I'm going to stick my neck out here.
Unless I'm mistaken, these remarks were made in council meetings about budgets. In this sort of context, it is all about money and when it comes to burdens, I think he probably would also describe a lot of other heavy demands on expenditure as a burden.
It's an ugly word and as a general attitude in society I think it's something we have to fight, but from a pure financial perspective when you're drawing up budgets and determining how much to spend on what and whom, extra costs on any budget, be they sen travel costs or anything else that increases the money needed out of a limited budget, such things are a burden.
It's like me looking after Dad who has dementia. It's a reality that he's a burden. He has falls day and night, he needs all sorts of stuff doing for him, he can't shop for himself, he can't trim his own toenails, he not only can't change a lightbulb, he can't tell a caregiver where the fuse box is. And who do you think's there at 3 in the morning when he's had another expletive fall? Don't tell me that's not a burden.
He's a human being and he's entitled to dignity and he's entitled to help, but like it or not, he's a burden. He's a full time burden.
I have an SMI. There are times when I need a lot of help. I'm not doing paid work. I take up NHS resources and have a council tax exemption etc. I'm a burden.
I think that denying that some of us are a burden is sanitising things in a way that doesn't actually help us.
Now most of you reading this will know me well enough by now to know that I've got strong views on the use of language and the need to be considerate, but looking at the matter from a budgetary perspective rather than a human perspective, when you're deciding what to spend money on and what the extra costs of something are, maybe it helps to use a different word from burden, but you still have to use some word for it, because financially some of us are a burden.
I have no liking for the Tory party, but on this count, he's right when he says it's all to do with money. When you're sitting in council meetings deciding how much transport you can afford to provide in times of massive cutbacks, then yes, it is all to do with money.