The 'Underclass'. Discuss.

[MrsSeanBean]

I am coining the term the media use to describe people living in similar circumstances to Karen Matthews - never worked, 7 kids, 6 dads, largely feckless and with no apparent aspirations.

Do we have one? Why?

Who or what is responsible?

When did it all go wrong?

What can be done to resolve the situation?

Answers on a postcard please.

I grew up on a council estate. There were a couple of families on the estate who were considered "rough", fathers in and out of prison, children not cared for adequately and front gardens full of rubbish. The majority of the families living on the estate were hard working working class people, very few people living off benefits.

Fast forward to now and the situation is very grim. The majority of the people living there are unemployed even though unemployment in that area is low. My old street which was lovely is now inhabited by drug dealers. When I was young I didn't even realise that I lived in a "poor" area we had a lovely house with window boxes at the front, apple trees and a vegetable patch. We drove up to our old house recently and the garden was stacked full of junk, some of the windows were boarded up and there were pitbull type dogs roaming about.

It really is quite depressing.

ForeverOptimistic. I don't get the gardens full of junk thing. It is free to use the local tip.

when we lived on a council estate in the UK, our garden was full of junk and old cars.
why? well I was out at work all hours, and in any case, could do nothing at home, where ex h insisted on absolute control. ex h didnt care (not his country? no community, therefore no image to hold up with neighbours? not sure). We were both pretty miserable as relationship tottered towards split.

Now I am in germany which is like legoland, it is so clean and tidy. We are still the scruffiest family around. A neighbour scolded me, because there was a small muddy mark on the pristine whiteness of the front of our house. She is a cheeky cow though.

Assuming you can afford to run a car / drive in the first place. When DD and I moved into our 1-bed council flat it had been gutted and the bits of wood etc.. all dumped out front. Then I got letters saying people had been complaining. Was I supposed to take planks with nails in them on the bus by hand?

Great to see needmorecoffee picking up on my point about feckless men, who should be made to get back to work for starters. Women have a job, quite a hard one caring for children but the governmant want them to do the work of two because it's much easier to threaten and scare them

oh and to use the local tip, you have to have a car to get the stuff there.

and it is not free, last time I went in the uk I got stung for 35 pounds, which is a lot of money if you are poor.

Government. Terrible night with DS.

Ahhh Germany....

Yes Ninkynork, not denying there is a social problem of sorts, but forcing women to do two jobs while the fathers of the children hang around outside shopping centres all day long is not the answer!

I thought the same about going to the tip. It's not free and not necessarily on a bus route!

Tip is free for me. Must vary according to the Council. In the gardens I am envisaging, there are usually at least 3 cars. Not sure if they are all in working order though.

'am aware dh looks like feckless scrounger dad too. He's at home, he's scruffy (and seriously, I cant see how anyone on benefits manages to look non-scruffy. It really isn't very much money. We struggle every week'

dh has been told to 'get a job' when in the high street at mi day; bil has also had this.

Thing is both work shifts, dh has 2 jobs.

DH always looks scruffy, he doesn't care about day to day clothes (bizarrely helikes nice suits but they're not suitable for jos job now)- he bys cheap tat and that's how he's always been. He spends on nice food, holidays - stuff thats important to him / us.

DH is a self-employed web designer. If he sits on a bench in town people toss spare change at him

Take it!!! PUt it in your pocket!

My dc1 is always picking up 20c pieces off the ground and handing them to me! I think nowadays, if people drop something worth less than 50c (40p) they can't be arsed to get down on their hands and knees and scrabble about for it!!

forever optimistic- isn't that somewhat inevitable?

I grew up on an estate and see the same changes as you. But as council housing gets rarer (right to buy I guess) then you wuill need o be increasingly desperate to get to the top of the lists; hence the working poor won't get threre, and you get only the most struggling famillies being housed. Ofdten of course those famillies are percfectly nice people whe have fallen on misfortune but I think its inevitable that addicts etc are over represented in that group.

MyDad used to have a theory about all estates not just council, that their reputatioon was cyclical: young famillies move in, its lovely. Then as time goes on those kids age and you get estates with lots of teenagers hanging about that look bad because they do often congregate. Eventually they move away and the pop. ages so you get a very quiet elderly estate- until they die and it begins again.

I see the point that my situation is rare-ish but its not unique; before focussing on the hardest groups why not help those - ofen like carers- who want to work by making childcare available? It just seems simplest to me- start easy, tackle the rest in stages.

Not sure men should always be tackled before women; once i'm not bf, should dh lose his job then it will be the first of us to find one that works, can't see why that can't be generally universal

That's true. The path to the Costcutter on my estate is littered with White-Lightning bottles, dog turds, (there is a green with bins metres away), shopping trolleys, bits of rubbish people have just thrown over their garden wall, broken glass and ... money!

Do people not realise that you can actually save, change up and buy wine food with those little copper and silver things?

Peachy, that's so true about housing estates.. There is a massive housing estate not too far out of my town. These houses aren't cheap and they are being bought by people with good salaries, but in ten yrs time, there will be literally hundreds of bored teenagers sitting on the walls outside their houses looking for something interesting to do..... They'd be lucky!

Where my parents live was like this 15 yrs ago and now it's full of pensioners tending to their front gardens and there#s NO noise at all after 10pm!

and peachy you are in a couple, i was talking about men who have children but have absolved themselves of all responsibility already, so childcare is not an issue for them.

yes thats fair enough with men who dont have childcare concerns- I do wonder why men do that; I know dh and I would loathe each other if we split (same temper!) but i also know he'd stil share childcare- hec that's part of why i married him!

this is an interesting thread

There was a woman in a tower block in London that changed the tower block she lived in by changing the community spirit. She then went to Plymouth and showed a council block how to do the same thing there - getting rid of the drug users and dealer and making the tower block a good place to live regardless.

it took her more time and trouble to convince the officials than it did the actual people that lived on the estate.

It can be done but it is blardy hard work and it is hard work due to the keep banging your head against a brick wall with the council rather than the council tenants who did actuall all want to change the place they lived in - they just didn't know how to do it.

ah Mrs Sean, if you are from germany then I understand your lack of comprehension.
I have lived in an ex coal mining town with high unemployment in germany, it still wasnt grotty and filthy!

the cars arent working, by the way. The reason they are there is becuase all the scrap yards are miles out of town, so you need 2 cars to take the old one there, one to bring you back again. Also, if the market for scrap metal is ok, someeone will pass your house and offer to take the car away for free eventually, so its less trouble just to leave it there.

I agree Peachy, I guess it is inevitable that there will be a decline in social housing communities as the demand for housing is probably greater than it ever was and yet there are fewer houses available.

It is sad that communities that were once considered respectable are now ghettos. I think drugs are partly to blame for the decline of a lot of communities.

I also think that when social housing developments are built they should be built within existing communities to avoid the ghetto effect. A few years ago my sister was offered a council house but was advised by the housing officer to decline it as they mainly housed criminals and drugs addicts in that particular community as it was easier to keep them all together.

Yes drugs. They're to blame for so much. I was listening to two old women talking outside tesco a while ago and they were comparing how many of their chidren were 'on de heroin'. Really sad. Me eldest son john he's on de heroin but me middle son david is on de metodone and me youngest one steve he's a good lad he never took de heroin'.

it was SO sad. actually those women probably weren't even THAT old. 55ish.

We had a decent car we couldn't afford to fix, (windscreen had been smashed by kids) in a parking bay and within a few days a group of community-minded gentlemen removed it gratis

foreveroptomistic - exactly what I mean by the "officals" deciding to put all the drug dealer in one area to keep them all together - rather than actually "doing" something about them and tackling the problem they put them together so that they can ignore that area and let it become a hell hole. The vulnerable people that also live with them have there lives blighted and come down to a level of not keeping things nice to be recked.

Does anyone know, BTW, up to how many hours a person can work without losing benefits? Is it anything under 16 hours a week, or is it if you earn less than a certain amount of money a week?
Because I think one useful solution might be to allow people to earn a little more money without losing benefits if doing essential jobs (ie cleaning, caring, assorted entry-level jobs) so that working actually definitely makes a person better off.
Mind you, again there would need to be safeguards against the poor being used as slave labour.

i despair of stereotyping of council schemes/estates as drug riddled morally bereft holes inhabited by reprobates

makes stereotyping so much easier, heh. underclass just trips off the journalist/social commentator tongue.but hang on we are talking about real people here,families and individuals all lumped together as a homogenous mass

not everyone on KM estate is a loser
not everyone living on council scheme is a heid banger

so dehumanising to a large group of people and very fatalistic to have an expectation that there is a self fulfilling prophecy of doom and poverty

maybe instead of demonising and alientaing people, try to get a grip on what their daily struggles are.responsive and apporopriate policy interventions rather than mass braying about underclass