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.

Do you believe this post though?

Given that the disabled start piling on right at the beginning of these threads, obviously not even bothering to read the original posts but merely the words welfare or benefits, they really can't complain if the thread then takes another turn.

I don't believe an 81 year old would be on here.

I'm not surprised at all considering how these threads usually go.

Also, ''the disabled''?

Why, is there an age limit? Please let me know what it is in case I break any rules being here.

Seems like you have a beautiful relationship 😁

How patronising is that? Not all 81 year olds want to "ease off". Would you have you given David Attenborough the same advice 20 years ago?

Are you actually blaming the zoo? So if someone pushed you in front of a train, you’d blame the train company? If you got hit by a BMW, you’d blame BMW? Such strange logic.

I remember that article. I also remember that the calculations were done based on the family being made up of a disabled, single mother, raising 4 severely disabled children in a 4k a month privately rented house.

The LL was getting half of the money, but if that woman does exist she deserves a raise.

Don't be silly and calm down with your sarcasm.

People are known for making stuff up on here, it is anonymous after all, and some of us merely questioned the validity of the post.
No one is suggesting an age limit.

I’ve noticed an increased number of people seeking diagnoses over the last decade or so - not necessarily because they genuinely have those conditions but because they think life will be easier/ the world will roll out the red carpet if they have a victim status. So there seems to be a sort of chronic illness Olympics going on for some. At the moment I do suspect there are some professionals out there who will give them the diagnosis they seek. Meanwhile those diagnosed accurately/genuinely are focused on survival, adapting to the reality of the world (which is still challenging for those with chronic illness) and trying to live with their condition in order to do that.

Agree and a lot of it depends on when you were born. I'm a 70s child and saw my mum take on two jobs with 5 kids. Back then you had to be able to afford kids of course. My dad was a heavy drinker. He worked but would roll in late at night drunk. The benefit system has been milked and long since moved away from its original purpose. It's become an overwhelming burden now which doesn't equally reflect individual's social contract. There are legitimate cases but far too many taking the piss.

I certainly won't be here in my 70s 😆

Yes that is exactly the article I was thinking of but I have seen other similar ones.

It's something I have had to explain to my elderly parents who tell me these "facts" about benefits having read the Mail.

That and the fact that the reason "no one wants a job these days" when the local Beefeater can't recruit is because the jobs it is offering are zero hour contracts and people won't put themselves in a precarious situation by taking one and potentially losing benefits.

I'm a child of the eighties, and I remember that back then, we had factories, shipping yards, a fishing industry... and you could leave school and walk into a full-time job the same day.

We no longer have that.

We had a terrible recession in the latter part of the 1980s which carried on well into the 90s. Firms were going out of business left right and centre, every Friday lists of companies that had gone bust were read out on the news with consequent job losses. People were losing their houses everywhere. It was a very hard time, far worse than our current situation.

My other half was talking to a 24 year old in our village pub. The lad told him he prefers to do little jobs on the side for cash in hand. His working mum enables him by funding him while he plays on his xbox all day and doesn't take his poor dog for a walk. He's also going to try and claim benefits for dyslexia!

This in spades. I can't speak to mosques, but the idea that churches/church communities, which outside of the big city churches (which might rally round for a few weeks, but I very much doubt it would last beyond tbat) will plug the gap when they are dwindling and struggling themselves is for the birds.

Removing money will end up being incredibly short sighted and a false economy, but few want to understand that.

It's funny how people overlook that the modern "welfare state" evolved not out of pure altruism and compassion, but as a means to an end. After WW2 there was a danger that disaffected and traumatised troops returning from war would look at the elites, and make comparisons with other countries that had narrowed the inequality gap via bloody revolution.

It had become apparent that those same troops, the cannon fodder if you will, had been malnourished and unhealthy. Following a world war, there is often an economic surge due to rebuilding and idealistic views of improving society so "never again" - a broadly securely housed, employed, educated, fed and nurtured workforce is beneficial to a capitalist regime - they feel they are part of a social contract and see the benefits, to both themselves and reflected in wider society. The idea of stringing up the elite who engineer the misery of war is less attractive if you are offered things like security of housing and the chance of your children being educated out of poverty.

Trouble is, capitalism is a pyramid scheme that depends on endless growth and requires ever inventive new strategies to make profits. How many varieties of Oreo does one need?

Society and its structure and expectations has changed in unprecedented ways with the advances in technology we now have. This "technological" revolution is nothing like the relatively slow creep and adaptation to the "industrial" revolution over the last 150 / 200 years, the main difference being that new technology is developing so that even the button pushers may be rendered obsolete - the technology is being actively trained to push its own buttons, and also push our psychological buttons.

Bread and circuses are age old methods of crowd control.

It's not that people are entitled or lack resilience or don't want to be self sufficient. A pp from another country touched on the unfeasibility of buying land and building ones own house in the UK for the average person. Individual Self sufficiency is an anathema to end stage capitalism because it threatens the corporate machine, so it makes sense to place bureaucratic obstacles in its way, disguised as regulation for a myriad of often tenuous reasons - but then make concessions for "big business" who can pay for the privilege.

Pointing out structural unfairness and asking for changes to make society more equitable is hardly "entitled". The whole problem is that the will is there in the majority, but the route to self sufficiency is no longer clear, and societal cohesion is failing.

There's alot more, obviously, but in anticipation of the long list of rebuttals that may come - or not, it's a bit TLDR for the dismissive, and probably "6th form common room debate" for some, I shall just recommend, yet again, mayonnaise or the dressing of your choice if you're a vegan, for my "word salad".....

We didn’t have a recession in the late 1980s? We had a short recession in the early 1990s linked to the ERM.

Yes, I'm a private person anyway, but threads like this have at least taught me to be very careful what I divulge in real life, although some of it is blindingly obvious to look at me!

The point I was making is not that things were better in the eighties, it's more that things have changed to a degree where the job market now would be unrecognisable to someone from the 80s/70s/60s or whatever era people think was the golden age.

The British job market has been decimated by a mixture of globalisation, automation, austerity, and bad government decisions.

The factories, shipyards, and the fishing industry are mostly gone. The hospitality industry is on its knees, and entry-level jobs no longer exist; they've been rolled into mid-level jobs, but are still paying entry-level wages.

There 2 jobseekers for every one vacancy, and that is when we ignore the fact that a third of those vacancies don't actually exist.

If we scrap welfare, people will not get a job instead because there aren't any. They will either starve or turn to crime or sex work. That is not a society I want to live in.

Not sure anyone alive in the 1970s would consider it a golden age.

You have completely missed the fact that the comment I responded to was not about whether the post was made up.

It was a simple statement of disbelief that ANY 81 year old could possibly be posting on this forum.

The ‘people’ you are referring to are Royals, other aristos, the new aristo billionaires, and politicians. The example is set at the top and no one likes being made a mug and a fool.

If you want poor people to take pride in working for a living once again then that work needs to pay for a living - a real living, enabling anyone who works full time to save a little and aspire to own their own home one day. You need to bring back a country that does not require inheritances or family support, and isn’t slowly inching its way back to the focus on family alliances and politicking that characterises the works of Dickens and Austen among others. And, to be clear, where those who work harder get paid more - a meritocracy, in short - and is still capable of recognising that there is genuinely needed work with no remuneration , such as mothering children and caring for anyone.

At the moment two people working full time and combining their finances struggle to afford life in shit private rentals while billionaires are laughing at all of us squabbling over scraps.