Oh You Selfish Naion?

[Theland]

how do yu voters feel about the tory win and the perpetuation of food banks, benefit sanctions, and grinding our weakest people into penury?
God help us for our lack of humanity

[maggiebee]

"It is our moral failure that we still tolerate poverty."

Ela Bhatt

[Khandro]

Hypo. // no employer is going to pay someone in the region of £20,000 to do something unless their activity generates at least a couple of thousand more than that in productivity or intangible benefits,//

In a rational world, -yes, but I have just returned from Slovenia - population of only about 2 million. I knew it when it was part Yugoslavia and very poor under communism. Now, due to joining the EU, there are new large houses everywhere and everyone has new cars, many BWS, and Mercs. Well over 60% of the population work in the public sector and it's mostly all being done on credit, I fear it will go the way of Greece.

The old communist joke was "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."

Now I think it is more, "We pretend to work, and they DO pay us."

[ToraToraTora]

well I suppose the lefties have a right to have a whinge.

[jim360]

As much as the result on Thursday may have been sad -- but why not let's wait to find out first? -- this sort of post probably explains why "the left" often do so badly. They are right, and people are stupid for not realising it. What a brilliant attitude.

[tamborine]

As the poor seem unable to manage their financial benefits, perhaps communal living is the answer? Bring back workhouses, that'll soon separate the wheat from the chaff!

[anotheoldgit]

No food banks during WW2, one went to the local Civic Restaurant and paid for your meal, no benefit money either.

[naomi24]

The welfare state was not established for the benefit of those who are fit and well and able to work. It was intended to be a cushion to help people over hard times and to care for the sick and elderly – and that is all it should do.

[Retrochic]

To be honest I'm sick to my back teeth about this Food Bank Milarky. Yes this is anecdotal but I've seen it with my own eyes people filling their bags with free food (which they are entitled to as they will be in receipt of means tested benefits) at our local town hall, then going a few doors up to the off licence for wine and beer,which I presume they pay for. No one, and I mean no one in the UK needs to be given free food. They go and get a shopping bag full because they are entitled to,then spend what money they would have spent on food on other unessential things like phone contracts and cigarettes.

[boxtops]

I have no confidence that anyone would be any better off under Labour, if that what Theland would have preferred. I agree with Naomi's last post - when the welfare state was established, it was never imagined that whole families would spend their lives never doing a stroke of work, just living off the rest of us. It has to change. I remember when we only got child benefit for the second child, not for the first one - having a first child, it was assumed that you'd worked out your finances and could afford one.

[Hypognosis]

I feel sorry for the people who come to the realisation that they were brought into this world not because their mother particularly wanted them but mainly because it meant she could leapfrog the housing queue and get her own council flat, whilst still a teenager.

And to think that idiotic system only got introduced as a cheap tactic to score more votes (probably).

The trouble is, it is impossible to make noises about who should and shouldn't 'breed' without sounding like a fascist or eugenicist. When logic dictates that something needs to be done for everybody's sake but "it's a bit fascist", left wingers are obliged to not do it and make a big noise about not doing it. Hence they cave and start handing out freebies in a way which only compounds the problem.

[Hypognosis]

@naomi

"The welfare state was not established for the benefit of those who are fit and well and able to work. It was intended to be a cushion to help people over hard times and to care for the sick and elderly – and that is all it should do."

Correct. As for the chronology, I take it that this was introduced by the post-war Labour government (i.e. a similar stage to the kick-off of the NHS)?
I guess it was easy to be so progressive, at a time when the country was replete with work to be done: turning tanks and planes back into scrap metal, clearing rubble, building pre-fab houses and so forth. The Empire Windrush was 1947, which was all about a shortage of labour which was **causing problems of spiralling wage demands** - a rare case of "employees market".

Excess labour force maintains wage restraint so you can justify mass unemployment - and the costs thereof - by the way it unburdens employers from increasing wage bills eating their profit margins and inflation is kept low so those who are working hard are not faced with spiralling prices.

Which is a convoluted way of saying "stop complaining about the unemployed, they're doing us all a favour".