worsleyweb said:
This talk of savage public sector cuts is dramatic at best. Of the 12 billion - 40 percent will come from tax evasion, significant amounts from housing benefit reform. How many under 25s do you know are able to buy a house? And yet the single mum from Rochdale can have 3 kids by 23 and get a 3 bedroom council house. That option in life has to be eradicated.
But that's not a fair comparison. Being able to rent a council house for £60 a week and being able to purchase a house for a hundred grand aren't the same level of opportunity.
I'd argue that we don't actually have any issues with low cost housing, only that we have a problem with the distribution of low cost housing. You're a property man you said, I bet you know loads of places around the North West where you can pick up a small starter terraced house for ~£50,000. I saw a 2 bed middle terraced in the paper the other day for £56,000 with a 95% mortgage available, was thinking of buying it just because it was ridiculously low and sticking it up for rent. My sister lives in half a million pound house - 6 bedrooms, massive rooms with high ceilings, detached with a garage and a big back garden. Valued at £200,000 due to location. On the other hand my Dad just sold his 2 bedroomed mid terrace rental home for £185,000.
On the single Mum thing, what are you suggesting needs to be eradicated? Why is it wrong that a woman can have 3 kids and get a rent a house that they can live in? Let's say she has 3 kids with her loving squaddie fella and he gets killed in Iraq so she has to move due to lack of income as he was "the breadwinner". Should her kids starve because you don't like it?
Imagine if you had the same attitude to benefits when you were on your arse and needed help.
You see this is sort of my problem with many of your statements. You'd be hard pressed to find people who don't believe that there is a benefits culture in the country from a certain part of the population. I certainly do, I do volunteer work with young people constantly and pretty much my entire friends/family around here is in the social care sector both public and private dealing with either abused children or teenagers who have been in trouble as kids. I know that there are people who are 17 or 18 who go straight onto benefits, get a little council house and decide that that is it for them; but my experiences in one of the poorest places in the area working with some of the worst educated kids in the country is that 95% of them want to work and want to do well for themselves.
In all of your arguments you make sweeping statements such as "it is wrong for a single Mum of 23 to have 3 kids and get a council house" which is both silly because it lacks specificity and comes across as callous. Here's an example, there's somebody who I know was raped as a teenager and it sent her life completely out of control; she went from a normal student to a man hating bitchy teenagewr who went out taking drugs, robbing cars and getting nicked every night. She was put in a Children's Home because she refused to live at home where the rape happened and fell in with yet another bad crowd. By 15 she was pregnant. By 17 she was pregnant again. In fact by the time she was 23 she had 3 children and yes, shockingly, had no job, no secondary education and lived in a council house with an abusive partner.
Somewhere around that time things got done to help her partner leave her alone as she was pregnant with her fourth child. Then she basically went through a crisis where she had lots of children, no income and no prospects. So me as somebody who also dropped out of school for different reasons and developed programming as a trade instead, we went together to an Adult Education Centre to get our GCSEs. Let's just say that the split is that she's the people person and I'm the Academic one - she wasn't just bad at Maths, she was literally frightened by it as a subject. I went through the course in about 2 days. She struggled through it three times a week for 9 months, balancing the responsibility of four children along with an education along with a small part time job that she managed to pick up and driving lessons that she was doing as well as the mental health or emotional issues that come from sexual abuse then physical and mental abuse from her partner as well as a complete lack of friends because friends were "banned" and all of her childhood friends had disappeared because of it. But we all pulled together and somehow made it work as everybody become a de facto babysitter, taxi service, counsellor and bank manager.
Then she worked for a bit as a carer for old people. Not a very well paying job unfortunately and certainly not enough to live off, but the hours were pretty good and the main skill was being good with people/able to clean which she could do. Very much a baby steps operation. Let me make you understand here, at this point she is still in receipt of housing benefit and other low income and high children benefits, she is still getting told by the Job Centre that she isn't looking for work hard enough and she should get a full time job in Tesco rather than part time work. But how exactly can you explain to some uppity civil servant wanting to get you off of the benefit system about how big of a deal that part time job is in terms of her ability to manage her life?
After doing this for a few months whilst simultaneously raising her kids on her own, she started to think about what she really wanted in life. She wanted a good life for her kids but she also wanted her whole experiences to mean something or be used in a positive way; after her own good experiences with the Police as a teenager (although she was constantly getting nicked, the Police were always nice and never "judged her as a victim" like others around her did) she decided that she was interested in Criminal Justice. So she started doing some unpaid volunteer work in a certain field called the Appropriate Adult scheme - what this is if you don't know, is a network of people who are on call 24 hours a day to attend a Police station and sit in as an Appropriate Adult to provide support for people who have been arrested. Essentially this boils down to the mentally ill or more often, young people who are in the social system and don't have parents to call and sit with them in an interview who should could identify with.
Again, not only at this time was she in receipt of housing benefit and had 4 kids living in a 3 bedroomed council house but she'd just given up a paid position to return to no income. I have no doubt that if you weren't fully aware of all of the circumstances around this, you'd be thinking this was ridiculous and bad and she should have been evicted. But therein lies the point - you have absolutely no idea what challenges people are facing in their lives and you have absolutely no way of judging what type of person they are based on their economic circumstances.
That woman by the way then managed to get herself a degree in social care, work with charities for a while then worked as a full time social worker and has now just been given several million quid to setup a whole new team in the area focused on handling child sexual abuse cases better and engaging with victims who are acting out with their new foster parents, essentially the worst of the worst that no other people want to touch as they're seen as unmanageable but are the people who need the help the most. Her kids aren't just never in trouble, they don't even swear. When you deal with the worst kids in the area all day, little Jimmy trying to sneak out of the house when he's grounded is a well manageable scenario.
The point of the story, and it's a true one by the way, is to highlight that you are passing judgements on people without any knowledge of them. At several times in that woman's life you would proclaim her a waste of space and a scrounger and probably forced her to take that underpaid job at Tesco which would have ruined any future career. Now she earns enough where in a few years she should be looking at paying the 40% tax rate and will easily surpass her benefit payments in terms of worth, not to mention the social good she does in turning other people into healthy members of society with a job, a life and a future.
Me on the other hand? I'm a lazy ****, always have been. I've always used an ability to pick things up pretty sharpish as a main advantage and sailed through most of the time without any major economic challenges. I can build good and reliable software so by the time I was 25 I'd already ran and sold my own business, mainly because it was getting to a place where I couldn't be arsed with it and a small local firm was losing business to me and it was easier to buy me out and offer me a job than it was to compete. But I wasn't in social housing nor on benefits (though I was when I was younger) nor any children and always had a few quid lying around - by your definition a success story and "one of the good ones" but in reality have nowhere near the work ethic that the other woman has.
The major logical failing that you always make and you aren't the only one to do this, is that you judge the worth of a person by their material success. You think you're better than that single Mum of 3 living in a house in Rochdale and think that they are a drag on you. Worse than this, you do so after previously telling me that you're now a success after being on your arse in a pretty major way a few years back. You've been in hardship and in that position yet are willing to judge everybody in that position.
Again, nobody is denying that there isn't a benefits culture in some quarters in Britain. We all have stories about that one guy who is always trying to nick a fag but turns up with an iPhone when he's claiming JobSeekers. But the reason we always highlight that one guy is because we find it outrageous - it is a strange occurrence, something out of the norm that is worth talking about. Most of the people in the benefits system are people who are just as you were, down on their luck and need to reassess themselves in their lives. Forcing them off benefits in some cheap "sink or swim" mechanism will do absolutely nothing at all to help.
Think of it this way. You seem to have a measure of pride about your success which would imply that you felt ashamed when you were on the other side and down on your luck. Like many others, you seem to put your self-worth into your current success or failure, not an entirely unreasonable position I might add. If you go to any Job Centre in the country, you'll see the same thing when a long term unemployed person finally finds a small job - the excitement that they feel is palpable because to them it isn't about the money or the work, it's because they are finally
worth something and they are no longer an embarrassment to themselves or their family. When I was a teenager/early twenties I worked in construction recruitment, interviewing applicants for positions that we had available. Telling a 55 year old guy who had never worked a building site in his life but was made redundant in his former role and had been unemployed for 5 years that he now had a job going to a site and doing some sweeping up, and seeing him break down in tears was both a joyful and confusing thing to see at that age.
Like you many people who are benefits judge their lives in the same way. Now imagine that not only are they told by society and themselves that they are constantly a failure in life, but also that we're now going to remove your ability to live because your crushing sense of disappointment and failure isn't enough to motivate you we think, so have some starvation and homelessness too. Go get 'em Champ!
Is the benefit system giving a small amount of people an excuse to be lazy? Yes.
Are these people enough of a problem that we need to single out "anybody in 3 bedroomed council house with 3 kids" as a sensible way of judging whether they can be arsed or not? No.
So the real question is "how do we weed out the people who are legit and might be going somewhere with the people who aren't"? And there's no answer for that because there's absolutely no way that any civil servant can sit and understand the mental and emotional hardships that somebody is going through on any sort of fair scale that can be applied across the country - that's the problem with the benefits system in general, it is trying to legislate compassion which isn't something that can be legislated evenly because not all stories are even. I gave the example of the woman above who many would call "a baby factory" from the outside but they had no idea about her history of abuse nor the psychological trauma it was still inflicting on her that made her totally unemployable. I can tell you for absolute certain now that if the social safety net wouldn't have caught her then she would have committed suicide and the children would be living in custody with an abusive father and a mother who had topped herself. She's alive because she had a council house and housing benefit and now paying it back in financial and social terms ten times over. Her kids are grafters too, always with a paper round or fixing bikes for their mates and will be well educated functioning members of the workforce in a few years time. That's more tax money and another generation of properly raised kids who don't turn to drugs or crime in an area that desperately needs kids not to turn to drugs or crime.
You turn the benefits issue into "hard workers" vs "not hard workers" and its so much bullshit. Many people on benefits have ten times the work ethic of me and earn ten times less because I was well educated in Bowdon and taught how to critically think whilst they went to a back-arse comprehensive in an old mining town where nobody really cared any more as the mining collapses had recently destroyed the whole industry in the town. It isn't a level playing field, this is what you can't seem to appreciate. I got advantages in my life - my parents grafted to get my extra tuition and put me in a decent school, I lived in an area that was relatively crime free in that generation (aside from the usual kiddy stuff), I had a stable family upbringing with two educated, working parents who seemingly liked each other, my old man used to take me to City games and we bonded over it, my Mum taught me about social activism and the need for equality of rights for homosexuals (which obviously was a big deal in 80s Manchester), my Dad taught me how to fight and my Mum taught me how to love. But both THEIR parents were on benefits of some form and couldn't have survived without them - Dad's Mum was disabled, Mum's Mum had 16 kids in one of those weird highly adherent Roman Catholic families and shock horror, lived in a council house. Comparing my upbringing to some of the kids who I meet today and the idea that I can turn around to them and say "well why don't you go off and get your GCSEs at night school then get a University education like I did you lazy bastards" is an unimaginably foreign concept. Some of these kids can barely count, some of them were abused as children and were addicted to smack by the time that they were 15 and homeless prostitutes by 17. Telling them that they are actually in this position because they obviously can't be arsed to work and if only they went to Uni like me then they could be a lazy bastard and make top whack is like telling a person in a wheelchair that they should get on a treadmill and run a marathon like I did the lazy bastards.
This is one of the reasons that some people seem to dodge you or don't engage with you - the way that you write your posts it seems like your entire mental model on how people work is wrong. Benefits or house purchasing isn't an issue of lazy vs workers. There are hard working people on benefits and bone idle home owners. Yes, in a perfect world we would like to remove the benefit scroungers from the system and it isn't exactly piss easy to deal with these Job Centre people under pressure to cut people off the list either by the way. But in cutting these we hurt real innocent people who need our help.
We have a fundamental disagreement here. I would rather 1 person take the piss out of me so that I can help another 4, because helping that other 4 isn't just the right thing to do morally, it is the right thing to do financially when looking at the looming pension crisis who requires more workers in the world. You seem to see the 1 taking the piss and decide to enact legislation that will hurt them - which is fine but it will also definitely hurt at least 1 of the 4 hard workers and they shouldn't be punished.
The cuts to benefits is essentially the death penalty argument in disguise. Most people I feel would probably agree that killing 4 evil people but having a splatter effect of killing even a single innocent person makes us murderers and they don't want to do it. The same logic can be applied to cuts.
And before it even starts, let's get this other logical issue out of the way. Cuts are necessary - but the distribution of those cuts is the argument. We could keep the benefit system at the current level right now if we scrap plans for a Trident replacement instead; as you point out WW in the post there are numerous places whereby things can be cut - this is cutting for the sake of ideology and attempting to socially control people and not finance. I was always under the impression that you were against attempts by the Government to socially control people? Perhaps you can go and tell John Smith in Blackley that he isn't allowed council tax benefit any more because although we have nuclear weapons, we want some better ones so we could potentially blow up people in a foreign country more efficiently but will probably never use them? The very definition of a white elephant.
Honestly sometimes you just come across as oblivious and worse than that, mean.
