famous, rich and hungry for sport relief

[misstiredbuthappy]

Anybody watching ? I watched it last year realy hit a nerve with me.

Yup.

But whineaholic the chances are none of them were even on benefits under the labour government. If you lost a loved one are you honestly saying that you would be able to give up a beloved family pet? Or, even, fags?
What struck me about the mother Theo Paphitis stayed with was that she was unable to make the best choices when managing her money and all she needed was someone to come in and help her budget. If a service like that was widely available to help people make the right decisions (e.g. avoiding expense, hard to leave contracts) then maybe she wouldn't have been in the position she was in.

He might have been kind and caring, but he still didn't have a clue.

unbrellahead. I was a smoker for years - like many of my age - gave up many years ago when I wanted children. LIke many of my age.

Labour have only been gone a fe wyear s- I strongly suspect that the single mother and the toothless woman with a criminal record were on benefits long before that.

Whine- they don't fail to prioritise their money because they are trying to leave a luxurious lifestyle. Total nonsense.

But whine, when you gave up did you have other things you could fall back on? I know when DP gave up he wouldn't have been able to do it without the support of his family which is something the widowed mother seemed to not have. I'm making wild assumptions here as I've never been a smoker but if there is very little in your life to motivate you then how would you even begin to give up? Also, I would suggest that having suffered a stroke she must have attempted stopping?

Also, the single mother from Deptford had been widowed two years previously so probably hadn't been on benefits before then. As for the other families, we really don't know so shouldn't be assuming that they made those decisions whist on benefits.

I would have thought being so hungry you feel ill and end up stealing is quite motivating, umbrella ?

There are loads of assumptions on this thread umbrella. Most of them assuming poor people can't give up smoking or have hidden disabilities and so on.

It's not that they can't give up smoking, it is that they have other shit to sort first. Why can't you grasp this?????

What, like the assumption that they can just go get a job?

i really felt for some in the programme but screamed at others. you can't make sweeping statements about people in poverty, but as a tax payer who helps fund these payments, you can be aggrieved when they have a bigger telly, more kids, and expensive habits -smoking-takeaways, you can't afford to chose.( as has been raised) However I would suggest our education system needs a massive boot up the rear, Mr Gove, bring back home economics as a compulsory subject but start in primary schools- bring in basic accounts, how to budget etc Teach life skills, that unfortunately a generation of parents are going to be unable to teach.( are we too busy teaching our 11 year olds how to deal with drunk mates?) I constantly told my children "never a borrower or a lender be"..." if you can't afford it you can't have it" " get a credit card and I'll chop your hands off" it sounds trite, but it's true. Having been brought up in a large family, I made a choice to have only 2 kids. I new I couldn't afford to have more. I think the benefit system is utterly essential we should be proud we have it, but it can't spiral out of control, and we need to look at apolitical ways of helping people help themselves through education. There are great charities out there to help- CAB/ Money Advice, but you need to want to help yourself and access them. The concept of poverty is very relative though, isn't it?

It's not trite.
It's simplistic.

How do you know what the widow's life used to be like? We DO know what the painter/decorator's life used to be like, high earner who raised a large family without state help.

Lives change catastrophically in moments.

I know it must be horribly difficult to make ends meet for people on benefits, but I do feel that sometimes people don't budget according to their means.
If you have extremely limited means, then it most probably follows that you won't be able to afford many of the things that other people enjoy.
The basic essentials come first - food, shelter, clothing. Only after the essentials have been taken care of can other things be considered. Unnecessary luxuries, such as pets, holidays, smoking, alcohol, going out, TV, takeaway meals, magazines etc should only be considered when one has excess income after the essentials have been paid for.

And people who took out financial commitments in work that they can well afford - ie mobile phone contracts - then get made redundant?

These companies DO pursue. Via scary collection agencies that add fees if necessary.

Company you work for goes bust. Don't get paid. Direct Debits fail. Incur bank charges. 8 week delay in JSA claim and company didn't pay redundancy and administrators issued wrong paperwork so you can't claim that back either. In the meantime HB claim delayed due to JSA delay so HA issue repossession proceedings on flat, so incur court charges. Ditto for Council Tax.

The above happened to us. Put us £2,000 in debt. This was when DS2 was 8 weeks old and before disabilities were known so DH in work, me on ML. Despite DH finding new work within 3 weeks we incurred a lot of debt.

Rachel Johnson said some incredibly tone-deaf things but she is Boris Johnson's sister after all so that in itself is a form of disability. Foot-in-mouth disease seems to be rife in that family...

Overall it was a mixed bag. The show did a good job of showing how wearing and exhausting it is to be poor, even if you are responsible and plan carefully like the woman with fibromyalgia. On the other hand, we kind of know this already (unless you're Rachel Johnson and think people living in the 'land of the poor' as she put it spend all their money on fags and Sky TV). Benefits are really not enough to live on and if you are on a low wage or benefits you really can't afford more than 1 or 2 children, no pets, no luxuries. Sadly many people in that economic bracket often seem to plan poorly and so the poverty cycle continues e. G. The dad Mohammed, who had 8 children in total although only 2 of them lived with him, I think they said. Who can afford 8 children?

I think a couple of steps would make sense such as banning payday loans, improving support for food banks and allowing people on benefits some emergency cash for rental deposits, furniture or children's clothes, toys etc. it would take the a little of the grimness and fear out of life for people at least.

Having lived on benefits for a time, and also having been brought up on them, my view is they are enough to live on frugally. They are not enough to have everything. As a child, we had no telephone, no washing machine, a black and white tv (this was in the 70s/80s - most people had colour). But I always was well fed, warm, and had clean, new clothes. I had all the essentials, those were my parent's priorities, and rightly so. If they went without - and they did - I certainly never knew about it at the time.

There needs to be more affordable housing now, that seems to me the root cause of the problem. Councils should never have been allowed to sell off so much of their housing stock without building new homes with the proceeds. A lot of the issues we see now (people having no security of tenure, being forced to move, losing deposits etc) are due to a lack of social housing.

People also need a greater sense of fiscal responsibility, to live well within their means not at the limit of them, to have a tiny cushion of some kind (even if its only a couple of hundred pounds) to cover emergencies, or at least go towards covering them.

There are jobs. Many immigrants find them and we have low unemployment. Some people are unemploysble and some dont want to work. Anyone can set up a cleaning round . The bounxers wife could. They had a car.
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We both work and have no money whatsoever for emergencies - this is not due to irresponsibility but the cost of living which is out of control! Both children need new mattresses but this is just impossible, things like shoes clothes and school trips make our hearts sink. We have a mortgage, which maybe makes us 'lucky' but that was a choice we made when we were 'OK'. I sat at work the other day and did the entitled to calculator - we would be about thirty pounds worse off a month if we both stopped working - it's not only people out of work who struggle -I know two of the families featured had low paid jobs and i'm glad they were featured. It's heart breaking to know that we work so hard for so little.

I agree mrssipple. I would increase support for low paid workers and replace part of the benefits with tokens. We should make work pay considerably more than not working. No one on benefits - no one - should be better off than a full time worker.

There certainly aren't enough jobs in some areas.

Others, like where I live it's not so bad. Perhaps that's where you live Whinge, in a bubble not seeing the 30+ applicants for a single job at Costa scenario.

I thought the programme was really good I. The way it portrayed many different situations, the famous people did well too and I didn't think RJ was as bad as people made our on here!

I am in love with Mohammed and his kids!!!

There seems to be massive differences in some families managing/living on benefits.
Some families can afford to drink, smoke straights, have designer clothes but some cant afford to eat. Because the cost of living is so much higher in london do people living there get more in benefits?

Mohammed is an inspiration.

I do find your attitude rather negative and defeatist gobby. Not to say, patronising. According to you the poor are unable to :

Stop smoking, not keep pets, are unable to cancel Sky or phone contracts ( this must clearly be the preserve of The Rich as I have managed to do both very successfully), cook from scratch and not have takeaways, set up their own cleaning or ironing round or get a job . At all. Despite thousands a month coming in from overseas managing to do so.
Two of the most successful people I know ( and I'm married to one of them) come from poverty that makes this programme look like a walk in the park.

I think this says far more about your condescending attitude to people in poverty than it does about them.