What will it take for the Government to enact welfare reform?

[Schlossadler]

What has to break, before the Government is finally willing to enact welfare reform?

Yep. Loads of crimes, like shoplifting, are correlated very strongly with poverty.

Your friend clearly needs this financial support and is absolutely deserving of it. No question that people in her situation should receive state support.

HOWEVER, I also know of people who aggressively seek out private diagnoses for their children so that they can claim maximum financial support just because they think they should be able to work the system. This is wrong and it is happening EVERYWHERE. It is morally wrong, we can't afford it and it needs to be stamped out. We all sit on the spectrum somewhere and it is indefensible for huge numbers of the public to be working the system to claim support for things they should not be entitled to. Not to mention damaging children by giving them a label when (in the case of the children I know, where the parents have sought multiple opinions before getting 'the right answer') it is unfounded and unnecessary.

Nine-tenths of women do not report their rapes.

Catholics, along with other strongly-religious people, suffer rape. For them, abortion is simply not an option.

No woman should have to endure invasive, morally-questionable (in the sense that not everyone is OK with it) medical procedures after being raped to avoid her own children's destitution.

Obviously. Which is why I said upthread I’d never be voted in.
The ELECTORATE as you shouted it, is however, a funny thing. The vast majority of Reform voters seem to be the ones who would be most adversely affected by Reform policies. That is inexplicable to me.
All that said, I stand by the fact that the NHS needs massive reform, plus a payment structure. The fact that you don’t agree doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to happen or that it won’t happen in the future. We cannot continue as we are.

I wonder if OP is coming back. There is something familiar about them...

Eta: Harriet Harman was talking about this earlier and was saying that she thinks Labour will attempt to reform welfare by tackling the root causes of why people end up on benefits ling term, especially young people, rather than cutting benefits.

I’d love to see them survive on £400 s month. Can we televise it.

Cap the JSA to 24 weeks of benefit within a five year rolling window. Remove the triple lock and index pensions to earnings only. Use some of the savings to fund food banks, shelters and job training programmes so that people down on their luck can bounce back quickly.

You seem to believe that the long-term unemployed just aren't trying hard enough to find work. Are you aware of what the youth unemployment stats are?
Google says 16.4% (up 2% from last year). And there are far fewer jobs.

I think needing to live in a shelter is somewhat more than 'down on your luck'

Because we're not brave enough as a country to have the conversation. We are entirely polarised. We either have to deify people (it pisses me off when I see the NHS blue light discounts when I've had repeatedly shit care) or savage them. We seem to have entirely lost the art of debate.

The ELECTORATE has been brainwashed to think that the NHS is our only option and to say otherwise is to blaspheme. The reality is that there is a LOT of waste and shit care and shit people in the NHS. There are also fantastic people. They are not the same but we are brainwashed into treating them as if they are. Until we grow up and admit that there are major issues with people and processes we will never solve it.

My point is it isn't about parties not being 'brave'. It's about the electorate not permitting it, plus no party other than Reform actually wants the alternatives because they are shit options.

Sorry @Schlossadler you have actually come back to the thread. For some reason when I initially clicked on "show all" I couldn't see your other posts. Odd.

And….?

They won’t pay for the clothes I need to wear or many things I need to be employed: that’s called costs of employment.

If of course there’s no jobs local that suit there’s always the options of remote work or moving to where there is work.

PS I do live rurally
PPS I do have a license as I know not having one whilst living rurally wouldn’t work

I can see comprehension isn’t your strong point

Youth unemployment is a major issue. Two major points: increasing employer's NI and raising the minimum wage for young people has done them no favours whatsoever. Why would an employer hire a young person with no experience (life or work) over an older person unless there is the incentive that they cost marginally less? Also, the number of low-level anxiety diagnoses - I have huge sympathy here but we need to recognise that there is a difference between anxiety and Anxiety. Letting young people sit on benefits when self-esteem comes from working as part of a team and achieving is something we should all be ashamed of.

Everyone understands there are problems with people and processes.

Do you think the electorate don't use the NHS so can't see the issues?

NHS issues are talked about by everyone, everywhere.

What's the 400 a month?

I was chatting to someone who was just awarded higher rate pip and no review for 10 years. He was quite chuffed he would get approx £96,000 over the next 10 years. I actually didn't believe it and ended up googling and it seems correct. And he said this doesn't affect his housing benefit and other benefits he gets!

There’s choices:

1. steal to get what you need
2. work to get what you need

We need to ensure people do the later through ensuring decent moral standards and necessary crime prevention and punishment measures.

I grew up in poverty and didn’t, nor did my parents, shop lift. We either went without or they found a way through overtime, doing without, and / or mending a making do.

Who do you want to plunge into further poverty in the name of such "reform"? How do you hope to prevent such moves from causing issues such as increasing homelessness, for example?

Is this a headline from 1983 @Schlossadler? I'm pretty sure this question has been asked of every government from at least then.🙄

I comprehended what you wrote just fine. It wasn't complicated.

It's a fantasy list. Where are you getting all your money from?

It needs cross party agreement. Until our politicians put the country before party politics it won't happen.

Add 'spend more on police, courts, prisons and probation' to your fantasy spending list too?

It’s not about “kicking the can down the road” - it’s about the fact that reforming welfare in a way that actually saves the tax payer money takes serious, structural reform looking at the root causes of why so many people are ending up on long term benefits. If it was possible to simply “stop dithering and decrease spending” the Tories - who talked endlessly about decreasing welfare spending - would have actually been able to do it. They couldn’t - because in reality it is very, very difficult to make cuts to the welfare bill that don’t just shift the costs to the tax player through health etc instead.

We all sit on the spectrum somewhere

No, we don't. You are autistic, or you aren't.

Autistic people are disabled by their condition. Nine-tenths of autistic women are sexual violence victims compared to one-third of our neurotypical counterparts. This is in large part because we are disabled. We lack the social skills to detect and skilfully evade sexual predators. This lack of social skills is a disability that results doing really badly at interviews, struggling to even write the application letters, being unable to cope with working in retail and hospitality, making enemies on the factory floor without understanding why, and being bullied in the office.

And then on top of that nine-tenths of autistic women live with the trauma of sexual assault. And yes, #metoo.

No wonder so many autistic people can't get or keep jobs.

Not to mention damaging children by giving them a label

It's far far more likely that an autism diagnosis will be missed than one be incorrectly given. The assessment protocol is multi-stage and involves multiple professionals. Source: recent personal experience.

I'm not damaged by my diagnostic label. I am damaged from spending over forty years unsupported, thinking that all the times I said the wrong thing without even realising it were some kind of moral failing on my part.

I agree that it's talked about but we skirt around it. We're not having honest conversations about what the NHS is for and what we should be funding. These are difficult topics that need to be debated, rather than the rhetoric that I hear which is 'the NHS is failing but the people who work within it are wonderful (true in some cases but absolutely not true across the board) and we should add x, y and z to the care that we should all be entitled to. It's not free. It's not great. It's being taken advantage of by citizens and non-citizens. Not all NHS workers are heroes, a lot of them are shit.

I agree with this - at the moment so much of the debate around welfare is ideological and impractical.

Politicians need to work cross party, looking at the independent research and make pragmatic reforms that have a chance of working long term.

Hard to see it happening in the current political climate, though.