The recess provided the opportunity to catch up with some reading. I thought I’d pass on the main conclusions from a recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation report because it’s highly relevant to the Welfare Benefits Uprating Bill, which will be debated in the Commons tomorrow. That Bill will extend the real cut in the value of most social security benefits and tax credits beyond the forthcoming tax year till 2016, as announced by the Chancellor in the Autumn Statement.
As I remarked in my last blog the assumption behind this Bill appears to be that people out of work are a load of ‘skivers’ and ‘scroungers’ happy to live off benefits long-term as they inhabit a culture of welfare dependency or worklessness. The researchers did all they could to find such people. This is what they report: ‘We found no evidence to support the idea that participants were part of a culture of worklessness, and none for the idea of intergenerational cultures of worklessness. Despite their long-term worklessness, parents actively strove for better for their children and often assisted them in searching for jobs…Running directly counter to theories of intergenerational cultures of worklessness, the research found that conventional mainstream attitudes to and values about work were widespread in both the middle and younger generations’.
They conclude ‘politicians and policy-makers should abandon the idea of intergenerational cultures of worklessness’. Unfortunately, for all the talk of evidence-based policy, politicians and policy-makers tend to ignore evidence such as this because it does not tally with their own view of a world divided into out-of-work ‘skivers’ and in-work ‘strivers’.
http://audioboo.fm/boos/1122850-unemployed-man-who-refused-a-job-because-he-didn-t-want-to-get-up-at-8am
Here’s Paul, didn’t take a job because he didn’t want to get up at 8:00am for work.
Off work for 6-7 years.
Not only that, he’s been working on the black and not declaring. A nice bit of ‘cash in hand’.
That’s taken 1 minute to find. Exactly the things that the Rowtree foundation don’t want to find.
Meanwhile, the real problem is government fraud. 5,010 bn of debts hidden off the books.
they inhabit a culture of welfare dependency or worklessness.
Very interesting indeed. I am rather glad about that because I read that myself the other day, and did wonder whether it could be true.
So the children of the long term unemployed/welfare dependent parents are keen to earn more than their parents have, on long term negative taxation, which is a small survival wage in itself. That is good!
In a world where all out food and clothing needs are supplied with very little work at all, all from higly sophisticated modern agricultural machinery,
being welfare dependent is only objectionable, if it is demoralizing.
Creative unemployment is a jolly good thing to do, if you do ever get unemployed. you are employed by the government if you are welfare dependent, so make the most of the free time!
Next, we have millions according to the latest statistics of migrants coming to the UK.
536,000 people immigrated to the UK in the year ending March 2012, according to the ONS.
A huge majority of those will be working in low paid low skilled jobs. London is where most of them are arriving.
So why can’t people get up off their arses from Tower Hamlets and get a low paid job?
Ah yes, the Rowntree foundation didn’t go looking.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/3166938/Breadline-mum-got-60-inch-telly-on-benefits.html
A MUM of 13 who splurged £1,700 of her benefits on a 60in plasma TV claimed last night that plans to cap payments to the workshy would leave her family “on the breadline”.
Whining Anita Hull, 38, lives with unemployed partner Steve Dalton, 46, and nine of their 13 children in a large detached house — all paid for by the taxpayer.
Their benefits-funded income totals £38,324 a year but Anita last night branded Chancellor George Osborne’s move to limit handouts to £26,000 a year as “completely out of order”.
She said: “I would really like to see the Government give us a break and give us MORE money.
==========
I notice that the other set of claimants, the House of Lords, claimed a lot more money last year.
Perhaps the Rowntree report were looking in the wrong place there, and SW1A 0PW might have been a better place to research.
This post above is the best example yet of scapegoating the poor by via the old chestnut, they can afford a dog on what the state gives them, pendulum swung too far t’other way.’
What the writer fails to see or acknowldege is, this functionally defective group he wants us to spurn, along with him, has been led into the state propaganda that tells them, ‘life is a wide screen TV and you must have one or you are nothing at all.’ And to take it one step further, the wide screen is the tool used to programme the psyche into believing this same nonsense, put out by the controllers who get handsomely paid for it.
The poster here is part of the spin which is used to frame the vulnerable as the criminal and the depriver of him in what he sees as his. He is as delusional as the person he is denouncing. And, like her, doesn’t see it as the manipulation by an evil political state, backed by a special breed of elitists who have bought into the scam.
She’s made a choice. She went for the 60 inch screen paid for out of benefits.
Lots of people, most of whom are poor have had to work and pay taxes with no hope of getting a 60 inch wide screen TV.
Then when it comes to those people getting back something of what they have paid in, they won’t get it.
Their pension contributions have been spent, on people like Peers on 2,700 a day, and 60 inch wide screen TV. There is now a 5,010 billion black hole in the government accounts for pensions alone.
So they won’t get a pension and they will be destitute.
However, you don’t seem to give a t**s about them so long as you get your cash.
And what will you do when all public money is cut off and the market place selling 60″ TV’s goes to the wall because not a lot of people will be able to club together to buy any more?
The High Street is just about finished off by the clownlike thinkers of your ilk. Can’t you see that only the poor by the trash on offer in shop windows. If you remove all the cash from those who have nothing, then nothing can or will be purchased. Because the rich have everything they need. Whereas the lower working class and benefit claimants have an endless stream of things they need to live. Or have been convinced to long for them. They buy the goods on offer in a never ending stream. Now they sit only
You know I have had to accept the fact that those akin to you, blagger, are as dumb as you get. Not economically able to see the wood for the trees and certainly no understanding of growth and the needs of the market for a spender.
The answer is to raise the spending levels of the poor and you stimulate the economy. Cut it off and the the economy dies. Which, no matter the spin put out by the Eton boys with limited experience or intelligence tries to tell you, we are in a slump that will continue until we are rid of them. And I know the old call from you is we are broke. Well that may be, but to close the UK down the way it is going now, will only bring more debt. And if they are printing money at the pace they are, giving it to those with milions already will only mean it’s spent outside the country.
And did you hear the nice little news from UKIP? They are hankering after a coalition with Labour. Now there is a fun concept if ever there was one. Shows you just how Blair managed to wreck the party of its socialism if ever there was an example needed.
And as I raised UKIP. Farage wife is German and he is of Belgian stock. ROTFWL. He had to look to Europe to find a mate, yet wants to deny the rest of us the opportunity to broaden our horizons. Bad show all round, particularly as I’m keen on the continental mind.
Your last paragraph, Baroness, just about sums it up. And the reason ths study is ignored is because they want to stop the discussion before it reaches the work force and enlightens us all to what is truly taking place.
If we become aware of political chicanery and spin in the real world, then, those promoting it will have lost the war, not simply the battle.
What you need to ask is, why is our opposition, who came into being as the peoples might against exploitation by the elite, now taking the poor to the cleaners? They have abandoned their very reason for being and have not lifted a finger to reveal the fraud we are being subjected to. In fact they have abansned their mission.
All you have to do to answer that question is, look at who is paying their bill. Their masters are those who buy the spin and misinforma in the first place. And those who stay quiet collude in the demise of their nation and their civilisation as they turn the blind eye. The human syche cannot refer with a sense of meaning to the human condition on a global scale. Responsibility is removed from ordinary men who conspire with that premise once the devastation they create is outside their community and their personal reference. And those in power know this well, which is why they play the game of global movement. It takes the eye off of those close to you. It takes the eye off of us all, as we are no longer able to accept our personal part in a society that is too broad to express concern and do something about. It is made to big to swallow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8aiPYQFnpA
And where it is all going.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdY11bpQMgw
Chris Hedges believes (on the other thread) what is taking place is a conspiracy of the right, and this guy here believes it is a conspiracy of the left.
What they miss is, it is a consipracy indeed, but not of either left, as we know it, or, of the right on the same basis.
However, it is a conspiracy of greed by wealthy individuals who have colluded to control the world and remove the individual of any kind of self control.
It starts with the collapse of unity between peoples. And heralding the ‘strivers’ whilst at the same time creating a hatred of the poor, disabled and malfunctioning people of society is a tactic used by politicians for eternity. You can read of it historically. Hitler being the big front man used today.
Hitler did it by selecting a breed of people not of the mainstream. He directed the discontent of a nation against that one group. He used the Jews as the scapegoat for punishment. What is taking place now is scapegoating the weak. They are an easy target. However, the object is to use each group we have as scapegoats whilst they deny reality or culpability for the demise of our social cohesion and lifestyle.
It begins as this is beginning with blame toward those who cannot fight their corner. And the entire society colludes with it as they are led via propaganda to believe in it.
In 1984 it was the Criminal Goldstein.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/orwell_goldstein_1984.html
@ Beccy – Hansard:
I made a terrible hash of the spelling etc., of an earlier post. How long is it going to be before we get the edit button I so badly need?
Please can it be soon.
Best wishes,
Maude
A MUM of 13
Bit young to be a mum I thought, then realized.
I don’t know how Blagger manages to maintain the caricature so successfully for so long or Maude the simple rehash of one or more of the daily newspapers.
Cultures of worklessness are a myth…. Ah! but not at the house of lords!! Ha!Ha!
Well, in the Lords they turn up to get their cash, have that subsidized meal, subsidized wine. However, they have made some cuts. Foi gras is off the menu.
Work? Think again.
Meanwhile, 5,010 billion of pension debts, and not a clue how they are going to get the cash to pay you a state pension.
On the mum of 13, a few years ago I was in Sheerness. Newspaper headline was Grandmother at 28.
@Gareth Howell:
I’m afraid you are out in left field with your remark aimed at me. No newspaper article in either of my posts on this. So, you didn’t read them or follow the gist of my argument.
Sadly.
Still, what can you expect? It is, after all, 2013 and the onset of a new year is indeed stultifying to many.
You don’t need to invoke a consipracy of Jews, and world domination by a secret group.
The truth is far more mundane.
It’s a Ponzi fraud.
1. Hand over lots of cash for a pension
2. Government doesn’t need to pay pensions for another 40 years.
3. Government spends the cash
4. When people want their money the government can’t pay.
It’s a boring old school Ponzi fraud, run and carried on by most of the house of Lords when they were in the commons.
Let me put some numbers for you. The underestimate from ONS (national statisics) is here at the bottom of page 4.
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171766_263808.pdf
5,010 billion from 2 years ago. Much higher now, and they have to assume that the BoE doesn’t control inflation to get the number that low.
1,100 billion for borrowing.
….
Not a single Jewish financier involved.
It’s the government stupid. The city, the banks, the financiers aren’t involved in the state pensions at all.
The state’s taken all the money and spent it.
Now its 14 times its income in debt. It’s not as if its a mortgage on an asset. It’s just like spending 14 times your earnings on a credit card (well someone else’s), on holidays in Ibiza. Its like raiding people’s Pension funds like Robert Maxwell (OK, he was Jewish, and a Labour supporter).
So you’re part of the problem because even though the hard evidence is before you, you can’t admit that the state has robbed you, and will make you destitute if you are reliant on them.
Meanwhile, spending is up. More Lords, more money. You’re pension – its gone.
Jesus said unto his disciples,it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle,than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
Let it be known, God came down to earth from heaven, who is Lord of all,and his shelter was a stable, no crib for a bed.
With the poor and mean and lowly lived on earth the Creator of the world.
What I am saying is, do not criticize but help those living in poverty because as man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.
‘Whoso mocketh the poor reproacheth his Maker’
Proverbs 17:5
God [Jesus] said, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.
So in essence God is saying do not criticise those living in poverty but call to repentance the rich for not helping more.
Do not forget, God [Jesus] came down to earth from heaven and with the poor and mean and lowly lived on earth the Creator of the world.
As man is, God once was; as God is man may become.
I know Britain’s welfare system isn’t perfect but the benefits rightly belong to those living in poverty, it is God’s will.
‘Mind-Disfunctionality’
is the overshadowing bigger and causative Context here;
and that has a number of breeding-seats, mostly dressed up among Constitutional-Establishmentarians, Parliamentary-Privilegeds, and ‘Private’-Individual-Capitalists; but also breeding all the way UP through the Civil Service and the ‘Middle-Classes’ ,
from the level of overpayment of two, and up to 1000 human-livings(*)
to one-only-person (as a ‘worker’ (and ‘striver’, and ‘upwardly-mobile’ – [good-citizen), ‘essential-service-professional’, and/or ‘indispensable’.
———–
Spin-Doctoring as well as having become a career-ladder profession ‘in-its-own-right’
has become an attractive add-on skill for practically all Workplace including Public and ‘Private’ sector wordsmiths.
Why, even Baroness Lister boldly opens with “Myth**” when “Misnomer” and “headline-sensationalism” are being peddled as a tag for
“it is anti-social to positivise an unemployment-&-unemployability stamp placed upon you by Government or by any Workplace-Employer or Owner”.
* one-human-living = allowing £200 per week [but Conservatives have reduced that from Labour’s near £150pw to £140pw, as a sufficient income for one person to maintain their-self healthy, citizenlike, and environmentally-supportive.
** any truly tertiary level of educated-mind would know how to choose the right term to label a topic. A quick read through a list of about ten things which “myth” is not and must be distinguished from would have saved us all from fallacious ‘spin-doctoring’ and ‘verbal-spoofing’
(see Robert Graves’s “The Greek Myths” for such a clear and tertiarily-tight list).
——————
Maude Elwes also indicates where deeper underlurking complicit or causative contexts are to be found;
and this ‘spin-doctoring’
which includes much ‘sin-doctoring’
and literally ‘evil’ distortion and misapplication of the de facto World-Language (which is [our ?] ‘English’ language ? is it – was it ?)
has as its big-concealed-cause a number of distinct disfunctions right up to the Top and all the way across at least Britain’s Establishment, Educational. Parliamentary, Essential-Services, Political and ‘Private’-Economic, and ‘Community’ sectors.
=================
In short, you can not, neither honestly nor non-criminally, pick on the defenceless and disadvantaged for finding themselves, albeit would-be-positivisingly, described as members of a “culture of people permanently without a Workplace”
when
(a) there is no workplace willing or able to employ them;
(b) it is more sustainworthy, and thereby ‘cultured’, to be living off just one-human-living per week in the Lifeplace, than to be demanding two or more livings-per-week from a Workplace;
and
(c) whilst our established and unchange-able ‘guaranteed’ leaders, governors, enforcers, civil-servants, educators, trainers, judges, ombudsmen, advocates and representatives,
are both possessed by at least one
Mind-Functional Impairment or Corruption
and both unwilling and unable to keep abreast of Individual and Collective Human Developmental and Sustainworthy-Environmental advances in both knowledge and know-how;
and are runaway-driving an utterly wasteful and destructive Civilisation more as a Life-Extinctive Weapon
than as a Human-Race-Sustainworthying Lifesupport.
======================
Interest or Intention Declaration: The writer is an 85 year old generational-English-person, permanently-part-time occupied as a “retired-participatory-democratisational-British-citizen”.
Still ignoring the debts. How are you going to pay off 5,010 bn of pension debts when you only get 550 bn a year in taxes, and are spending 700 bn?
Told out before, Lord Blagger; please see below “Radically…”.
You’re doing well;
so please keep up your cool and figures-backed [alas! oft lone] scrutinising !
Baroness Lister, your choice of title for this post is apt. The researchers for the JRF report (link above) state:
We believe this to be the first study to have interrogated, explicitly, the idea that there are families where ‘three generations have never worked’.
They confirm that this was never anything but an idea yet fail to nail down when (or why) it was founded. Rather than some poor research or a mendacious attempt by a politician it appears to have originated from the media – who would have guessed?
In particular, Dame Carol Black was misquoted in a preview of her report, “Working for a healthier tomorrow”*, 17 March 2008. She said:
We have got places where there are three generations of men who have never worked.
The Telegraph wrote**:
Children are growing up in families where three generations have never worked…
This gross distortion is the first instance I can find that may explain the origin.
It is true that Mr Duncan Smith has repeated the myth in person, though I have yet to find mention of it within policy documents.
I am somewhat curious that the researchers for the JRF report (linked above) did not go beyond their back door. I can not comment on Glasgow but I do feel that families in the North East are much more bound together than in the South of England. This is an important factor not explored in the report though evident in the selected quotes of the interviewees. If somebody funds me…
* © Crown Copyright 2008
** http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1581191/The-terrible-legacy-of-sick-note-Britain.html
Radically re-budget both the Common Purse and the Common-Health; by
(1) Paying one person just one-human-living, awarding luxuries on a health-maintenance Need basis (not on ‘merit’ nor a ‘market hedonism’ basis)
(2) Make freely available to all, both Lifeplace individual-&-mutual-education, and Workplace literact and competency training, material and leadership;
each and both of these ‘peaceful-revolutions’ would “bring down off their super-costly, socially-inhibitive, and self-inflating-&-shaming pedestals” the multiple-human-livings consumers and over-drawers
(e.g. the psychiatrist who is deluded that s/he is not just one-human-being but ten –
[[ “therefore” s/he is “entitled” to ten human beings’ incomes/lifesupport-monies]] !!
Notice also, in this same area of cold, straight reasoning and life-evaluating,
since £140 per week has been legislated by Britain’s best brains to be
(“) a sufficient living for one person to maintain their-self healthy, citizenlike and environmentally-supportive, and available for work(“)
it follows both Strongly and Validly that any-one drawing twice that amount from the Common Purse
is (ergo) only 50% personally-efficient, i.e. at making-ends-meet in the Lifeplace (75% timeframe inoluding all spending) as distinct from their Workplace needs (only 25% timeframe no personal spending allowed, needs and costs paid by the Employer).
———————-
Consider please:
Neither you (‘Lord Blagger’) nor any other participant here, has yet put up sound reasoning for so grossly overpaying practically all of the upper-working, middle, upper, and super-upper classes of workers, throughout these Britain-Isles; and for thus ‘creating’ (or rather ‘evilly-breeding’) parasitic-cultures of “excellence”, “expertise”, “social-mobilities”, “indispensabil;ities”, “golden-geese” and “Midases”.
It is Over-‘Rewardings’ falsely and inhibitively ‘supported’ by Under-educations for the ‘Poor’ that are insidiously crippling both the higher-educated minds and the lowest-educated bodies, of this Great British “land of hope and glory”:
we ‘lowest’ millions of under-enableds have no hope,
but those tens-of-millions, of overpaid ‘higher-ups’ in the middle and upper classes, have only meretriciously-false ‘glory’.
By radically-re-budgeting (and of course radically-reforming both Constitution and Legislation)
Britain could pay-off existing Debts in ‘no time’,
and could be re-budgeting for a small but sustainworthy future credit-balance with other Nation-States.