Welfarisation has made people utterly entitled and unable to take responsibility for themselves and their families.

[hagchic]

I grew up in a working class family. The values I was taught were that you stood on your own two feet and it was no one else's job to do what you could do for yourself.

If you were hurt, you were expected to get up and go and clean yourself up - and stop whining about it unless it was actually serious. If you were ill, you went to bed and if you were lucky some magic lucozade appeared.

If you were sad, then you were sad. If life was unfair then that was just how life was and you needed to deal with it.

You never ever sought charity or took benefits when you were able to work or put up with less. You lived to your own means, not to what you saw on TV or at school - and if you wanted that lifestyle it was up to you to get it.

Today everyone has the expectation that someone must help them, that they are obliged to help them - even before they have made any attempt to actually do the work of helping themselves. They expect luxuries like holidays, pets, new clothes and treats when they do nothing to earn this.

I think self sufficiency is a value that needs to return to our society.

But they are not taxing the wealthy they, are taxing a largely captive middle.

Why should needing help be seen as a personal failure though
the people I know on benefits are single mum nurses who married absolute pricks or people who worked blue collar jobs and got industrial or asbestos related injuries
or families in 2 low paid roles with a teaching assistant and a healthcare assistant both working thier bums off not able to afford to eat
stuff like that
why would they be ashamed?
its good we’ve moved on from that surely?

Also by chance was this attitude prevalent when we could sustain a family on one normal income?
when if you didn’t own a property for a reasonable price proportional to your salary you could get a secure socially rented property?

I Royaly agree with you!

It's so strange, on one side of my family the older generations are incredibly entitled and expect handouts front be government. Can't understand why I don't live in a council house, why I work full time when I could claim UC etc etc
The subsequent generations are more self sufficient and independent and less entitled . So grandparents (all now dead) incredibly lazy and entitled, parents/aunts/uncles slightly less so but still think they should have more than they have without earning it, older cousins again less so
But that's just one family. I imagine everyone is different and you can't generalise by generation

Up to a point I agree.

however this country has had a welfare system since 1601 continuously up to the present day.

and for all that time a major problem facing the people who ran it was feckless fathers who got women pregnant and fucked off and refused to support their child.

bastardy bonds whereby parish councils pursued fathers who refused to pay for their children were common.

see example here:

https://www.genguide.co.uk/source/bastardy-bonds-documents-parish-poor-law/

so if the uk has seen welfarisation it’s been around for at least 400 years…..

I was a kid in the late 1940s - early 1950s. Not having a job then was a huge stigma. We were forbidden to play with the offspring of one family because their father did not work. That was an attitude we grew up with. At 81 I am still working and still paying tax. I get legacy DLA for mobility and it pays for my transport to medical appointments. But I would be ashamed for my neighbours to know I was on any kind of a benefit.

Agree. 20 years ago in my industry it would have been shameful to be on benefits. It would have been seen as a point of pride. These days people openly discuss the sweet spot between working hours and benefits.

Those who say this doesn’t happen live in a middle class Mumsnet perfection island.

They changed it with years of notice and loads of publicity. The pension age has changed for me since I started working too, and may do again.

Even I knew about the changes affecting the WASPI women, and I'm a much younger man.

my mum grew up in the late 40s early fifties.

her mum had a job then and there was huge stigma around a woman who had a job.

family members disapproved, she never told people at school that her mum worked, and it was really difficult for the family.

i suspect what you mean is that men were expected to have a job and there was stigma if they didn’t. For women it was the opposite way round. They were not expected to work and many men absolutely refused to let their wife work.

Not sure re other benefits but i dont think lwpevel 1 asd and or adhd need any sort of benefits as a disability. Or blue badge parking. My kid is like this and what they need os actually better state education. Yes there are costs for having incredible fussy eating. But maon challenge has been that they cant cope with afterschool clubs etc.
But i guess if i did claim dla for them i would be spending it on the councelling for severe mh issues camhs refuses to see them for. And more generally i would go private for healthcare for them because nhs just isnt flexibke enough. I think i probably left them with hearing issues as wouldnt give antibiotics several times leading to burst drums.

Hard hard agree

I agree entirely @hagchic. I was born in the 1970s and while benefits in the 1970s and 1980s were probably generous, I don't remember anyone claiming them unless they were truly unable to work.

Now I have teenage children and I hear them discussing a possible life on benefits as if it's a career choice. I challenged my 17 year old DD on this and she agreed that she would have to spend less if she made that choice, but she considers benefits as an option for her to choose instead of work.

I claimed the dole for eight weeks between A-levels and Uni but otherwise have no experience as to how feasible her ideas are, but it horrifies me that young people are looking at the world they live in and think that simply choosing not to work is a valid option.

I had a shit working class childhood in the 80s/90s with a father who had manic depression who self medicated with alcohol who was gainfully employed as a factory fitter. Ah, them were the days.

It’s complicated.

But all things being equal, it is better for people to have meaningful, remunerative work than not.

Having an entitled, helpless, reliant on the state attitude certainly isn’t limited to benefits claimants.

Plenty of people don’t really want to take responsibility for themselves and their lives - life can be hard and disappointing, but nowadays we’re led to believe that it shouldn’t be. I think that’s a big part of the problem.

So with big caveats, I think YANBU.

Dd is the same, long hours too.

During the 1980s in particular there were massive rises in people claiming incapacity benefit (the then disability benefit) for various issues but the media at the time claimed that many of these people were claiming for “bad backs” and that they were not really ill.

link here to a research paper discussing this.

https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/154782/1/paper_2019021.pdf

disability benefits claimants have always been demonised.

i also lived through the early nineties when the Tory party claimed that everything wrong with society was because there were too many unmarried single mothers on benefits.

If you were sad, then you were sad. If life was unfair then that was just how life was and you needed to deal with it.

where is the humanity in that? why be one of the 20 wealthiest countries in the world if you cant support your mist vulnerable? Trust me, you feel like that because you are ok.If life pulled that rug unde you you would want a welfare system that supports you and is easy to navigate. And be careful what you wish for because life can punch you down: an accident. a mental health crisis and you could be like those you seem to despise. I hope it doesnt though.

i think you will find that many in the uk are working hard but goal posts are moving further and further. many a self sufficient regardless

you want to go the American way? if you are sick then. oh well, deal with it.

They should choose their partners better!

Obviously not always possible where illness or accident befall them.

But the biggest thing holding back women is bad choice in partners and who they have children with

Unfortunately when everyone wants and demands equal rights for every little thing, this is the type of society you end up with.

Oh I knew OK, but then again I'm a reasonably well educated woman who was brought up to have an interest in current affairs, the news etc.

But an awful lot of women now at or heading towards the new retirement age were brought up to think politics etc was a male interest and for them not to worry themselves about such things. Even today you still get women voting a particular way because their husbands tell them where to put their X, because it's the men who know about such things not the little woman 🙄. This is particularly prevalent in WC households.

I referred to me not having been officially told because I am of an age that has been impacted by the changes, as an example of someone who was never formally informed about them.

Many of the women surveyed in the DWP reports said they did know the retirement age was changing and eventually being equalised, but many didn't understand how it would impact on them. Maybe that was due to a lack of comprehension on their part, but we can't all be smart.

Ouch 😳

Ah, this again, eh. Blame the women for bad choices... and not men for being crap partners/parents.

I must polish my crystal ball.

I remember a female supervisor at work being incandescent with rage about the changes. Because "women bring up children AND work so deserve to retire sooner". She actually called me a "fucking idiot" when I said I had no problem with the retirement age being the same for everyone.

Come to think of it it’s also weird how the poor are constantly lambasted for not being self sufficient, yet on an international scale those same lambasting people will argue against us having our own local industries, employing people and manufacturing the stuff we all need to live; they insist that fancy economic theory x says they have to pay people abroad less or use cheaper crap from abroad to make them more cheaply instead, so they can sell high here to make millions.

re the waspi women, “I referred to me not having been officially told because I am of an age that has been impacted by the changes, as an example of someone who was never formally informed about them.”

Do you know what changes we genuinely never were informed of in advance?

The shift to a rentier economy and the push for buy to let among the boomer generation, who gleefully jumped on the bandwagon to make themselves very rich and told my generation that we were being selfish in complaining about our lives being used to pay their pensions. They pushed up the house prices hugely by supply and demand, enduring the start of intergenerational inequality.

When all of those younger get compensation for the waste of our lives and work in private rentals, then I might consider giving any of that generation compensation for change that was very well publicised.

House prices/rents have been pushed up by successive governments failing to invest in social housing - or house building in general.