I was going to post about the so-called underclass on council estates and Peachy beat me to it.
I agree with everything she said.
I lived on an estate, (private tenant, ex-council house, which in fact you will see a lot as most council housing has actually been sold and then rented out to the very poor people who would have once been eligible for it..)
Maybe one in 20 families on that estate were the classic dysfuntional, substance addicted and criminal Jezza Kyle style lot.
The other 19 out of twenty were perfectly normal, hard working families.
You can't punish the majority for crimes of the minority.
And as peachy said, there is always a back story, damaged children breed damaged children, and the best way to end that cycle is proper support, monitoring, stability and education.
I do feel that the poor (which I include myself in at the moment) are being punished. It is dressed up as an ecomic neccessity, but actually it is poor families being punished because the country seems to want to blame someone to ease their anxiety.
Everybody actually does know that it is the profligacy of the banking sector, triggered by the sub prime loan debacle, that has caused this, but it's so much easier to take it out of the poor and the vulnerable.
After all, what are they gonna do?
The facts are:
People on full time wages(living in places where there is work) cannot afford to pay their rent and bills without government help.
Wages are, in real terms, going down,food, fuel and VAT is up.
The government is suffocating the economy and preventing growth.
Buses and trains are getting even more extortionate, so once we have moved out to the edges of cities, where we can cover the rent, we won't be able to get into the cities to go to work.
The only people really suffering in this ideologically viscious slashing of public services and support, are the poor, the disabled, children and the old.
Meanwhile the big companies get let off millions in tax.