Conservatives maintain that every working family now pays £3000 a year to fund lifestyles of those who do not work.

[moondog]

In addition, there are 3.9 million British households where nobody works-an increase of 200 000 over a decade.

Blimey.

There is work for everyone providing we are prepared to stop immigration and raise minimum wage and then force those on benefits off them and onto the living wage that work will provide.
But then what do you say to the woman who needs asylum to save her families lives, sorry you can't come in despite being better qualified than the lazy indigenous population because we need the lazy bastards to work and starving them out is the only way.
It's all so difficult and those who refuse to work play on that.

Here is is: Welcome to Cameron Land

Here is is: Welcome to Cameron Land

Work for everyone? even the ones losing their jobs as we speak?

Oh Electra you linked to Hari....people will all start saying 'chilling' next and pulling their lived ones close. And I thought the link to the emotive and factually inaccurate Daily Express article was this threads low point.

Electra, no it's based on respectively,an anecdote and a subjective opinion about what you consider to be 'essential services that vulnerable people were in need of.'

I would like a link though yes.

I said earlier in the thread that I couldn't find this article online, althoguh I looked. I saw it in my newspaper.

Undoubtedly there are plenty of Conservative shits, like Shirley Porter. But then look at the right on Lefties. Polly Toynbeee for example. Nauseating woman, bleating on about equality while being paid £££ and having a husband who has been raking it in as head of Audit Commission. She was forced to withdraw remarks she made.
comparing Tories to Nazis. Oh, and when the Telegraph asked her and her husband to tell them how much he earned (for the sake of fairness and transparency you understand, there was a deafening silence.

Oh and those right on Millibands.
They grew up in grinding poverty of course.

Once you understand that a privileged bacground is not the sole preserve of the Osbornes and Camerons of this worls, you can start debating with much more clarity.

Loved ones

I just read that article. The individual cases are tragic but I am sure you could have just as easily found similar examples under a Labour govt. No system is perfect.

The article also completely ignores one inescapable problem. Affordability.

I'm sorry but the government cannot simply do everything. Yes, the poor need help, yes the disabled need help. But the government is not some fairy with magic dust to sprinkle around.

Given the opportunity, Politician's will always choose to spend money, not save it. Why? Because spending money is a vote winner, saving money is a vote killer.

But the current economic crisis is so bad that the Tories have HAD to make cuts.....just like Labour would have done. This is not about Conversatives vs Labour, it is simply about living within our means.

Now welfare is the number 1 expenditure, ahead of defence, healthcare & education. If we truly want to live within our means, we HAVE to make cuts there. To ignore that simple fact is akin to ignoring the elephant in the room.

That article actually made me laugh out loud Electra.
Is that really what you take as fact, a few dramatic pumped up sentimental stories?

Read Theadore Dalrymple instead and learn something.

Moondog - is it this article?

The annual bill you pay for Labour's lavish benefits system

All journalism is biased moondog but you yourself started this thread about something you've read in the paper.

You believed that - or that's the impression I got. So isn't it somewhat hypocritical for you to laugh at me for doing the same thing?

Haha!
I wouldn't be caught dead reading The Mail, Electra.
I am interested in what you think we should do, considering the country is in such deep shit financially.
If you were in charge, what would you cut and what would you keep and on what basis?

Moondog - got it in one.

The point here is the proportions. There will always be shirkers and fraudsters taking advantage of any service, public or private. There are hypochondriacs at hospitals, shoplifters who "return" goods to shops, etc.

The question is, would we rather have no service and no fraudsters, or a service and some fraudsters, and if the latter what proportions should we tolerate?

And that's the point of the current propaganda - to give the impression that fraudsters/choosers are the majority and the "people we're prepared to support" are the minority. To get people like Sidge saying above: "I think there are a significant number of families where not working is a choice." There are clearly some, but significant nationwide?

How far are we prepared to remove services from the vulnerable in order to punish the lazy?

I certainly would not seek to dismantle a system which some people really need, or try to brainwash the public into thinking that most people who receive benefits are basically stealing them from working people and don't really need them.

I also think it's all very well for the conservatives to talk about people who live in a family of three generations who've never worked. But who is going to employ someone who's never worked anyway? My university educated, professional friends are struggling to hold onto their jobs. Where are these jobs going to come from for people who haven't worked for some time? I think a lot of people who don't work would like to but not everyone has the same opportunities at birth which makes it more difficult for them to succeed in the future.

I've just done a quick google - can't find the article anywhere else except in a blog...

Ah well, Cahe, the flipside of this is to say 'We accept that every societal set-up has its malingerers but this needs to be kept in check'

In my view, the recommendations and actions of people like Frank Field and IDS do just that. The danger with using emotional anecdotes of the type in that ridiculous Independent artice is that they stop peopel thinknig clearly about what is and isn't necessary.

I'm an NHS worker and when all around me are getting hysterical about 'the cuts' I am thinking 'Great, this might mean I start doing the job I am supposed to be doing'.

If for example you had any idea of how much time and energy amd money is wasted in the public secotr, you'd have a fit. So much of it is actually about making the worker feel good rather than doing any good.

As an aside, with that Independent article and its talk of the homeless, I'd far rather hear what somoeone sensible and measured like Louise Cssey, has to sa on the subject.

NiceGuy, typically, a mortgage is a greater outgoing than a ciggy habit (or golf club membership, or other expensive hobby).

So would your first economy be cutting back your mortgage payments? No. You would cut according to importance, not according to size of single item.

I'd start on pensioners too-fuel allowance, free bus passes and swimming. That sort of stuff.
Bonkers.

Moondog, I don't need emotive anecdotes from newspapers to be furious at the treatment of the disabled - I am sodding disabled and when David Freud says the sick need to have more hassle, that hassle gets done to me! Doesn't make me more able to work: make me less able to do the tiny, tiny amount of record-keeping I was doing for local charity because can't do both that and DWP make-work-hassle-activities.

This link here is a little out of date (2008/2009) but shows public spending by sector. It won't have changed massively I would imagine, though JSA spend is likely to be up a bit.

By my calculation (though I may have got a zero wrong, so I am very happy to be corrected) every man woman and child in Britain (62 million now I believe) spent £18.65 each that year on their contribution to JSA and Income Support.

If you include pensions and pension credit, that would be a very different thing, spending on state pensions was £62bn, compared to spending on JSA £2.9 bn and income support £8.7 bn.

That's a great and comprehensible diagram.
Thanks Takver.

I think I probably did lose a zero (I think a billion is a thousand million?)

How exactly Cage?

NB Am substantially better now than when had to give up charity stuff - I couldn't have written this much on MN at that time (or even read and understood this thread in one go).

Good to know you are better.
May I ask what your disability is?
It was this bit i found confusing

'make me less able to do the tiny, tiny amount of record-keeping I was doing for local charity because can't do both that and DWP make-work-hassle-activities.'