So David Cameron (we are in it together) really wants to fuck up our children then!

[belleMarie]

How can anyone be taken in by this muppet? whilst him, Sam (and her £1000 pound frocks) and kiddies eat good, sleep good, shit good - we're basically screwed?

His hate for the poor/have-not is staggering and apart from a a couple of grunts here and there, this man is unstoppable.

Cameron to axe housing benefits for feckless under 25s as he declares war on welfare culture
Prime Minister gives exclusive interview to the MAIL ON SUNDAY
Reveals housing benefit will be scrapped for under 25s, who'll be forced to live with their parents
Dole money will be stopped for those who refuse to find work
Mr Cameron shares his views on Euro2012, Jimmy Carr, and what really happened when he left his daughter in the pub

Radical new welfare cuts targeting feckless couples who have children and expect to live on state handouts will be proposed by David Cameron tomorrow.
His bold reforms could also lead to 380,000 people under 25 being stripped of housing benefits and forced to join the growing number of young adults who still live with their parents.
In a keynote speech likely to inflame tensions with his deputy Nick Clegg, the Prime Minister will call for a debate on the welfare state, focusing on reforms to ?working-age benefits?.

Among the ideas being considered by Mr Cameron are:
Scrapping most of the £1.8 billion in housing benefits paid to 380,000 under-25s, worth an average £90 a week, forcing them to support themselves or live with their parents.
Stopping the £70-a-week dole money for the unemployed who refuse to try hard to find work or produce a CV.
Forcing a hardcore of workshy claimants to do community work after two years on the dole ? or lose all their benefits.
Well-placed sources say Ministers are also taking a fresh look at plans to limit child benefit to a couple?s first three children, although Mr Cameron is not expected to address this issue directly tomorrow.
Speaking exclusively to The Mail on Sunday, Mr Cameron said: ?We are sending out strange signals on working, housing and fa8milies.?

He argued that some young people lived with their parents, worked hard, planned ahead and got nothing from the State, while others left home, made little effort to seek work and got a home paid for by the benefits system.

?A couple will say, ?We are engaged, we are both living with our parents, we are trying to save before we get married and have children and be good parents. But how does it make us feel, Mr Cameron, when we see someone who goes ahead, has the child, gets the council home, gets the help that isn?t available to us???
?One is trapped in a welfare system that discourages them from working, the other is doing the right thing and getting no help.?
Asked if he would take action against large families who were paid large sums in benefits, he replied:
?This is a difficult area but it is right to pose questions about it. At the moment the system encourages people not to work and have children, but we should help people to work AND have children.?
His plan to axe housing benefit for the under-25s will have exemptions for special cases, such as domestic violence, but he said: ?We are spending nearly £2 billion on housing benefit for under-25s ? a fortune. We need a bigger debate about welfare and what we expect of people. The system currently sends the signal you are better off not working, or working less.?
He also favours new curbs on the Jobseeker?s Allowance, demanding the unemployed do more to find work. He said: ?We aren?t even asking them, ?Have you got a CV ready to go?? ? A small minority of hardcore workshy, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000, could be forced to take part in community work if they fail or refuse to find work or training after two years.
The Prime Minister wants to show he is committed to radical policies, but his speech could exacerbate strains with Coalition partner Mr Clegg, whose Lib Dems oppose drastic welfare cuts.
It follows the row over plans to revive O-levels and will fuel rumours the Coalition could end long before the 2015 Election. ?As leader of a political party as well as running a Coalition it?s right sometimes to make a more broad-ranging speech,? said Mr Cameron.
A Government official said: ?Decent folk are fed up with the increasing abuse of the welfare system. Responsible people who work damned hard, often on low incomes, to support themselves, are sick and tired of seeing others do nothing and live off the state.
?Labour threw ever greater sums of money at the problem and made it worse. If we want to encourage responsibility we have be bold enough to tackle these issues. We suspect some of those who refuse point-blank to seek work are working on the black market and claiming fraudulently.?
But a Labour source said: ?It is easy for rich Tories with big houses to have grown-up children at home while they find their feet. It?s different if you live in a tiny council flat and your daughter is a single mum.? Ministers said curbs on housing benefit for the under-25s, had helped slash the welfare bill in Germany and Holland

quicklook - it would have to be a really large drop round here for low paid people to be able to buy houses. maybe a drop of 75%. if they didn't fall this far and landlords stopped renting to tenants where would they live?

"if labour cared more about people than staying in power, they would not have created this situation. what happened next was always going to be bad."

We have so many on housing benefit because Thatcher sold so many council homes that they were running out of homes to put people in, so they resorted to using the private market instead. I don't believe this was an accident. She wanted to destroy public housing and rely on the private market IMO. House prices and rents inflate, and it all goes tits up.

The high housing benefit bill is the fault of the fucking Tories. But rather than admit it and build some council homes, they want to sling our young people on the streets. Granted, Labour should have reversed this instead of encouraging the buy to let tossers use rentals as their pensions. Incompetent, corrupt bastards the lot of them.

Labour had 13 years to build council housing? Did they? No, because they were relying on the boom created by artificially inflated house prices in order to stay in power. Blaming the Tories for attempting to sort out the mess is absolutely asinine.

If you had read my post properly you would notice I blamed both parties for the crisis.

Well, calling me daft when you can't be arsed to read my post is just rude. Tut tut

Actually, the massive spike in house prices that occurred in the last 10 years was an aberration. Most economists agree that house prices need to come down from the artificial high they reached.
It is not a workable situation for the average house price to be more than 7 times the average wage.

When the min wage was re-instated a dozen or so years ago, did it cause the great drop in employment the right wingers predicted?
Er, no.
Companies CAN afford to pay employees living wages. If your company can't afford to pay an employee £10 an hour, frankly you shouldn't be in business.

And don't forget, these properly paid employees do spend their money. Not like now, when no-one is spending money for fear of more cuts and higher fuel bills to come.
Maybe, if house prices drop a bit, people can start talking about homes(a basic human need) rather than property (a privilege) and we can all get a bit of perspective.

nowthen - think you are talking rubbish. how can you say companies can afford to pay £10 per hour? what background have you to be able to justify this? how do you think a company can compete against imports from countries that pay much less an hour? And it would have a knock on effect for other workers - more highly skilled ones would expect an increase to, in order to maintain a differential. massive inflation and companies going out of business would be the end result and that wouldn't help the working poor

Companies here don't directly compete with the countries that pay much less an hour. Our min wage is already much higher than wages in, say, Indonesia. If Companies who outsource to the developing world do it because labour there is a tiny fraction of what it is here. That would not change.

It may have a knock on effect for other workers.
Or maybe it would just close the massive gap that currently exists between the lowest worker in a company and that company's CEO.

It is quite amazing to me that paying a still fairly low, but liveable wage would automatically bankrupt all these companies, yet the CEO's getting a million quid a year are costing them nowt.Very odd.

blog.shelter.org.uk/2012/06/5-reasons-why-cutting-support-for-young-people-is-a-bad-move/

there has been something of a reverse of offshoring which a £10ph minimum wage would undermine.

50% of people in the country are employed by small companies & many would be finished by your £10ph. there are v few peole earning £1m pa. its just headlines.

nowthen - lots of companies directly compete with suppliers from abroad. thats why whole sectors of our economy have more or less gone out of business - textiles, steel production to name a few.

agree with your comment about CEO's and that looks as if its starting to change. But I can't imagine middle managers being happy about earning the same as their staff - this started to happen at one point at the company i work for and they had to sort it out as no-one was going for promotion and they were struggling to recruit managers

not a lot of people know this and i cant actually remember how i do but when the delightfull maggie made all her pomp and bluster about right to buy and everybody else was focasing just on that aspect and how wonderful it was blah blah blah she used the bill to slip in a piece of legislation that made it practicly impossible for LA's to build any new housing stock thus resulting in any new builds being HA as opposed to LA and the very strange 'hello rich devoloper off you go build 30 banging good luxury flats but you have to make 6 of them for social housing but then we will move people into them that need HB but HB will class some of the luxury aspects of these building as being above and beyond what they should cover and will deduct ammounts from your HB award acordingly so you wont be able to afford the rent' ones that nobody likes. basicly thats why the LA wont/cant build anymore

Of course they do dreamingsun. I just mean that adding a couple of quid to an hourly wage for your workers is a do-able thing for most companies. It's just that companies don't have to. So they don't. They pay people the minimum they can get away with.

I don't think managers should be paid the same as lower down workers-just that the pay structure should not be quite so uneven.
In the company I work in, a lowly clerical asistant is on 15k a year. A manager around £60 k.
15k a year is not a reasonable full time wage, for anyone, and leaves people dependent on tax credits and housing benefit.

I have run a business. I know that wages are a bit outlay, but if small companies can't manage to pay a living wage, you are not doing well enough to have employees. My friend runs a small business. She pays her staff quite well. She makes a living, and will make more in years to come, but she probably does not earn more than her employees at the moment. She is fine with that, as she will be the one reaping the eventual rewards as her company grows.

I do think that red tape for small business should be reduced, and it should be easier to get started. To me, this is more of an impediment to growth than reasonable wages.

nowthen - i think wages is v industry specific. i run a company in an industry where you have to pay a high salary to attract good staff. others, you would just have to shut up shop. e.g. cleaners.

i dont have a problem with red tape. i think its an important part of employee rights.

It's social mobility Cameron style- donchya know. Fuck right back to wherever you came from.
Just unlucky if you come from one of the more remote or poverty stricken areas of our country.

I have been reading this thread with interest. Sadly we seem to have a culture of entitlement to everything now which just did not exist 20 or 30 odd years ago and I think this is where the problem really lies.

I grew up on a council estate in the 70s both my parents worked in manual jobs to pay the rent. They chose to have only 1 child because they could not afford any more than that. They were keen for me to do well at school because they wanted more for me than what they had. I did ok getting O levels and A levels but decided I did not want to go to university instead going out and getting a job. At no point did I consider moving out of my parents home. I paid my parents rent instead. I met a boyfriend ( my now husband) at the age of 21 and we soon realised it was serious and we saved hard for a deposit so we could buy our own flat. It took two years of serious saving to achieve this. Neither of us were on big salaries at the tme me £10k him about £15k and we both paid rent to our respective parents so it wasnt easy. We both had aspirations to better ourselves financially and we worked hard at our chosen careers. 20 years later we have moved a few times and now have two children 8 and 6. I am a SAHM. We have fallen on hard times in the past (Dh has been made redundant twice) but each time we have had enough put by to give us time for him to get another job. If he had not got a job in his chosen field then he would have taken anything and I would have got a job as well just to make ends meet. We left having children until we were in our 30s because we wanted to ensure we were financially secure enough to have them.

There will always be those who genuinely need short term assistance and this is what benefits should be for but sadly there are far too many who abuse the system and spoil it for those who are in genuine need. My father was a case in point he worked solidly for 39 years paying tax and national insurance and was then made reduntant. He was 55 at the time. He retrained in another industry because he knew there were jobs going. Took two years of college (privately funded) to qualify. Just after he qualified he became ill and was diagnosed with cancer. He applied for sickness benefit but was refused. Why? Because he had not paid the last 3 consecutive years national insurance contributions. What about the other 39 years worth you may ask, they apparently dont count. You see this is why people want things to change so that the system helps those people in genuine need.

I don't think it's that reasonable to say the system needs to help those in need and too many are abusing it when you just said your father didn't pay, but should have gotten help. Isn't that a tad hypocritical? Forgive me, I'm an Australian with bad insomnia so if I've missed something I apologise.

It's pretty funny that the same government that said people should be willing to move to find work, is now placing a huge barrier in the way of young people who might actually want to move to find work.

Unless the next speech is about radical reforms to private rental accommodation and the introduction of a building project that will create thousands of new social houses, but somehow I doubt it.

I've been in trouble financially before and when i was younger too and I tried to claim some benefits to help me short term, they didnt give me a penny. I've never got anything before I had to sort it out myself.

Also now we aren't flushed with money and have loads of bills to pay but we aren't entitled to a thing so why should others get it? We are struggling too but can't get benefits. It's not fair really is it?

If you were below a certain threshold of income, you would get top up benefits such as tax credits or housing help.
It's pretty fair, actually.

I don't think it's fair at all. If people are entitled to assistance then everyone should be. Yes genuine need cases perhaps exceptions like disabilities / I'll health then fair enough.

If I have to have the worry of planning for my future without government help then why shouldn't everyone else have the same worries?

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

these are the zeros you are looking for,

these are the zeros if added to any money we have spent on welfare wouldn't even get us close to what we have spent on bailing the banks out.

you know when a naughty child who wants to distract your attention from addressing their bad behaviour whacks a smaller sibling to create a diversion. well unfortunately we have people in government who have not yet grown out of this tactic, I personally blame the parents,

Unfortunately as parent I don't fall for this type of behaviour, and find it insulting when it is tried on.

here's the link for those who missed it,

leedspostcards.co.uk/products/302-stating-the-obvious-lp1000.aspx

I can't just think well I have the security of my benefits coming in can I?

The bank situation is a mess but so is the benefits.