To think dh is winding me up when he says some people on benefits are getting £500 a week?

[angelos02]

I'm pretty sure he's talking bullocks? Otherwise why the fuck would anyone do a minimum wage job?

Benefit cap??

This ONLY applies to people who are NOT getting working tax credits.

If you do and are working 30 hours the cap doesn't apply

The government made it sound like they'd honourably capped it at a lower amount when if you're on WTC the sky's the limit.

And yes, I personally know families who get way above this and are proud of it.

www.citizensadvice.org.uk/benefits/the-benefit-cap/the-benefit-cap-and-housing-benefit/the-benefit-cap-and-housing-benefit-who-is-exempt/

Some only have to do 16 hours to get round the cap and people indeed so abuse it.

There's posts on here all the time re ways to get round univeral credit, the cap etc. People admit to only working 16 hours to get round the cap, not because they want to work, spouses putting themselves on the DPs self employed books to still qualify for universal credit etc.

The whole system is a farce and people play it which just shows what sort of society we have become.

The government made it sound like they'd honourably capped it at a lower amount when if you're on WTC the sky's the limit.

Er, no, from later this year two children will be the limit for new claimants/births. And children was really where the money was as far as tax credits were concerned. WTC on their own without the children is a very modest top up to the very lowest wages, not a 'sky's the limit' situation at all.

BillSykes yes the Labour government inflicted a terrible punishment on low earners by giving them extra money to lift their dc out of poverty.

Lone parents can get WTC and CTC on 16hours.

A huge amount of lone parents cant actually afford to work more hours than that and it's not a case of it just not being viable it's actually cannot afford it because the associated costs eliminate the wages and tax credits fully

We get around this a month.

I am disabled as is dd.

The last few years I have been able to sense an increasing and almost palpable hatred from people towards us.

I can assure you if I could work and feel a bit of pride about myself I would.

It has been said within my hearing before that disabled people should just be put down, we are all scroungers costing decent people money.

It seems anti-benefit hatred is almost acceptable now. It does make me sad and very scared for dd's future.

After paying for the extra help we need, equipment to make life bearable and just basic bills we are left with very little.

Hardly the life of riley at the taxpayers expense.

i said it AGES ago and said no one ever considers it and unsurprisingly no one has even after it's been said.

a low income family would also be getting benefits so no you can't compare the total benefits income of one household and the earned wages only income of another and say it's not worth working.

the family on minimum wage would likely be getting at least their salary again in working tax credits and housing benefit.

as i said earlier i worked out that i was cheaper to the state whilst ill and uemployed than when i went back into work and started getting WTC.

i was much better off and i daresay many of the posters here would have been happier seeing me go to work with a disability and drop my child off at the childminders and walk 3 miles to work etc but it cost the tax payer more than when i was off work.

persian I was being sarcastic
I totally see that now, sorry for being a bit snappy last night.

BillSykes yes the Labour government inflicted a terrible punishment on low earners by giving them extra money to lift their dc out of poverty.

Sigh. You do realise Labour's claims to have 'lifted children out of poverty' are widely discredited, partly because of the dreadful measures they used based on % of average wages. It meant they could claim to have lifted children out of poverty by colluding with the suppression of wages of people in work rather than by actually doing anything constructive for the low income families themselves. Their 'cutting children in poverty' claims were in a large part a knowing and elaborate scam.

And it was an unfair system which rewarded dependency, and the greater the dependency the greater the rewards. Every time you tried to do something for yourself you were punished.

Spiralling housing costs meant that people who were supposedly on incomes too high for any help other than a bit of money to help with childcare costs were living in actual, real poverty because they were left with so little money after their bills were paid. It was awful and I am bitter about it. I remember myself and a lot of other people who worked at the time having to skip meals to feed their kids and struggling to pay the utility bills whilst our supposedly poverty stricken neighbours had all the latest gadgets and plenty of disposable income. Yet apparently despite not being able to feed a whole family properly or heat our homes adequately the fact we had to hand a huge chunk of our income straight over to a landlord every month meant we weren't in poverty because that income was treated as if it was disposable income we could go splashing around.

Labour treated those just above the thresholds horrendously and they knew this was happening.

What always puzzles me is how it always seems to be the people who display a bit of resentment towards certain benefit claimants (the "undeserving" kind) who have intimate knowledge of their benefit-claiming neighbours' or acquaintances' finances. Even when I lived on one of the roughest estates in NE England a few years ago, where I was very much in the minority as a FT worker and where a high proportion of the properties were council/HA, I never knew what my neighbours were claiming. We talked about all sorts of crap but didn't share financial details.

Also it never crosses anyone's mind that the "latest gadgets" are often from Bright House or similar, bought "on tick" at punitive interest rates, or that some of what they hear might be simple bravado.

who have intimate knowledge of their benefit-claiming neighbours' or acquaintances' finances
If you are referring to me with that statement, the reason why I know is because when my neighbour's partner was being chased for some old debts he had to produce a budget of all of his household's finances.

Neither of them had a clue how to do it and so I painstakingly produced a spreadsheet for them and explained it all to them.

That is how I know.

I also found out that they had needlessly been paying a contribution to their council tax, so I got the necessary forms and not only got them an exemption but also got the money they had already paid refunded.

Bill the tax credits thresholds were very high under Labour well over 40k. If you couldn't make ends meet on that kind of wage you were living beyond your means.
Living in an expensive property has an element of choice. Unless you were living in a one bedroom flat with your dc you could have saved money on housing. Low earners can't save money not eating and ceasing to pay utility bills.
That's the issue with the " squeezed middle" they forget they are the middle class, with choices many people that Labour helped will never have.

Having the threshold at £40k was always ridiculous.

Er, you do realise that BrightHouse items still have to be paid for right? So households who have BrightHouse items do so because they can afford the repayments. Otherwise they would simply send balliffs around to take them away. And so normally it was households with big benefit payments who could afford to get these things on repayments where working households, or those just over the threshold of income to claim, couldn't dream of making the big repayments. The fact it comes from BrightHouse on poor deals doesn't change the fact they are expensive goods with an expensive price tag beyond the reach of a lot of working families but accessible to a lot of benefit claimants under the Labour system where many were better off.

And, yes, you do tend to notice when a neighbour does not work (ever) but is engaged daily in expensive activities such as sitting in the pub or drinking in their front garden, or horse riding or quad biking or motorcycling etc, etc, etc.

You tend to notice that sort of thing when you're working 60 hours a week but still struggling to scrape together the £4:00 a week for your kids' swimming lessons.

Which is why middle class Labour supporters always seem so supportive of welfare claimants with lives like that. After all, if you can afford something yourself then why resent someone else getting it for free?

But for Labour's traditional working class voters (who had to watch their own lifestyles get considerably worse) watching the most feckless and uncontributing in society being treated to lifestyles totally unaffordable to them was a slap in the face. And yet another reason why Labour has left the working class vote so utterly disenfranchised.

Which is why middle class Labour supporters always seem so supportive of welfare claimants with lives like that. After all, if you can afford something yourself then why resent someone else getting it for free?

I grew up in a (now ex-) mining village, no one in my family - including me - went to university, I don't own the house I live in and I've been on the bones of my arse living on value brand rice and pasta struggling to find the bus fare to work. Still doesn't give me the right to police what other people do with their money. Sorry if that doesn't fit with your stereotype.

Well, actually, I (and most of the rest of the electorate) seem to disagree with you on that. If you receive money from the state, which means your fellow citizens and their businesses, then, yes, other people do have a right to ask if that is money well spent. And an awful lot of people had their own personal experiences which meant they strongly believed it wasn't. You can sneer at that as 'policing' other people's spending, but people aren't going to have the wool pulled over their eyes and be gas lighted forever.

Of course there might be some people who can say that their individual circumstances don't fit that mould, but the fact remains that Labour's vision of the welfare state was not one which the electorate shared and was really rather unpopular.

Brighthouse payments are affordable if you are on a low income, generally managing week to week and not monthly salaries. People pay the massive interest on it by having the flat screen telly on a £5 per week for 4 years.

People also forget that families may get gifts from others, but it doesn't fit the "feckless poor" narrative that lots of you like to go on about.

!But for Labour's traditional working class voters (who had to watch their own lifestyles get considerably worse"

Funny that between 1997 and 2007 unemployment was lower than at any point in the previous 18 years of Tory rule at the same time average wages grew in real terms under Labour.

I woudn't be claiming you speak for "most of the rest of the electorate" Bill, Daily Mail readers maybe but not the most of the rest of the electorate.

I have always voted Labour. I think the Labour Party need to understand why many of their core voters abandoned them. I see no sign of that.

Well why has it never been a vote winner foxes? Like immigration it's another thing that Labour never never promises, never puts on it's manifesto, never asks people to vote for, but sneaks in through the back door after elected because they know that they are vote losers and massively unpopular.

Labour fiddled the unemployment figures by moving people onto sickness benefits, not by getting people into work BTW.

And wages only rose under Labour because the wages of the highest paid rose - those of the lowest paid stagnated or dropped post 2004.

This " Labour voters abandoning the party" line is a bit odd really. They won almost all of their safe seats in England in the last election and were routed by the SNP in Scotland too, but this was due to the back lash against them from the Scottish Indy ref.

We had this referendum because Cameron was worried about losing votes in key areas to UKIP so promised to have it, as many if not more safe Tory areas voted to leave, and more Tory MP's did, going against their party leader, who had just won them the election. We now have a PM who has no electoral mandate because the leadership of the Tory party collapsed after the referendum.

Yet Labour are the ones in crisis? Its a good bit of spin, but it isn't accurate, and the referendum was not swung by voters in Labour areas.

"Labour fiddled the unemployment figures by moving people onto sickness benefits, not by getting people into work BTW."

No that was Thatcher in the 1980s, sorry, it may have happened under Labour too, but it was a practice started by Thatcher, unemployment fell under Labour, and was low until 2007/2008.

The thing about wages, wages rose between 2004 and 2008, the lowest paid as we have had discussed before the bottom 5 % of earners saw their wages go down marginally due to immigration, but everyone else saw their wages go up. It isn't a case of large increases at the top effecting the average. So most people saw increased prosperity under a Labour government.

Tory voters have become very over confident about winning the last election, they forget that even in 2010 ( when GB the worst PM of all time according to you lot) you couldn't win the election out right, and then when you did you did it with a very small majority.

Oh FFS foxes this thread is not even about the referendum, you're like a dog with a bone dragging it into everything.

Do you realise how laughable a statement like Labour 'won almost all their safe seats' (except the ones in Scotland) is as a supposed endorsement of a parties success is? They're safe seats. That's the whole point of them. Winning them with reduced minorities is a failure, not a success.

The fact that parking on sickness benefits began under Thatcher doesn't change the fact that trumpeting supposed falling unemployment under Labour is inaccurate and uses massaged figures.

And as for wage stagnation, yes, the wages I referred to were the wages of the lowest paid - the working class. So the wittering on about 'actually wealthier people got wealthier' claptrap is irrelevant to my point - which is that getting wealthier did not apply to most of the Labour Party's traditional core vote aside from public sector workers.

I can't really see any reason for Conservative voters not to feel confident at the moment. Labour does appear to be the party in crisis and on the verge of a split at the moment. And people like yourself who are determined to drag Labour into the realms of the far left are making pretty damn sure they remain unelectable only appealing to student activists and people who'd vote for pigs with red rosettes and not actually the rest of the general electorate in any numbers.

It must be nice living in your echo chamber of denial foxes.

I think Small deserves sympathy she's driven all discussion off the EU boards and needs somewhere else to hold court