Unemployment and Benefits

[Trojan]

Steve Austin......I remember when he was barely alive. Could run at 60mph in a pair of Pumas after the operation mind you.

[Ian]

Better education and compassion is the answer, not putting children into care, sterilising people or any other half baked reactionary ideals.

Those people are impecunious, naive, angry and directionless. It is not our hatred they need but our help.

While I agree with the sentiment, the arguments in favour of education and compassion have been made - eloquently - for many years, yet the sorts of attitudes which Hugo describes appear to be on the increase.  And I'm not sure you can describe them as impecunious; in many ways, that's at the root of the problem, since impecuniosity per se was abolished many years ago, and we thus have an entire class of people who work the system for all it's worth. 

Education, in short, doesn't seem to be the answer, so what do you think is?

On the other point, taking steps to remove the children from the baleful influence of their parents is fast becoming the only way to prevent the loop closing; if you leave children to be raised by those whose attitudes are dangerously antithetical to the generally accepted mores of a well structured society, then you only perpetuate and possibly aggravate what is already a deteriorating social situation. 

 

[born2run]

Better education and compassion is the answer, not putting children into care, sterilising people or any other half baked reactionary ideals.

Those people are impecunious, naive, angry and directionless. It is not our hatred they need but our help.

While I agree with the sentiment, the arguments in favour of education and compassion have been made - eloquently - for many years, yet the sorts of attitudes which Hugo describes appear to be on the increase.  And I'm not sure you can describe them as impecunious; in many ways, that's at the root of the problem, since impecuniosity per se was abolished many years ago, and we thus have an entire class of people who work the system for all it's worth. 

Education, in short, doesn't seem to be the answer, so what do you think is?

On the other point, taking steps to remove the children from the baleful influence of their parents is fast becoming the only way to prevent the loop closing; if you leave children to be raised by those whose attitudes are dangerously antithetical to the generally accepted mores of a well structured society, then you only perpetuate and possibly aggravate what is already a deteriorating social situation. 

 

Firstly, I don't believe the "problem" is anywhere near as big as the right wing media portray it to be. So I see no need for any radical solutions. What people seem to percieve as a major downfall of standards is often just this generation acting as they do and the older generations wrongly categorizing this behaviour as something to be frightened of and something  that needs to be stopped. This is nothing new, it happened in the 50s with rock & roll and in the 60s with Hippies, even the 70s had Punks and the 80s New Wave! But even at those extremes (Elvis being filmed from the waist up) I don't remember anyone ludicrous enough to suggest they should be seperated from any offspring they may have! The only time I've heard of that kind of thinking in modern(ish) times were the stolen generations of the poor Australian Aborignes, These Children were supposedly "protected" by their society as well!

In answer to your question, as it was well put and deserving of an answer. The way to stop people "milking" the benefit system is to make them feel valuable and worthwhile members of society, who therefore would not want to take money from the pockets of their fellow citizens and who will then strive to go out and work for the greater good. That takes time I know, so as an immediate effect we need to put up the minimum wage to encourage people on benefits to work (we do this with a Robin hood tax and also through a part benefits system, which would pay for itself as the more people going into work would come directly off benefits - i.e (and this is simplified for the sake of simple maths) Norman gets a job and as a minimum wage he gets paid £7 an hour - the government pays the "top up" of £1 to Norman, the employer pays Norman the £6 they would have paid him anyway - If Norman works 37 hours a week he makes £259 before tax -  which is about £200 take home pay. So Norman is well up on the 60 odd pound he would have had on the dole. The Governement is already up the £60 Norman has paid them in tax - and also probably another 60 to 80 pound in housing benefit - out of that they are only paying the £37 top up to minimum wage so the government (and all of us) are also happy!!

[DaveR]

[The way to stop people "milking" the benefit system is to make them feel valuable and worthwhile members of society, who therefore would not want to take money from the pockets of their fellow citizens and who will then strive to go out and work for the greater good.

You have to understand these people have no interest in working for a living. They are not decent people 'down on their luck', they believe people who work for a living are mugs and they also believe are entitled to get everything for nothing. I've met many of them in my time and they are all the same.

[brumbob]

The way to stop people "milking" the benefit system is to make them feel valuable and worthwhile members of society,

but they're not, end of story.

[Ian]

What people seem to percieve as a major downfall of standards is often just this generation acting as they do and the older generations wrongly categorizing this behaviour as something to be frightened of and something  that needs to be stopped.

While there might be something in that, it's not the entire picture. Detailed research by social scientists over the past 50 years reveals some disturbing trends.

For instance, the once stable relationship of marriage has largely given way to single parenting, co-habiting and increasingly repetitious divorce strategies. Over the past 50 years, the one in eight births in England and Wales that were to mothers born outside the UK rose to one in five.  In Great Britain in 2007 the proportion of people living alone (12 per cent) was double that of 1971, in 2005 there were just under 284,000 marriages in the UK, around 27,000 fewer than in 2004, and 197,000 fewer than in 1972, when the number of marriages peaked at 480,000.

Over the last 20 years, the proportion of unmarried men and women aged under 60 cohabiting in Great Britain rose from 11 per cent of men and 13 per cent of women to 24 per cent and 25 per cent respectively, while one in ten men and one in four women forming a civil partnership in the UK in 2006 had been in a previous legal partnership, in nearly all cases a marriage.  The average age of a criminal in the UK is 19, so it's possible to infer a link between a destabilising society in marriage terms and an increase in crime and criminality. Perhaps the most worrying statistic, however, is that at March 2006 there were 32,100 children on child protection registers in the UK. Nearly half of all cases were due to neglect.

So society is changing in some very basic and objectively measurable ways, and it's not simply "the older generations wrongly categorizing this behaviour as something to be frightened of and something  that needs to be stopped."

Your laudable aim of stopping

people "milking" the benefit system (by) making them feel valuable and worthwhile members of society, who therefore would not want to take money from the pockets of their fellow citizens and who will then strive to go out and work for the greater good

fails to mention how this would work in practice, other than by increasing the minimum wage. However, there is also substantial evidence that many people set out to deliberately abuse the system to obtain tangible benefits they could never otherwise hope to get, even with a marked increase in the minimum wage.

[Hugo]

[The way to stop people "milking" the benefit system is to make them feel valuable and worthwhile members of society, who therefore would not want to take money from the pockets of their fellow citizens and who will then strive to go out and work for the greater good.

You have to understand these people have no interest in working for a living. They are not decent people 'down on their luck', they believe people who work for a living are mugs and they also believe are entitled to get everything for nothing. I've met many of them in my time and they are all the same.

These "do gooders" have got to be joking, those people are just scum. The scum do not and do not want to make any contribution to society, all they want to do is take,take,take.
Do these "do gooders" think that it would be wrong for the Government to make any of the able bodied  people to work for their benefits in the way that the vast majority of decent people have to work for a living?  There are many charities crying out for volunteers and there are other jobs that could be done such as litter collecting etc.   so don't say that there is no work for the scum to do.

[brumbob]

The problem with that Hugo is that it could put already employed litter collectors out of work, then there is the cost of setting up and running another quango plus supervisor wages

[born2run]

[The way to stop people "milking" the benefit system is to make them feel valuable and worthwhile members of society, who therefore would not want to take money from the pockets of their fellow citizens and who will then strive to go out and work for the greater good.

You have to understand these people have no interest in working for a living. They are not decent people 'down on their luck', they believe people who work for a living are mugs and they also believe are entitled to get everything for nothing. I've met many of them in my time and they are all the same.

These "do gooders" have got to be joking, those people are just scum. The scum do not and do not want to make any contribution to society, all they want to do is take,take,take.
Do these "do gooders" think that it would be wrong for the Government to make any of the able bodied  people to work for their benefits in the way that the vast majority of decent people have to work for a living?  There are many charities crying out for volunteers and there are other jobs that could be done such as litter collecting etc.   so don't say that there is no work for the scum to do.

If you have ever seen what a mess the "community service" programme is, you'd know this is not possible.
You can't get non motivated people to work, in short of putting them in chains - I fear that's what some of you would actually like to see happen!! We talk of lowering of standards, but I've never seen such a lowered standard of attitudes towards basic human rights than some of the posts I've read on here. To be honest I would rather be a "do gooder" than a tyrant.

[Hugo]

If you have ever seen what a mess the "community service" programme is, you'd know this is not possible.
You can't get non motivated people to work, in short of putting them in chains - I fear that's what some of you would actually like to see happen!! We talk of lowering of standards, but I've never seen such a lowered standard of attitudes towards basic human rights than some of the posts I've read on here. To be honest I would rather be a "do gooder" than a tyrant.

I understand that the "community service" programme is in a mess but the majority of people in this country are hard working decent people. Do you think that any of these non motivated people who refuse to work should receive benefits that sometimes are well in excess of what anybody in employment receives for a hard weeks work?
 

[Hugo]

The problem with that Hugo is that it could put already employed litter collectors out of work, then there is the cost of setting up and running another quango plus supervisor wages

You're right of course Brumbob and Born2run is correct in the comments about the community service programme but something has to be done as the Government hasn't got a bottomless pit of money.
We are too soft with benefits for the undeserving minority but perhaps someone on here has got the answer to this problem.

[born2run]

[If you have ever seen what a mess the "community service" programme is, you'd know this is not possible.
You can't get non motivated people to work, in short of putting them in chains - I fear that's what some of you would actually like to see happen!! We talk of lowering of standards, but I've never seen such a lowered standard of attitudes towards basic human rights than some of the posts I've read on here. To be honest I would rather be a "do gooder" than a tyrant.

I understand that the "community service" programme is in a mess but the majority of people in this country are hard working decent people. Do you think that any of these non motivated people who refuse to work should receive benefits that sometimes are well in excess of what anybody in employment receives for a hard weeks work?
 

Which is why you increase the minimum wage, have better working conditions for the low paid (I know some younger family members who have worked in big retail shops and I understand they get treated like rubbish, ussualy by power hungry but ill educated "managers")  So that the honest people who work have a better lifestyle than those on benefits (in fact I believe they do already, but it should be even more of a positive gap)

The alternative (as a lot of people on here, I suspect would like) is that you decrease benefits or even stop them altogether! Well if that happens I don't think these un-motivated troubled people will suddenly leap out of bed and go to work! They will get their money by other means, and I hope it's your house they'll be burgling rather than mine!!

[Hugo]

 Would it be fair to everyone if benefits were capped at a level equivelent to the average take home wage so that it would not be beneficially to those who refuse to work.   What do you think?

[Ian]

Which is why you increase the minimum wage, have better working conditions for the low paid (I know some younger family members who have worked in big retail shops and I understand they get treated like rubbish, ussualy by power hungry but ill educated "managers")  So that the honest people who work have a better lifestyle than those on benefits (in fact I believe they do already, but it should be even more of a positive gap)

We're actually talking about two distinct groups here. There are those on benefits who - for one reason or another - simply cannot work, and I'm fairly certain no one on here is seriously advocating we throw the sick and infirm into the workhouse.

On the other hand , there is a growing but significant minority in the UK who do seek to defraud, to who do live lives in which their prime aim is to extract as much out of society as they can without giving anything back in return. It's this latter group that attracts condemnation  - some might argue rightly so - and research for years has indicated the 'vicious circle' mentality that means, fundamentally, we're allowing the gradual erosion of society to continue unabated through a lack of suitable positive action. 

The Chinese have long realised that population control is an essential ingredient in a developing economy, and they achieve this through a combination of legal missives and peer persuasion. But even China hasn't won the battle against those whose primary allegiance is to themselves and not society. With Western Society, it's a question of drawing a line. Trouble is, where is that line drawn?

[Ian]

Would it be fair to everyone if benefits were capped at a level equivelent to the average take home wage so that it would not be beneficially to those who refuse to work

I'm fairly sure this is one of the proposals being considered by the government, Hugo.  I think the biggest problem is housing benefit, however.  In places like London's West End, it's costing millions a year to house relatively few families.