This is who’s really to blame for Britain’s ‘broken’ benefits system
It’s an unspoken truth about the welfare state today. The sheer scale of in-work poverty is driving the need for state support – which is contributed to by housing costs – but also (yes) by insecure work, poor-quality jobs and terrible pay. By employers, too, who seemingly think it’s the job of the state to step in and top up the poverty wages they offer – you know, to those people who get up at 5am and graft for them from sun-up to sun-down. And yet, even then, it’s still not enough for many people to live on – as evidenced by the 4.5 million kids in poverty in the UK, 72 per cent of whom (according to government figures) live in a working household. And the fact that 300,000 of those are in families with both parents working full-time. Unsurprising, perhaps, when you learn that 56 per cent of those hit by the two-child limit – and being pushed into poverty – are in employment.
From the i Paper, a supporter of the social class which is gradually grinding down working people into a state of dependency. Andrew Burnham's social class, and the social class of his Cabinet, the Labour Party and the Establishment.
Where can I find an image of myself? Ah, in the poor, in my poor neighbour labouring in the grip of an unjust system of capitalism. Let me look at him, let my heart be wrung, let me give myself to his service. Poor fellow, poor image, he is so badly off. Alas and alas, I do love my neighbour as myself: I am as anxious about his pecuniary welfare as I am about myself. I am so sorry for him, the poor X. He is a man like me. So I lie to myself and to him. For I do not care about him and his poverty: I care about my own unsatisfied soul. But I sidetrack to him, my poor neighbour, to vent on him my self-pity.
D.H. Lawrence – Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays (1933)
D.H. Lawrence – Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays (1933)
6 comments:
"those people who get up at 5am and graft for them from sun-up to sun-down."
I wonder what sort of job the writer will seek when he grows up.
dearieme - I thought of putting "from sun-up to sun-down" in the post title, but maybe the writer hopes to write Lone Ranger scripts for a new series when he grows up.
Not sure it is broken.
If the purpose of a system is what it does then the poverty and state dependency is a target.
Just like the Frankfurt School aimed for.
Of course, as my brother once remarked, none of them talk about how to raise the money for their projects, like the novel idea of growing the economy, which they havn't the first idea how to do.
"What percentage of the British population lives below the poverty line? When I call that a silly question, a question that doesn’t deserve an answer, I’m not being callous or unfeeling about poverty. I care very much if children starve or pensioners shiver with cold. My objection – and this is just one of many examples – is to the very idea of a line: a gratuitously manufactured discontinuity in a continuous reality.
~ Richard Dawkins"
Mike - yes, it's one of those cases where outcome is intention.
Tammly - that's it, they don't have the first idea about growing the economy, so much so that the ignorance is startling at times.
DJ - "a gratuitously manufactured discontinuity in a continuous reality." Yes it is, that's a good way of putting it.
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