broad enough to expose hypocrisy: nearly everyone is a “user” at some point - schools, roads, hospitals, libraries. Yet stigma concentrates on the services associated with poverty, disability, migration, addiction, or single parenthood. MacDonald is pointing at the cultural mechanics of respectability politics, where some dependency is framed as normal (pensions, mortgages, business subsidies) and other dependency is framed as failure.

The context is a long British political tradition of separating the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, refreshed for the modern era through welfare conditionality, hostile-media archetypes, and bureaucracies designed to deter as much as to help. Her intent isn’t to moralize back; it’s to reveal that moralizing is already the system.