The callousness of the ConDems appraoch to welfare appals me
I make no claim to have a solution to the welfare payment issue: I make the simple observation that the system is messy because so too is the real world.
But then along come the Tories saying "get a job or we'll cut your benefits".
Haven't they noticed they're increasing unemployment rapidly - especially for women who are key target for their welfare abuse?
Sickening
But all so easy to know nothing about when daddy buys you your internship and meal ticket for life.
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Here’s my submission to the DWP consultation: take IDS a bit further, use benefits to subsidise jobs in the green sector of the economy. http://bit.ly/eXmJ7A
The thing about the ConDem govt is that their rhetoric is completely at odds with reality. I’m not saying that Labour got it completely right on social security (I hate this US term “welfare” – I refuse to use it) – in particular, unemployment benefits for childless non-working people didn’t even reach the poverty line, as research for the JRF by Donald Hirsch and others has shown. But the recent changes to Working Tax Credit actually *reduce* – not increase – the incentive to work because the taper rate has gone up and the amount of support for childcare has gone down. So we have Cameron saying he wants to reform the system so that being in work pays more than being out of work, while his actual reforms will accomplish the exact opposite. I’m doing a research project on this issue at the moment – will have some results just before the Budget.
The other thing is that certain groups are being victimised just because the Mail and Express don’t like them – housing benefit claimants (many of whom are in work) and disabled people, for instance. The shocking treatment of disabled people on benefits was a big problem under Labour but it is now getting much, much worse.
believe it or not, an awful lot of people who aren’t born millionaires think that benefits should not be paid to people who can work, but choose not to. the principle is sound, albeit that the excecution will probably be shoddy.
it’s easy to say that the government are a bunch of toffs who don’t understand how real lives work.. because they are.. and they don’t*.. but there are concerns at all levels of society that there are many people on welfare out of choice, rather than necessity – and whilst i don’t doubt that the issue is overstated by those with a general hostility towards welfare, i think it is still an issue – and an attempt to deal with it is welcome. of course, the devil will be in the detail.
(* though let’s not pretend that labour and the lib dems are not also riddled with privelage, even if it may be to a lesser extent)
@Howard
Agreed
@lee
I have no great love of people wanting to free ride
But that’s not the situation we have
We have a situation where 2.5 million are unemployed, deliberately, more than a million in part time jobs want full time ones and still it’s sai people have to work
That’s deliberately abusive
Promote full employment and you can say people must work
Promote unemployment and you can’t
Take care about the ones who want to work first, then take of the ones who have to survive on benefits (in work and out), and then you can fret over (and afford) the ‘lifestyle’ unemployed minority.
Any other order and you’ve got your priorities wrong.
Paul
You’re right. The “lifestyle” unemployed need intensive therapy and re-education. Even if there was work for them to do, they would be the last to be accepted.
We need to turn the system on its head. Instead of waiting, micawber like, for the economy to turn up and absorb some of the unemployed, we need to ask, “what needs to be done?” and then facilitate the doing of it.
We know exactly what needs to be done. Not just the Green New Deal, but also a vast amount of work in:
1 energy conservation
2 renewable energy technologies
3 energy efficient goods manufacture
4 pollution control technology
5 waste minimisation
6 repair
7 recycling
8 water management
9 sustainable agriculture
10 forestry and timber use
11 countryside management
12 housing – new building and refurbishment
13 improvements to visual environment
14 public transport
15 education and training
16 counselling, caring and healing
17 community work
18 leisure and tourism
19 innovation, research and development
Allowing people to take there full benefits into work with them when they find jobs in these fields (as they would if we had Citizens Income) would act as a stimulus to the green sector. The beauty is that it is cost free in the short term, since the benefits would be paid anyway, and in the long term, it will pay back in increased taxes.
“Promote full employment and you can say people must work”
I would perhaps be more sympathetic to this argument if the number of people claiming out-of-work benefits hadn’t doubled during a decade which allegedly saw “full employment”.
Who was it who said that the true measure of welfare success is how many people leave welfare, not by how many people are added? Never a truer word spoken.
As someone said above, you don’t have to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth to think this is wrong. In fact the people who it offends the most are probably the people earning the same amounts that these people are getting without working.
@Roger Yates
You utterly ignore the rive for so called productivity on unemployment
If you destroy a great deal of manual work what do you expect the impact to be?
The Mail does the rest…..do you read it?
“The Mail does the rest…..do you read it?”
No – but then I don’t get called by them/quoted by them/paid by them either.
And your response is completely irrelevant to the points I raised.