Two million 'wrongly get benefit'.
Wherein an investment banker (!!!) pulls figures out of his arse - to justify a reform of the system.
(I can't help but point out that if many people are indeed working illegally while claiming - then I wonder just how many have been forced to do so simply because the benefit rates are so low that they couldn't hope to pay their bills otherwise!
I also can't help but wonder what fee this banker got for this little job. I'll wager it was quite a bit over the minimum wage! And what does he know about things like benefit rates, social conditions, the localised economic situations, etc. etc. Surely all he knows is how to make money. [update: oh what a giveaway! "Today, on a visit to a job placement centre in Newham, I asked Purnell whether he was happy for people to get rich helping the unemployed. "Yes" he answered without so much as a blink."])
Tories plan 'work for benefits'.
Someone interviewed by the BBC site made a very good point - that they make criminals do hours of 'community service' as a punishment. What have the long term unemployed done exactly that means they should be treated in this way?
"Arbeit mach frei" anyone?
Private firms to find people work.
(There are already hundreds of these firms across the country and believe me, they're pretty much totally useless. I've had personal experience of them.)
To the last news piece - this is the response I wrote to the BBC website - I'll doubt they'll publish it - and even if they did it'll doubtless get buried under the massive amount of mentally-diseased comments they're bound to get from the 'Daily Mail' 'Daily Telegraph' readers calling for anyone who's been unemployed for longer than three months to be shot dead. Seriously fat people and the unemployed are seen as the last two groups in society it's acceptable to bash. So the venom really gets flowing on this issue.
I've got a much better idea - rather than contract these Private firms to do anything. Let's simply not have them in the first place. Get rid of them altogether. In fact - what we should do is totally dismantle the entire DWP/DSS, sack every last person involved with it - break it up completely - sell off all it's assets, and then with the proceeds and the money saved - give every man woman and child in the this country their share of the money to do with what they want. It is, strictly speaking, our money anyway. The cannier ones will invest it and be able to live off the proceeds for the rest of their lives without having to work again. Others will be able to set up their own businesses and become self-employed. Or whatever. Sure, the less canny will probably fritter it away within a few years and we'll see a lot more people in the streets with begging bowls before long. (But given the useless and punitive schemes both the parties are proposing we'll likely to be seeing that anyway.) But it's obvious the system as it is broken, and hasn't worked for decades - it's extremely wasteful and costly in itself, and in many ways it actively, deliberately conspires to keeps people poor. (A big labour pool always means wage demands can kept low.) And every time - again and again - it totally ignores some blatantly obvious facts, such as: that there are far currently more people than there are jobs to be filled, that some locations have more industry than other areas, that too many businesses don't pay enough in wages, that in many cases the minimum wage is far, far too low to live on (which is why a great percentage of the population are now heavily reliant on 'tax credits', that the working population in this country work far longer hours than is good for them (whatever happened to the idea widely prevalent in the Sixties/Seventies that we would all be working only three to four hours a week by now?), that the education system is failing us, the whole live-to-work mentality in the UK is a form of mass insanity in itself, (another example: what exactly is the point of forcing single mothers into work just so that they are then forced to spend whatever money they earn on childcare costs?), the list goes on and on. No wonder the rates of mental illness are at an all time high...
There really needs to a be a commission studying the whole range of issues surrounding 'work' in the UK, because the various problems are a lot deeper rooted than anyone cares to admit. But instead we get the poor, the unemployed, the sick, the disabled being constantly demonised while wave after wave of half-baked private 'businesses' and 'charities' set themselves up - earning themselves nice fat commissions and nice wages patronising the disadvantaged. While giving the impression to the gullible types (the sort of person who reads the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail usually) that something is being done.
Of course what is definitely going to happen shortly - is that there's going to be a massive serious economic downturn - if not an out and out recession - where many businesses are going to fail and unemployment rates are set to start going through the roof again. The only growth then will be in these private firms and they'll be bursting at the seams with new clients while the pool of jobs they try to push them into will be constantly shrinking. But no one's thought it through to start heading that one off. Tough times lie ahead.
No comments:
Post a Comment