to think there is an inverse relationship between how little money people have and how much they are willing to spend on presents for their children

[Twiglett]

am truly gobsmacked at some of the things that people I know are buying for their children

truly and utterly, spoilt bastard, gobsmacked

why spend that much money? why?

to nickernacker:

my dd loves to ride a pony (hasn't got one) and we feel that as long as she loves doing it we should encourage her...

my ds's lego star wars is on the family computer - none of the children have any gameboys, ds', wii or anything like that.

we prefer to do things together, not spend money on expensive gifts we can't afford.

hope it makes things clear!

FioFio - I did not mean to offend anyone by my post, and I am sorry if it has had this effect. I was trying to show that a persons idea of what is a quality item and therefore of some value depends on what they were raised to view as quality. I used my self and my partner as examples because we were raised differently and have different ideas as to what quality and valuable is. I did not intend this to be viewed as me saying that all middle class people are one way and all working class are the other, I personally dispise broad generalisations such as that. In retrospect I should not have mentioned our class backgrounds as you are right, it makes little difference to my arguement.

Peachy - You don't actually have to sign off JSA for seasonal work/occasional days, you simply have to declare your earnings so they can adjust your benefit accordingly.

Xenia, you read wrong!
I worked every hour god sent when I was pregnant, but i was SINGLE, so still on benefits.
NOW im with my partner, and HE couldnt get a job, no matter how hard he tried.
I am by no means lazy! And worked like a dog when I was pregnant with my first, and after!

Also iv had a hard pregnancy, so why should I go out and get a job and chuck my toddler into childcare, letting somebody else bring im up?! Im not claiming any benefits, so why should i?
This thread is really bizarre! Some people like to spend money on there children, some people dont. So what?!

There's no reason anyone who has someone to support them whether a family trust fund, a partner, male or female, an aunt etc should work. My grandfather supported two sisters all their lives who never worked ever and were unmarried and had no children.

A lot of people feel better if they work even if they don't need the money to do so but I'm sure that depends on the nature of the work. I was just listening to R4 this morning in the car - programme about migrant workers in I think Cornwall, some employers will not take locals because they don't work so hard. Apparently they have trouble getting the Poles to stick to having tea breaks and lunch breaks and going home after an 8 hour shift as they want to carry on! He has to force them to respect their legal rights.

Also they mentioned full time minimum wage jobs at £11k a year which if you're a pole living in a caravan or sharing a floor with 20 other people you might want but not if you're British, understandably.

The other interesting point was about a lady - both her parents are teachers in Poland as is she. In the UK in 2 weeks serving chips in a cafe in Cornwall in the UK she earned more than both her parents' monthly wage.

Xenia - This is interesting! I knew the Poles had a good work ethic, and I really respect it, it's a great quality to have but I can't help but be infuriated that empoloyers choose them over local people to form their work force!
What does this say about the future of the BRITISH unskilled workforce?
I know from experience that £11k is a rediculously poor wage, it's ok for one person to live off if they are lucky enough to get social housing, but it really is a life of existing not living. SO it is not surprising that your average brit could well be reluctant to apply for a job with such a wage, but when your backs against the wall and you've stopped being picky and all you want is a job, any job, you'd take it, trust me! If these low paid jobs are being handed to migrant workers on a plate a HUGE proportion of the british workforce is forced in to the benefit system, and once you're in it can be hard to claw your way out again, especially if you are unskilled.
The powers that be are now mulling over the possibility of removing benfits from any who do not enroll on to a training scheme/ course of some kind... this is all very well but all this will mean is that the unemployment is transferred to a different level of the possible workforce - the skilled, such as builders, electricians etc.
Who's going to pay for this - the tax payer!
If you add to this the FACT that many migrant workers send large proportions of their earnings abroad to aid their families you'll see that as a consequence British money is no longer in circulation in Britain! They aren't using their wages to re-invest in British industries! British industries aren't selling their produce! Buisinesses will start to go under and every day our pound becomes more and more worthless.
The solution can only be for the government to admit their mistake and send the hard working migrants back to their home country and then turn to the unskilled in Job centres across the country and dole them out jobs rather than money. I don't mean pussyfooting around helping them to write CVs I mean take charge, look at what they've done before and/or what they're capable of and GIVE them an appropriate job. If the recipricants don't like the job they've been placed in they are in a much better position to apply for a job that they do want when they are already holding one than when they are standing inline for their JSA!
At the end of the day it is not this country's responsibility to provide jobs and good incomes for europeans, no matter how good their work ethic is! It is this countrys responsibility to look after british nationals before people of any other nation!
Anyway that's got nothing to do with christmas has it!!

Not at all. The poles, the Jamaicans, the Jews and all those others who have helped make this country what it is have been a huge asset.

Workfare would be good - why should anyone get benefits for doing nothing with free child care of course.

Xenia - I'm not a Nazi, I don't care what race people are, and as I said the migrant workers do have fantastic work ethics. They are committed and it is worthy of our admiration, but if we have more jobs available than workforce and so we can quite happily sit back and let non-nationals take up the slack then why are there so many British unemployed? why are there so many British peole who CAN'T gain employment?

After the war this country was in great need and of workers to keep it ticking and we reached out across the world for help. We got it and they worked hard but we weren't very gracious about it. but that was then and then there was a NEED now we have a problem of too many unemployed.

We, as a country, have opened our doors to refugees from across the world, not because we have the resources to accomodate them but because we have the compassion to do so. But these people are also putting a great strain on this countries recources. Many are giving back, as in, becoming hard working members of our workforce and respectable members of our society, but just as many are draining the system and adding to our unemployment figures.

Put the two together - A large amount of british unemployed + A large amount of unemployed refugees

A large strain on the welfare system and No need to offer employment abroad!

Does this help to explain what I mean?

Pk616 trouble is the goverment couldn't give a flying f* about people who are out of work due to their jobs being undercut.
brilliant people can get the job done quicker and cheaper. BUT their taxes will go up in the end to pay for the extra benefits the new people can claim(and send home) and for the extra people who are on benefits because they can't get a job in their trade.
(oh and of cause you arn't a nazi)

Because they won't take minimum wage jobs because they know benefits will be paid if they don't so the answer is say you don't get the benefits unless you do workfare and then they accept them.

The Poles are brilliant, clever, hard working, religious, well educated and have enabled a lot of companies who couldn't get staff to do so. perhaps we should outsource our unemployed to parts of Poland then where we could keep them via tax payers' money more cheaply.

sorry never heard of workfare.

but a sole wage earner with a family to support cannot do this on the minimum wage. people think that social housing is cheap(yes in most cases it is cheaper than a mortgage but not always)
if they take a wage cut the HA isn't going to say fine we will lower your rent. and more often than not they will be just above the threshold for housing benefit or free school dinners so how do they survive?

and are you suggesting sending people to poland to work?

social housing is almost impossible to get. My mum (disabled and 73) is being chucked out of her sisters house. The best they can come up with is a hostel with junkies.
DH is already sleeping on the sofa here cos we don't have enough room. Don't know what to do.

Workfare is done in a lot of countries including some US states. If you want benefits at all you have to work, that's all there is to it.

Plenty of British people have gone off to Eastern Europe to buy cheap property. We outsource work to India and China and a good number of people now go to Eastern Europe and india for operations, so why not park those people who won't or can't work there too?

NMC - your damn right social housing is almost impossible to get! My partner and I were litterally homeless for a year before we got anything, and even that was only because we got our MP involved. We were both working at the time but our wages did not cover the cost of renting privately in Birmingham so we had to sleep in my fiesta (my car insurance was paid for 3 years as part of the deal I made when I bought it, before anyone jumps on that one!)and shower in service stations for 12 months. And no we didn't get evicted from anywhere for not paying our bills or anything like that we were staying at my DP's parents, paying them a rent so that we could save a deposit to rent our own place and furnish it with the essentials. DP's father has parkinsons and is plagued by irrationality and tantrums and he suddenly decided that he'd changed his mind about us staying there and threw us out in the middle of the night. We didn't know he had parkinsons at the time and took it to heart, not speaking to them until DP's sister called us with the bad news AFTER we had been housed.

wow makes me realise how lucky we were and what a good job the OT did. disabled access houses are so few and far between.

Xenia - so you want to ship me out to Poland do you? I am not out of work because of choice. (I'm also mot collecting any benefits cause DP's £11k wage is too high to get help with council tax, housing benefit or for me to collect Jobseekers allowence, but that's by the by) I want to work but have been unable to get any so I guess that would put me on the boat! My home is here in Britain. I was born here. Why should I be shipped out to Poland when the Polish people don't even want to be there? Plenty of brits may have gone all over the damned globe to buy cheap property, that doesn't mean I either condone it or want to be one of them. Yes we do out source work to India and china and that pisses me off too. I hate having to talk to deli when I'm trying to get an engineer from Birmingham to reset my gas meter in Birmingham and being charged 23p/m or what ever the going rate is for this so called customer service. Just because it's cheaper doesn't mean we should be doing it.
Cheaper printing in Europe is putting my stepfather out of business. A small local family business that he inherited from his father that has been going since at least 1950. Because of the current cost of materials and the going rate of pay for skilled printers he CAN NOT cut his prices any lower than he has to compete with european printing firms. The man hasn't even had a personal wage for over 5 years because of this. What should he do? should he sack all his skilled workers and hire some polish people just because they'll work all hours for shit pay and risk the quality of his product? or, because his business is going under and he'll be unemployed soon, should he move to Poland with me?
How would you like it if you lost your job through no fault of your own (lost your business and was unable to start again within 6 months) and you were shipped off to another country?

Jingle - thank you for saying that I'm not a Nazi!

so you would send my dh abroad. even though he is has a trade. what a strange idea.
so who will pay for the extra respite i will then need for dd?? oh yes you the tax payer.

I always find it odd that the people who come up with these odd ideas have no idea of the knock on affect. all they want is to pay less for the plumber or have the local shop open on christmas day so that they can get the pint of milk they forgot.

Xenia, how would workfare work with disabled poeople? 80% of those with severe disabilities are unemployed. Most want to work. But an employers sees someone in a wheelchair who maybe uses a communication aid to speak or has no hand funtion and they wont give them a job however many qualifications they hold. I have many friends in this position, stuck on benefits and bored out of their skulls.
Plus, if you get a job, you suddenly have to pay 800 quid a week towards your carer if you can't dress yourself or feed yourself. Its a trap.
Workfare is also used by companies to exploit people and not have to pay wages as the State pays them their benefits to work. This then pushes wages down for everyone else much to Walmarts or MacDonadls joy.
A better idea would be better 'back to work ' interviews to make sure those who can work at least try. Qualifications you can get withou losing all your benefits while you try to better yourself and stopping discrimination against those who want to work but happen to be a bit different.
And decent respite care so parents and spuses with disabled kids/spouses can go to work and not be carers on a grand wage of £44 a week (gotta be 17p an hour for 24/7 caring. Whoop)

Should my 73 year old mum work or be shipped to Poland? She's on benefits because she raised children alone as a single parent so couldn't save for a pension.

I don't think spending too much on your kids at Christmas makes you a bad parent, just like spending very little doesn't. It doesn't make them spoiled either. I spend about £500 on dd. Its all the toys she'll get till her birthdyy. I am suprised that people feel able to be judgemental about people spending alot. People wouldn't hesitate to tell you off if you acused someone of being cheap.

Xenia - "The Poles are brilliant, clever, hard working, religious, well educated" I'm not disputing that, but so what! And what, for that matter, has their religiousness got to do with anything? And I totally agree that they probably have 'saved' many companies in more ways than one, but why should they, when we have a perfectly able workforce sitting around in jobcenters across the country feeling sorry for themselves because they can't get bloody work! And if employers are giving the jobs top the poles because they are intelligent why won't they give me a job? I have gone for all kinds of jobs and been given various tests by the prospective employers and each and every one of them has turned me down because I did to well and they were afraid I would get bored doing the job! It seems that doesn't count when it comes to migrants because they're that desperate to get a better wage than they get back home the employers just trust that they're not going to become a danger to themselves through boredom!

• "The Poles are brilliant, clever, hard working, religious, well educated"

what every single one of them in the whole country? no prisons or bad people?

surely that is like saying all english people eat chips.

" why should anyone get benefits for doing nothing with free child care of course. "

I think if someone is in need of childcare in order to work, they are NOT doing nothing, are they? They are looking after their kids.

I do actually think that anyone who wants to should be able to stay at home to look after their own kids. I am more than happy to pay the extra tax to accomodate it. I pay enough extra tax for overpaid, overstressed, overdrinking executives to have heart attacks on the NHS.