What's the most privileged/off the mark post/response you've read?

[waywardways]

I've name changed for this, just in case anyone does an AS and accuses me of getting DM fodder.

Me and the DC had to flee our home several years ago and we were moved into a tiny 2 bed flat temporarily. I made a thread at the time, saying me and 3dc had had a traumatic move and were very overcrowded and asked for advice on how to store our daily stuff in an efficient way.
Several posters replied helpfully, linking shelving units/freestanding storage, but one poster replied along the lines of:

"Your DH must be high up in the army and you have to rough it in officers housing until your 5 bed detached home is ready".

Another poster quoted the above with "This was my immediate thought too! It's so hard OP, but we've all been there".

I found this both amusing and perplexing because a) I would never have assumed the above and b) it was so far off the mark.

There was another thread very recently about food guidelines where the lack of awareness and privilege was quite frightening!

VAT has cost us an additional £40k per year that we didn't have saved and that has caused stress and turmoil. That's part fee increase and part loss of bursary, for two DC.

Sorry, you're paying £120k per child, per annum? £240k a year on school fees?

That can't be true, surely?

@ThisOldThang - that poster says they lost their bursaries (likely because the school was struggling due to the new tax rules) and also the fees went up, she’s not claiming that the additional £40k expense was all VAT.

You don't understand what irony means.

A good example is you whining about private school VAT in a thread about privileged posts.

I once posted for some advice about a relative’s child trust fund which didn’t appear to have as much money in it as it should. Turned out that the money everyone had been giving to his mother for deposit had been spent in other ways. But that’s another story.

There should have been in the region of £10,000 in there when he turned 18 and most was missing. I was told that that wasn’t really a lot of money to have saved over 18 years which showed an astonishing ignorance of some people’s circumstances. We’re not a rich family and people did what they could.

One that gets my goat is the people that clearly live in such a privileged, rarified world, that they simply can't comprehend benefit or PIP fraud being a real thing.

People can give concrete, first-hand examples from their lives (e.g. my deadbeat brother is scamming the system) and they're immediately labelled as liars.

It's pretty clear these people didn't attend sink comprehensives and have never even met, let alone lived amongst, Britain's underclass.

They just genuinely believe you can't get round the system I think.

As if people couldn't or wouldn't lie

'Irony'- posters discussing private school issues on private school threads being harangued by people not involved in private schools then being told to go and whine on their own thread about private school. Which (graciously passing over whine-gate) is what we were doing in the first place, and criticised for.
I think that meets the definition, assuming it wasn't 'sarcasm' you were aiming for.

No. Though you whining about threads being derailed while derailing this one is another great example.

Your ignorance is breathtaking.

It’s not that people don’t believe it, of course we know it happens. We just accept that it’s wicked to castigate all disabled or unemployed people just because your brother (who isn’t disabled) is a deadbeat.

Often people who know a benefits cheat will take their understandable, righteous anger towards that individual and throw it at the weakest in society. That’s quite evil.

Why are you repeatedly using the word 'whine'? As I've already said, these parents made decisions about their children's education and then circumstances changed, resulting in a big increase in the cost these parents had budgeted for. Why is it not OK for them to express, in a dedicated area of Mumsnet, how worried this had made them, for their children and for the effect on the whole family?

As for the idea that this is a derail, the OP's thread title is What's the most privileged/off the mark post/response you've read? I would say that the previous poster is correct to identify people deliberately posting on the Private Schools topic purely to have a go at parents worried about the imposition of VAT on school fees as off the mark. These parents have more money than most people. Nobody is denying this. Do you make your way onto property threads and tell people unable to buy a home in a nicer area or worrying about falling behind with their mortgage payments to stop whining? People comparing notes about the cost of skiing holidays and other holidays that are out of reach for most people - aren't they allowed to discuss these topics of interest?

Can you really not see the issue in banging on about how annoying it is when people come onto a thread and derail it, while derailing this one?

I use the word whine because you/her are whining.

This reminds me of a very posh woman I knew once who said very loudly to me on a packed tube once, “darling this is horrendous, why don’t people just get taxis?”

Please can the private school debate be left off this thread? Everyone arguing amongst themselves is derailing the thread 🙏🏻

In my experience, it is rarely because they are privileged and actually because they get PIP themselves, DLA for their child or know the system very well and understand how difficult it can be to get disability benefits and how much evidence that needs to be provided.

I've also never seen anyone say that benefit fraud never happens.

signed,
someone who grew up in a housing estate with a single mum on benefits, attended a sink comprehensive and currently lives in social housing in a deprived area.

I've never had anyone brag to me about benefit fraud, how easy it is to play the system etc quite the opposite actually.

I should clarify that my brother is brain damaged and receives PIP for a genuine condition.

I should have put that bit in quote marks to make it clear that I was just giving an example of the type of thing that's labelled as lies.

My train was pulling into the station and I was rushing to post before I got off.

Sorry for any confusion.

@doggostepping righto, yes, I'll bow out

The LTB suggestion when the person’s partner has so much as forgotten to put the bins out.

Agree. I'm aware that a very small proportion of benefits claims involve fraud (I believe the commonest form of this is lying about living alone so that partner's income is discounted) but:

1. Better to risk the odd fraud than leave genuine people in need destitute.
2. Anecdotal tales of benefits fraud are often based on misunderstandings or personal vendettas.
3. If someone is better off scamming benefits than getting a job I think that says something about the level of disenfranchisement they are experiencing, because benefits really don't add up to all that much and the hoops you have to jump through to get them are not much fun. I think the underclass consists of people who have been systemically and generationally disadvantaged and actually a good amount of them are likely to have undiagnosed impairments such as FASD or mild learning disability. Add that to growing up in poverty, living in the shittest housing and going to the shittest sink schools, and I really find it hard to summon much vitriol towards this group at all.

I agree wholeheartedly. I grew up on a sink estate that had the highest levels of heroin addiction in Europe at the time. I was lucky to be born with a half-decent IQ, and was able to escape. The long-term unemployed people I know are not just unemployed, they’re frankly unemployable. Through no fault of their own, they are of low intellect and have anti-social behaviour problems. They’re drug users, alcoholics, schizophrenics etc.

They are stuck. If you can imagine a person with zero prospect of employment, knowing their life will never amount to more than £90 a week, it’s no wonder they’re depressed. If they then claim a few extra pounds by going ‘on the sick’ with depression, it’s better than dealing drugs or house-breaking.

Privileged people wouldn’t be able to get their heads around this. They’d say “They must be something they can do. They can pick litter!” Not taking into account that a) they probably couldn’t even do that without getting into a fight, or telling their supervisor to fuck off, and b) there aren’t that many litter picking jobs.

There is no hope for them. They are hopeless. And their children will be born and raised the same way. To stop the cycle the government would need to invest huge sums and it would take generations to bring about change. It’s much more cost effective to give them an extra £70 a week and hope they keep their heads down and stay out of trouble. It won’t be for too long anyway. Male life expectancy on the estate is in the 60s.

Interesting perspectives. I am inclined to agree, but have to be honest I've never given it much thought before. Thank you for your thoughts @Nevermind17 and @plsdontlookatme

Exactly - if you wouldn't want to hire someone who is alcohol- and gambling-addicted with an IQ of 80 and a short fuse, why would you begrudge them being on (realistically, paltry) benefits? What else are they supposed to do? In an ideal world we'd invest in creating exit routes from this cycle of deprivation and dependency but otherwise, better to provide for them so that they aren't forced into further hardship or crime.

Also true that this high-dependency group rarely reach retirement age, meaning that most will never claim the most expensive benefit of all, which is the state pension

Agreed.

I used to work at a community support centre, and got to know quite a lot of people very well who lived on welfare benefit but perhaps didn't strictly need to - i.e. they could potentially have had jobs with a bit of support and guidance.

I didn't envy their lives one bit. They carried big folders around every week with all their supporting evidence for small grant applications, housing benefit renewals, etc. Every day carried the possibility of a sanction letter through their door and another flurry of paperwork for them to sort out somewhere in town. After all of that, they only really had enough money to sit at home and eat a sandwich most days. Their lives seemed arduous and stressful, and left them with little in the way of dignity.

I felt positively lazy compared to them, sitting at my comfortable desk job with a paycheck that I knew was coming every month. Even if I were to lose my job, I had a steady work history and a middle-class-coded way of speaking, and I could get another.

The fact is, these benefits claimants were stuck in a cycle. Their parents had lived the exact same way. They looked at jobs like mine like they were looking at someone flying an alien spacecraft - they had no concept of any of the steps I had taken to get there. Coming to the centre was the start of a very long and slow journey of possibilities for them.

I never met a "cheat" like the ones in the tabloids.

But see also ‘lazy unemployed people’ coupled with ‘plenty of care work’ not only do they rely on those services - they also undervalue the very specific skills needed to do the job well.

Exactly - how bizarre to suggest that the least able people in society should, or could, be charged with safely feeding, washing, changing, and otherwise caring for medically complex dementia patients.