To not understand how people can justify it

[ijustdontunderstand]

Okay, not a bun fight I just want to understand how those who vote Tory can think the cuts to disability benefits are OK.

This is NOT saying if you vote Tory you're a bad person, at all, I just want to understand. Will you vote them in again knowing?

Akire you've very convinently missed off the number of claimants for 'bad backs' and 'depression' which is where the vast majority of the fraud is. Why is that?

mysteries totally agree with that

LettingAgentNightmare

Akire you've very convinently missed off the number of claimants for 'bad backs' and 'depression' which is where the vast majority of the fraud is. Why is that?

Where's your figures for that?

Hazelisours, in 1997 when Labour came to power 500,000 packs of butter were sold
In 2011 when conservatives came to power 4 million bottles of milk were sold
How can you explain that

See what I did there? Both dairy products but not the same thing. Is this how spin drs roll?

The question is relevant because we would probably agree that some policies would make a party unacceptable, whatever the rest of their manifesto said.

"Labour crippled this country", "they can't be trusted with the economy", "they send too much".... usual phrases trotted out every time this sort of thread comes up yet when people post links proving that George Osborne has borrowed more than they ever did they get conveniently ignored. Whilst I accept that labour are not completely blameless it is not them that caused the world wide recession... you know the one that means pretty much every western country remains up to its eyeballs in debt, the one caused by bankers, the very same bankers that Geaege Osborne wanted to deregulate.
I will never vote tory, I'm a floating voter but will never ever float in that direction, they are self serving party who seek to demonise the most vulnerable whilst doing fuck all about the real criminals. As many pp have said the rate at which disability benefits are fraudulently paid is very very small. The fact that 80% of pip decisions are overturned at appeal is unbelievable. I hope I never have to go through that process, it's sounds ridiculously stressful and I imagine it can be incredibly dehumanizing.

Well said Frikadela
I also think some Tory voters will gloss over policies on disabled because it does not directly affect their lives.
The media propaganda of benefit fraud is a convenient way of excusing the Tory party's horrendous treatment of the disabled.

My babysitter' husband has never had a job. Bad back. Lifelong benefits. Drives a motorbike. His wife works part time as a dinner lady and cant take more hours as they would lose their council tax benefit. She does cash in hand jobs like cleaning and babysitting and her husband a bit of decorating Their 20 year old daughter has two little children and has been evicted by her parents from their four bedroomed home on advice. She now lives in a rather nice apartment a few streets away and her mother sees her every day. Obviously she isnt thinking of getting a job . Should the father have had his benefits removed a long time ago? You betcha. Otherwise they are all lovely honest people whom you could leave your handbag with in confidence.

letting I have a "bad back". Four years of treatment and one failed surgery. I'm waiting to have my spine fused. A five hour op where they prise two vertebrae apart, remove the disc, place a piece of bone grafted from my hip, then place a metal bracket round the two vertebrae and bolt it all into place. Obviously putting it on and its all made up to get my £55 a week.

long without high rate mobility I would not be able to get a blue badge. Without a blue badge I often can't park anywhere close enough to where I need to be. So I can go out, find the only option is a multi storey car park and end up going home. I struggle with stairs. I drag one leg badly when in pain (pretty much all the time) and I just can't cope with that extra time walking.

Sorry. Should have said that they vote Labour and I don't. And the small number of genuinely disabled people round here seem to have retained their allowances although they did have to reapply using a complicated system.

James Meek wrote an EXCELLENT piece on this for the LRB, around the idea of 'Robin Hood'. He points out that there are essentially two configurations of the legend:

1. The Robin who steals from the rich and gives to the poor as a redistributive act - the rich, who are pictured as indolent and wallowing in luxury in large houses and the bureaucratic class (the Sheriff) are here the evil.
2. The Robin who is a champion of those ordinary peasants working and paying tax, who are the victims of a poor who are conceptualised as indolent, wallowing in large houses and not contributing, whereas aristocrats with property empires and hedge fund managers who've made vast fortunes out of market movements, are grouped with 'hard-working peasants' as 'the oppressed of the earth'.

It's the particular (imaginative and imaginary) configuration of the poor-as-really-rich that allows work to emerge as the master sign of all decency and morality, and creates a really reactionary climate where attention is distracted away from the very real rising inequality (not just the obscenity of the top 1% owning so much, but the top 30-40% more generally). It also legitimates huge amounts of selfish entitlement ('I worked for it, I deserve it'), and disguises the way that everyone - rich and poor - benefits enomously from things that are held in common. (Try running a successful business in a climate of social breakdown and instability where there are constant riots over the availability of basic resources).

Really worth a read: www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n04/james-meek/robin-hood-in-a-time-of-austerity

Coffeeisnectar.

Sorry to hear about your back. Hope you dont mind my asking but can you drive a motorbike or paint a ceiling in your daughter's Victorian style flat? My neighbour can do both.

There will always be people who take advantage. But they usually find a way round it to work the system.

I have a friend who gets benefits because of depression. A friend has had to move in with him as otherwise he rarely eats (he was getting very underweight), washes or takes his medication. He has worked all his life but got very depressed after a traumatic event last year. If he didn't get benefits, friends would have to house and feed him. He can't look after himself, never mind work.

I also find it quite unpalateable that there is ample money to go and drop bombs on people, and to give MP's pay rises/pay expenses for second homes (IMHO they should stay in travel inns etc if they have to be in London for meetings, or move to their constituencies), not to bother chasing corporates to pay taxes, allowing the avoidance and evasion of taxes, but we have to take money from the most vulnerable.
A 'catch all' approach is not the answer. Too many people have already died having been found 'fit for work' which they are patently not.
Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is what it is.

There will always be fraud and abuse of any welfare system. Not because the system is wrong. But because some people are. Punishing thousands and thousands of people because of one bloke with a motorbike is overkill though, doncha think?

Actually, there billions of pounds in unclaimed benefits every year.

I think in an ideal world you would have provision of welfare as the left would like with an economy run by the right. The closest we have got to this in the UK was the Tony Blair government in the good days - he and his government are now vilified by both left and right! (i didn't vote for him!).

If you let the government finances get to the state of Spain, Portugal or Greece, then it doesn't matter who is in power (in Portugal it is the Communists in coalition!) they don't have the finances to provide for the most vulnerable in society.

the Government have to try to provide the best for the majority and the country as a whole. Unfortunately this will always mean heartbreaking stories of hardship for some people.

There is no perfect system of Government. The UK has generally muddled through by having a conservative government that curt public spending, repair public finances and reduce regulation helping grow the economy - but going too far in all these respects. They are then replaced by a labour government that increases public sector spending and increase regulation on "socially destructive industry etc but inevitably go too far - beyond what is financially viable in the long term and so the cycle swings back.

There are good altruistic reasons to vote labour and conservative and their are also selfish reasons...

Whether i vote conservative next election will depend on the state of the country at the time and the leaders of the different parties at the election

As a self-employed person I have to take the attitude "I feel shit. I'm going to feel shit where ever I am, so I might as well earn something". If there was only a way to preserve that kind of incentive without being unkind?

Does anyone think that Labour would restore the benefits if they came to power?

I think frikadela and the others pointing out that Cameron/Osborne have borrowed more than Blair/Brown are missing the same point that the Labour party as a whole has missed and why the sting of not being able to manage the economy still hits - the public view borrowing differently in different stages of the economic cycle.

Cameron/Osborne were facing a recession, the income for government in tax was greatly reduced, while at the same time, there was more need to spend, most people view it as sensible to borrow in an economic downturn to keep things going - however Blair/Brown oversaw a very long boom, they had a booming economy and a relatively high government 'income' from tax. There was money in the economy, they spent it all and then borrowed more to meet additional spending they wanted to make, rather than tax higher.

And yes, many people liked the good things the Labour government was doing with all that money, and yes, liked that all those goodies arrived without the need for higher taxes, and no, they didn't look all that carefully about where it was coming from - but the Labour party's response to "why were you borrowing in a boom?" has been "It's not that bad, the Tories have borrowed more in a recession!" - it makes them look like they can't manage the economy, and they don't get that you should be behaving differently in a downturn than in a boom.

Borrowing in an economic downturn = not great but understandable/acceptable
Borrowing in a booming economy = reckless and a sign you can't be trusted to make sensible decisions with the economy

Until Labour address this - either by justifying why they borrowed in a boom or admit it was bad management of the economy, then they won't win over voters for whom a stable, well managed economy is more important than other issues like the levels of disability benefits and the hoops you have to jump through to get them.

Why are people blaming Labour for the GLOBAL economic crash?

The whole 'Labour will fuck up the economy' thing doesn't actually make any sense to me.

It was the US sub-prime mortage market that pushed it all over the edge - what on earth has that got to do with the Labour party?

I've never understood why people connect the two.

Pandora - because not all countries were as badly hit as ours. Because decisions they made meant we were much harder hit when the inevitable boom ended.

Because all those banks and financial insituations HQing themselves in London due to a 'low touch' approach to regulation didn't ring alarm bells that there might be a reason why other countries weren't letting get away with such behaviour.

Because funding excessive spending through borrowing in a boom rather than taxing corporations properly meant that we had nowhere to go when the economy shrank.

Because assuming the boom would last forever so the money would keep pouring in was foolish.

Because the Labour party only seemed to have an issue with the size of banker bonuses once they stopped being paid. (and the tax stopped coming in)

exaltedwombat - You think self employed people don't get chronically ill or disabled? We are not talking about having a bad cold or generally feeling shit. I feel like that on a good day. I work when well people would be phoning in sick.