"Benefits are a lifestyle choice for so many these days"

[Bellerina2]

I'm on the bus and two women behind me are having a long conversation about perceived benefit cheats and one of them just said the above phrase. WIBU to hit her over the head with a rolled up copy of the Guardian??

But seriously, it's so depressing that people think this. Well done to the government and likes of the Sun and Daily Mail for convincing people that those on benefits are leading some sort of charmed life

ex wife - read my post above and you can save your blood pressure!

No one has a problem with those people who work full time and have to claim housing benefit because housing is so expensive. No one has a problem with families who cannot work because of disability and or caring responsibilities. The majority want a benefits safety net, but that doesn't mean the safety net should provide the opportunity to choose not to support yourself and your children.

So kind of the fellow citizens. I subsisted as a carer for four years. I'd hate to be back in that situation now.

What would one do? Explain the minutae of one's circumstances and finances to every person one met in the hope of being deemed 'deserving' by the citizens' jury?

noted!

I get pissed off with people who say 'oh, you'll be going back to work soon then?' as if I'd just sort of forgotten to show up for the last 2 years.

as to the 'lifestyle choice' brigade - of course a minority will do this. but the hateful rhetoric peddled by channel 5 and their ilk suggests a bigger problem that can only be solved by some major societal change.

I dread to think what that change might be.

Oh the issue of welfare reform is nothing new.

Frank Field was tasked to overhaul the welfare state by the Blair administration. Told to 'think the unthinkable'.

When he did, he was dully sacked.

I think you mean 'duly' Word

(But he was a pretty dull politicial so....)

^politician

I'm currently on benefits (a year this month). My other half works full time in a shit job for shit pay. I worked from I was 16 until I was 22. So 6 years, when my son was born (just before I turned 19) I started claiming child benefit and tax credits. I now get about the same on income support as I did working part time. I get rent help too (which I would loose if I went back to work). I watched other girls start claiming jsa at 17, then move on to income support when there children were born. Then they have more and more kids (nicely spaced out of course, not to close together). These woman never have worked and never will. I used to feel so bitter leaving my small son with relatives while I went out to work (first in retail, including weekends, then cleaning) while they sat on their arses all day doing the bare minimum around the house and with their kids. I do hope to go back to work if I can find suitable hours (not fussy what job, when you have cleaned toilets for a living, anything else is a step up). I stopped working when they tried to put me on a zero hours contract (we might need you now and again). Really hopeful something will come up soon.

I have seen tons of people choose this "lifestyle". Families where mum and dad left school with no gcse's, have never worked a day in their lives, and are quite happy for kids to be the same. Don't care if kids homework is done, and don't encourage children to learn. Have never read their children a book. Don't keep their homes clean, children properly groomed etc. It makes me feel dirty being on benefits, worrying people will think I'm like that. It seems that some people on benefits have a mindset, that they just don't want to work or stretch their intellects through education, and they don't have values or manners. They just don't seem to care at all. Lot's of these people also have alcohol or drug issues, which seems to be par for the course, and get worse as they get older. Some have kids my age (23 very soon) and they have turned out just the same. And their grandchildren will probably be the same (kids my sons age, already cheeky little buggers, never taught to say please or thank you, spend most of their time running amoke around the streets because mum and dad can't be bothered with them. Just how I remember the mums and dads being when we were all that age/how their lives were. While I lived in the same area, in the same kind of house and attended the same school, my childhood was quite different. My parents worked, (the odd time claiming jsa between jobs) and had a completely different mindset, that has always stuck with me, has made me want to raise my son how I was raised. Dp is much the same (parents worked and had values) but he too has watched/is watching a lot of his peers continue their parents cycle of apathy.

Yes, duly.

I'm dyslexic so that's not a bad one .

Still you are saying so many people scrounging from the state. There really are very few but you refuse to see that because you've been brainwashed by the worker/shirker rhetoric spun by this government and supported by the Daily Fail

So I, a working class woman, who grew up in a housing estate with it's fair share of scroungers and wasters (and drug dealers, paramilitaries, thieves and other scum) who do not want to work, who treat their children like dirt and take everything for granted...

I imagined it all?

wickedlazy Brilliant post. And you are right. There are thousands upon thousands of people who live as you describe up and down this country.

Which is why these days the only people I know who vote Labour are educated, wealthy champagne socialists and those who benefit directly from the welfare state.

Most ordinary working and middle class people don't vote Labur because they see things as Wicked so perfectly describes.

The percentage of people 'scrounging' is TINY, as people on this thread have already said.

Yes, it's unfortunate and no, I don't condone it. But

a) it's a social problem –why DO a small number of people take advantage of benefits? Why DO people prefer not to work? It's not as simple as 'Oh they're lazy'.

b) tougher sanctions would mean that people who genuinely need and do not fiddle benefits (the vast east majority) would suffer. Personally I'm willing to let a tiny minority fiddle the system if it means that much greater numbers of people get the benefits and support they claim for legitimately.

I live in Northern Ireland, and our voting is quite different and has it's own issues. Our politicians are still so focused on combating sectarianism and keeping the peace, and fighting over everything, serious issues don't get the attention they deserve. The republicans are much better at sticking to their word and getting the results they promise and helping their constituents. But unionists will never vote for them because they still want a united Ireland. Unionists don't really have a voice at the minute. Teenage boys from unionist backgrounds have the worst exam results in the country, but not much is being done about it. The alliance party are a middle ground party, but don't get the support they probably deserve.

wicked you're describing the underclass. That's a tiny minority. You must be trapped in a ghetto.

You could relocate (?)

Totally agree wicked. Middle class guardian reading. liberal leftie here then lived in London with many neighbours as wicked describes. Until you have lived alongside people living like this you don't get it. I do now. We moved obviously but many people don't have that option.

Or you don't realise that the underclass is a lot bigger than you realise? In this country (N.I.) the "underclass" is huge. Ordinary working class people live along side these people, and our children attend the same schools. We have to deal with these social issues every day. Most of us would have to win on a scratch card or similar to move to one of the naice areas.

Do you know how much social science and journalistic effort has been devoted to determining exactly that wicked?

The underclass is the size that it is. Bigger in NI, it's true.

Oh come onKerala, the mere existence of such people, or such neighbourhoods, doesn't make them more statistically significant than they are.

Or make it any less offensive to tar all low-income groups, all benefit claimants, all unemployed with the same brush.

Most social housing tenants work, most HB is paid to workers, most unemployed people have a good work history etc etc. Those stats haven't been forged.

wickedlazy describes a fair few of my neighbors in West London. I was a Guardian leftie before I moved here.

I'm not daft I don't tar all benefit claimants of course not. But some do choose the life style depressing in itself as a negative thing for them.

Ha yes goodbye. Your sympathy drains away with gangsta rap booming through the walls and their Staffordshire dogs leaping the fence, terrifying your baby and shitting in your garden

Dawndonna

But Ptolemy they are not taking money that I could have. They are taking money from a pot, but that pot doesn't get dished out to the rest of us if there is more available.

You are right, it doesn't get dished out to everyone else, but there no reason why that has to be the case indefinitely. It's not going to change at the moment, because increasing benefits - any benefits - is not going to be a vote winner. But I think the way to start changing that attitude, so that increasing benefits would be a vote winner, would be to ensure that only people who need and deserve be dost actually get them.

It's no good you saying no one has a problem with families who can't work due to disabilities etc. because in fact they do. It's not until I or a few others bring it up on these threads that people think about it.

Again, you are right that a few people probably do have a problem with families who can't work. They will be very few though, because there really aren't many people around that are both stupid and heartless. I'd be willing to bet good money that there are fewer people around who have a problem with disability benefits and who don't keep that opinion to themselves than there are people who are taking as much as they can out if the benefits system despite being capable of work if they made an effort.

So if it's wrong for me and people who share my opinions to contribute to 'the rhetoric' then why isn't it wrong for you to do the same when talking about the few uneducated people who tar everyone with the same brush.

I also agree with you that the government needs to tackle tax evasion, but I believe it's doing that, and there are enough people the civil service that we could sort out both tax evasion and the people who cheat the system at the other end of the scale.

And to bring tax avoidance into it, which many lefties seem to have a massive problem with despite it being legal, how is tax avoidance any worse than claiming benefits you could manage perfectly well without? Both are legal, and both are taking money out of the system that they could choose not to.

In 2013, N.I. had a population of 1,829,725. 5.7% unemployed. So 104,294 people. If 20% (and that's a generous estimate, it's probably much higher) people have no intention of returning to work (if they ever did) that's an underclass of 20,858. Only a tiny amount and that's just in our little corner of the UK.

depressing in itself as a negative thing for them.

Yep.

But very very little to do with the benefits debate.

The underclass has always been with us, long before the welfare state.

Remember Booth's poverty mapping?