to think that there are people who choose to live a life on benefits?

[autumnlights12]

the recent threads about George Osbourne made me wonder..
A high number of posters say that people don't choose to live like that, they stumble into it, hate it, what a miserable existence it is, nobody would ever choose it etc..
but if you have two or three children through choice, whilst at the same time having no job to provide for them, or if you turn down the job at the local factory (as I know someone who did) because it pays £7.50 an hour and a full time job there doesn't give you the same unemployment rights and benefits, isn't that choosing to live a life on benefits? Or being trapped on benefits? I'm not talking about people who can't work, disabled people, ill people, women dumped by feckless ex and left to fend for herself etc.. of course they should be protected.
I was watching 999 What's Your Emergency and I know that area. And I know people like that exist. And it's often a second, third generation who have never worked a day in their life, even during times when work was freely available. In the town I live, we have numerous Eastern European immigrants who all seem to be working, but mostly in low paid work the locals wont do
What say you?

I'm too tired. I'm not making myself clear. Time to finish watching Revenge and go to bed! Night :)

Goodnight

I will definitely be going out leafletting for my local Labour Party branch now. Thanks for the encouragement.

Oh no have I shaken the complacency! Terrible move on my part.

The Lib Dems are most definitely NOT the party of right wingers who don't want to vote Tory - I'm very left wing and very, very liberal and opposed to mass centralisation and very Pro Europe.

I don't agree with every policy (and Cleggs an idiot and Brown was daft not to offer to get into bed with us) but it's certainly a party I've been keen on for 10 years.

Before that I was Labour for 20 years but was pissed off with spin.

The Liberals are the natural home of the left with a social conscience - if David sex-god Mitchell votes Lib Dem it must be good

as the moment we have a bill that hopes to grant employers the right to refuse all employment rights and doing so gives them massive tax breaks,so they can offer a job that excludes you from protection

all part time employees in low income jobs who work less than 35 hours pw will be forced to obtain other work with no regard for any job they currently have this could require them to quit a 16 hour job for a 0 hour contract with no legal protection or get sacked for attending interviews during there normal working hours.

can anybody else see the problem this could cause.

its now gone from benefit bashing of the feckless to just benefit bashing and now bashing the working poor

LFC - they used to be. Most definitely. Am I the only old person here who can remember this and also the blue collar Tories?

Hilarious post, LFC, keep up the good work!

I don't get it.

No, I lost my job and found another one. I realise that was partly down to luck, but I don't want to vote labour because if everything stayed the way it was under them, then the country really will be up shit creek.

Yes that hostility isn't going to win any friends either.

Let's face it, why are the Lib Dems supporting this stuff. Is that what people who voted for them thought they were getting. Of course not. I blame them more than the Tories. Sneaky double crossing lot. I can't see the Lib Dems even surviving the next election as a party.

OP, YANBU imo, my friend is one of them. She has actually admitted to me numerous times that she would rather exist on £20 a week than work, even part time for £2000 a week.
I don't understand it tbh. She has a very poor standard of living and being poor consumes every single waking hour of every single day for her, yet the thought of going to work is apparently "beneath" her, and that is what she says to anyone who asks why she doesn't work, and never has.

Unfortunately, no govt has yet worked out an effective way of separating the 'can't works' from the 'wont works' with any degree of accuracy, so to punish the 'wont works' means that many many more 'can't works' will suffer immensely.

Is this a road we really want to go down? Punishing everyone for the sake of the 'wont work' people who would probably find other ways of making sure they didn't work anyway ?

It's nothing to do with just me being alright, it's to do with the majority of people I know and care for being alright.

I just really dont understand how the government can get away with attacking the poor like this. I really really dont.

How can the Tories see the majority of people you know alright? Have I misunderstood? Are your family and friends all hedge fund managers? Actually I only know one hedge fund manager, and he would never vote for those bastards.

I would say that the lib dems are actually worse than the tories because at least with tories you know what you are getting (ie bastards) but with lib dems they made themselves out to be all cuddly and caring and now they're just stamping their ecco shoes on a human face forever.

In response to the OP, I would say that you are being unreasonable. There are actually very very few people who have never worked. There are hardly any families at all where generations have never worked. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation recently did a study about it. What they found was that there were some people who had periods of employment followed by periods of unemployment, especially when their kids were young and there were pressures on their earned income such as childcare etc. But very few people had never worked. The JRF actually set out to find examples of generational unemployment and found so few that they were not statistically relevant. It's a myth put out by twats like Osborne to do their old 'divide and conquer' stuff.

I used to worry about politics. I used to worry about the economy. I try not to any more. Why? Because its too horrendous.

Now the mess the country is in is blamed totally on Labour. I worry about this. I wonder, if we were under a Conservative government at the time the extraordinary events which caused the credit crunch had occurred, what would have happened?

I worked in IT at that time, for a bank that is now partly owned by the taxpayer, in a department run by a man who has now been villified in the banking world. It was all about risk in those days. IT used to be mainly about testing. You'd spend 5 days writing a program and 10 days testing it - trying to break it. It would then be tested in conjunction with all the other programs it would be run with. It would them be tested by the business people that would eventually use it.

At that time we were told differently. Don't test new systems rigorously. Bang 'em in, we'll sort the fallout on the fly in production. We suffered this, we wouldn't do that usually, we said it was madness, but budgets were slashed and it became the accepted banking mentality. Worldwide as it happened.

What would the Tories have done in the face of this?

I'm not convinced Plan A is working now, anymore than I'm convinced that the Tories wouldn't have got us into any less of a mess.

Stop and think. It was a global thing. Absolutely massive shift in attitude to risk in a virtually short space of time. Take risk, take risk, it will be ok, nothing will happen. Speak out and you'll will be shouted down as an idiot. I know, I was.

Was this Labour's fault? Really? For giving out too many benefits?

But as I say, I don't follow politics. Because just now, I really don't think anyone has a clue what to do really.

So let's just have a go at benefit scoungers, because, hey, no one likes a scounger.

^this. Facts and research, not DM prejudice. Thanks Wallison!

I would like to know how many families earning up to 80k (I think) aren't claiming the cb they are entitled to. I know it was 42k but heard that a couple could earn lots more.
Anyway hands up, whose done this?

Usual, you have to admit the irony. You spend a number of posts dismissing the idea that the working poor or anyone would vote outside their best interests. Then you accuse someone of voting as an "I'm alright Jack". Do you see what you did there.