To think the level of state involvement many posters expect is bonkers?

I couldn't agree with this more.
I want to go back to the place where the welfare state was literally to fill a gap between jobs or for those who couldn't work due to significant health issues.
Now it is a whole way of life and being employed often feels like a choice not a necessity.
Parents need to parent, people need to follow advice on healthy lifestyle and being in employment should be expected.
education and health sectors could then go back to focus on their core business.

Free dentistry for all, a GP appointment within 2 days, GP home visits, rural bus services, council housing, weekly rubbish collection, second post, state pension at 60/65, districts nurses, meals on wheels, beat bobbies who would do more than give you a crime number when you got burgled, ambulances that would turn up before you died, council run nursing and children's homes...

My parents used to take me out of school for the last few and first few weeks of every school year! I believe it was a right. You had to fill in a holiday form but the school was not allowed to say no. I missed huge amounts of school.

Provide early and effective support. Invest in public services, housing, education and training, and the NHS, and it will pay off

I don’t actually believe this. How will it pay off? At some point, you are just wasting money and not getting any better results.

yes, I expect state involvement to ensure a basic minimum standard of living for me and my children, but in exchange I'm not going to be burgling your candlesticks

This … doesn’t speak well of you. If all that prevents you from stealing is a bit of dole money, that is not good

I think you should look at your own voters, since they are the ones who will get you Trump

You can’t pin all woes on mn threads in U.K.

And no I don’t think you know how they would vote

We might afford all that as well if we weren't paying nearly 20% of government expenditure on healthcare.

Extra funding gained by removing fiscally incompetent Tory government.

invest in whole country not vested interests.

And if the parents still didn’t comply ? What then? Remove children into private children’s homes where their outcomes are dire but cost millions ?

Well if you vote him in then obviously it’s your electorate who are keen

I don’t think Trump is as popular here

90% of the people posting on this thread would happily vote for Trump if they lived in America.

The view they are expressing are those of small staters and libertarian conservatives.

Don’t you have one coming up? Do you have US sites where you’re more worried about your own politics
I'm not a citizen of the US so I can't vote.

Or are we to blame for Trump also
I haven't suggested that. I have suggested that there are plenty of people here who would feel very much at home in Trump's America, or in Rand Paul's. Wannabe Texans.

Also what are you suggesting about the op, don’t be coy
That she is spouting minimally digested hate she has picked up somewhere.

Provide early and effective support. Invest in public services, housing, education and training, and the NHS, and it will pay off. This is relevant for disabled people but also the other social problems discussed on this thread.

Employer attitudes is another issue that needs addressing. Many businesses no longer want or can't afford to provide training on the job. They also don't want to hire longterm unemployed or disabled people. They don't want or feel unable to make adjustments or offer flexible work options. That needs to change. Encourage and support businesses to do this.

Agree with this, @Againname

I'd also add, go after men who don't pay child support when they opt out of family life.

Where I live, the state goes after deadbeat fathers both within the state, in other states, and in other countries. The state tracks them down via postal records, the National New Hire Reporting Service, the Federal Parent Locator Service, the State Parent Locator Service, the state Department of Employment Security (unemployment), and the Secretary of State Office (driver's license and other ID services).

Wages and monetary welfare benefits can be garnished, non custodial parents can be forced to pay for health insurance or add children to employer-provided health insurance, and the courts will issue a warrant for arrest or for contempt of court if a parent goes two months overdue on payments.

@MistressoftheDarkSide is spot on isn't she!
Disability bashing is like a national sport for some people on here!
Thank you, she is only 2 and a half, had to wait until 2 for her diagnosis even though the consultant said she was sure that it was CP, since then she has not been supoorted at all, she has been given sub-standard equipment and not seen a doctor in person since before she was diagnosed, she was even given her diagnosis over video call!
She didn't ask to be born with this condition, but she has and will suffer due to lack of care because the nhs is so stretched, that isn't their fault and it isn't hers!

Again, well said!!

@MistressoftheDarkSide

Everything you've written in that post is so depressingly true.

If you evict a family for non payment of rent of say 1000 a month, because the LHA doesn't cover it in benefits and the shortfall can't be made up in other ways, and you then place that family in temporary sub standard accommodation costing 1000 a week rather than paying the original rent for (hopefully) a short period, how is that helpful to the family or the state?

With all the talk on disability on the multiple benefits bashing threads and in the news, this situation is something 'bashers' should think about. I just saw on another thread a disabled poster told to work from home. That poster isn't well enough to work from home or anywhere else, but other disabled people might be. If they had a home. Because of the shortage of social housing and the lack of private landlords willing to accept benefits, many disabled people end up homeless. Sub standard indeed, when it comes to temporary accommodation. Admittedly it varies. Some is ok but often it's just awful. Definitely not a home or somewhere suitable for working from.

Agree with @CrispieCake and also @ChishiyaBat (and your granddaughter deserves support and how can people disagree with that?).

So because your experiences were bad no one else benefitted from them, is that what you are saying? What about a school nurse and proper dinners did you have those at least? I am 44, I did have the things I mentioned and eye tests(one of the things i'd forgotten about) the children today have none of these things and a sub-standard education because schools are chronically understaffed and underfunded.
University and higher education that people in both our age brackets had access to are also out of reach for too many children today.
Jobs are hard to come by especially in my area, travelling is out because we have no trains and the buses are useless, one an hour (When they actually turn up) , when only 10 years ago they were on time and 2 an hour, so working outside the area was made a lot easier. It's far harder for young people today than it was when I was young.
Too many people have the attitude of "I worked to get where I am I don't want to be paying my taxes for all these scroungers" when in reality the opportunites we had at their age were far better, but too many people forget that these opportunities were even given to them!
The state is fucked and cannot and a lot of the time don't want to help the people that actually need it!

Of course there shouldn’t be two tier pricing and the government should look into it. They have had to keep the supermarkets in line in the past with their corrupt price fixing. This is no different.

It's OK, a certain politically motivated class of poster is raising the spectre of a whole generation of feral untermensch to keep our eyes on the prize, which is to save the squeezed middle from penury by having to pay for them.

It's a classic tactic to divert attention from the growing economic inequality across the board, and get us all at each others throats.

Yes, there will always be people who don't live up to "standards" but they don't come into being from nowhere. It's usually pretty easy to see how they've got to where they are, and it's often a great deal to do with engineered poverty and lack of opportunity to progress.

Don't forget there are huge industries around poverty where the government pays private contractors far more than the employees or end service users get. If all social ills were solved, a section of the economy would collapse.

If you evict a family for non payment of rent of say 1000 a month, because the LHA doesn't cover it in benefits and the shortfall can't be made up in other ways, and you then place that family in temporary sub standard accommodation costing 1000 a week rather than paying the original rent for (hopefully) a short period, how is that helpful to the family or the state?

It can very quickly lead to a spiral of needing yet more various forms of support as the effects of destabilisation kick in. Hopelessness, depression, addiction, short term thinking because the future is uncertain, all creating an extra burden on the state and largely engineered by it.

Of course from this we get disaster capitalism, and technology brings us surveillance capitalism. My guess is we're being primed for a social credit system such as China operates where every citizen is spied upon and controlled via their bank accounts.

Which Rishi is a big fan if as his cronies have their fingers in the CDBC pie.

So don't worry, the brave new world approaches.

@ChishiyaBat I am 63. I didn't have dentistry or the nit nurse at school. My mother always said NHS dentists needed to be avoided.

We did have our eyes tested. My surname was at the end of the alphabet so I memorised what the others said and my short sight wasn't picked up at school. My mother took me to the optician just before my 7th birthday due to headaches.

The State should start with taxing big corporations more.

Its a fucking crime that Amazon, Starbucks and the like get away with paying so little tax.

Its also abhorrent that so much welfare is sent directly to private landlords.

Also, triple locked pensions? If we can't afford to support disabled children, we cannot afford that, that is now to go

Threads like this make me so sad, what is my granddaughter with cerebral palsy going to grow up into? I have always worked, I have owned my own house since I was 24, I was lucky, my 23&24 year old are never going to as lucky as I was 20 years ago. My mortgage when I had on was £250 a month, a house on my street recently went up for rent for £850, it is ridiculous!
As for the state, when I was in school, like others have pointed out we had dentistry in school, nit nurses, school nurses and probably more things I have long forgotten about. All the people who are moaning about how much the state provides probably benefitted from these services, but now the school children who have none of these things and cannot even get an nhs dentist, are scroungers expecting too much. The hypocrisy is astounding!

I wish the state would introduce educational infomercials about how to drive on a motorway.

Specifically what the inside, middle and outside lane are for.

Haven't RTWT but the thing is, in the past, if I was stronger than you, I could just march in and kill you and take what I wanted from you - your land, your food, your gold. Those who were strongest throughout history ended up concentrating wealth and power amongst themselves and ensuring their position was protected by ruthlessly suppressing discontent amongst the serfs and working classes and even getting the Church onside to preach about the morality of being happy with the position in life in which God has placed you and respecting your "betters". But it turns out that this only works for so long, and eventually it was necessary to share opportunities and resources a little (not much but a little) more equally to avoid full-scale revolt.

On a pragmatic level, there is a minimum level of resources you have to ensure that most people have access to so that they have sufficient "buy-in", firstly, not to rise up and murder you in your bed, and second, not to rock the status quo too much by demanding further redistribution of wealth. It's a kind of "contract", I guess - yes, I expect state involvement to ensure a basic minimum standard of living for me and my children, but in exchange I'm not going to be burgling your candlesticks.

A lot of people either don’t want to or don’t know how to take personal responsibility these days. It’s frightening. The Govt should do this, do that, Schools need to be doing this or that, your employer should be doing this…..etc, the list goes on.

Weird given how many threads we get about the holy grail 6 figure salary household. 😂

The vast majority on here are definitely not net contributors.

That’s a very sweeping statement. Evidence?