What is it that the ‘Left’ are really afraid of? Losing a client voting base comprised almost exclusively these days of public sector workers and the vulnerable dependant? ‘Wot about the Workers’ is hugely inappropriate, for they only stand for certain workers and every last non-worker.

I have taken the bait this morning following a Tweet from Steve Baxter, a writer I have huge admiration for, who has entered the debate over the proposed Welfare ‘Cap’, with this simplistic analysis.

No, Steve, the Welfare Cap doesn’t ‘boil down’ to that at all, any more than it can be described as ‘Social Cleansing’, another favourite of the placard waving Left.

It boils down to ‘why should the hard working poor’ – and they do exist, though you generally refer to them as the ‘middle classes’, be forced to subsidise those who chose to live in expensive areas, even when there is no work for them there, simply because they do so chose to live there.

How many hard working families have been forced to ‘disrupt their children’ and ‘tear them away from their friends and extended family support’ to take one of the arguments on offer from the Bishops, in order to move to a cheaper house, or live in an area where their rail season ticket is not so prohibitively expensive, or even just to change jobs? Do I see any crocodile tears over those children?

How many children were disrupted and torn away from their friends when Equitable Life went belly up, and thousands of parents had to chose between school fees or saving for their retirement all over again? When the Lloyd’s market collapsed, and houses had to be sold, lifestyles changed overnight?

Were the Bishops bleating ‘think of the children’ then? Was Steve Baxter Tweeting ‘so poor Lloyd’s underwriters shouldn’t live in nice houses’?

They weren’t. He wasn’t. For one simple reason. There is only one class of child, and one class of poor that any of the Left are interested in. The poor who are prepared to remain trapped into dependency on the state.

It is not a new phenomena, it has been going on for a long time. 20 years ago when Mr G was preparing to leave East Anglia, he tried to give his business away to a long standing friend who had, we thought, fallen on hard times. He was out of work and dependant on the State.

The core of the deal was this: Mr G had secure rented business premises at £25 a week, not an onerous sum. The mainstay of the business was a pine stripping service that operated one day a week, taking on average £1,000 a week. Sure, he had to get up at 3am to heat the tank up on that one day each week, and he worked like a Trojan all day heaving furniture in and out of the tank, and he did have to to be there again on a Saturday to allow people to collect their furniture, but you could have ignored what he did for the rest of the week and just operated the business on that one day a week. You could even have spread the load and done a little bit of the work every day…

Could he persuade his friend to take the business over – as a gift? Could he Hell! The State was paying his mortgage on a most salubrious house (I don’t think they do that now in fairness), they paid for his daughter’s school uniform, they paid for her school meals, they paid for a taxi to take her to school, they’d just paid for her to join an ‘outward bound group holiday’ in North Wales, Heavens to Betsy, hadn’t they just bought the world’s most expensive vacuum cleaner for them on the strength of a Doctor’s note that she was asthmatic (since I was currently sharing my vacuum cleaner with the workshop to make sure customers got their furniture back dust free, that one particularly rankled with me!) – why if he had to pay for all that himself, it wouldn’t be worth his while, not once he’d paid tax and insurance and everything.

20 years ago, I was damned sure that he would still make a profit out of £1,000 a week, still would today; but reality mattered not a jot, he was safe, he was secure, the State would ensure that, and he wasn’t prepared to jeopardise it. He had become one of the ‘deserving poor’ and he wasn’t about to lose that comfortable berth. (Nor was he the only one, we tried three other people before eventually giving the equipment away to a man who already held down three part time jobs and thought he could bolster his income by using the steam cleaner to clean cars…actually, since you ask, No, he wasn’t English, and he’s since expanded his empire into a ‘pukka’ business, now steam cleaning commercial kitchens).

I note also, that this morning the bleeding hearts at the BBC4 have found a new string for their violin – it’s not just ‘think of the children’ and ‘why shouldn’t the poor live in nice houses’, the welfare gap is religious discrimination to boot. BBC 4 have dug up a community of Haredi Jews who are liable to ‘be forced out of their community’.

‘Manni’, who illustrates the story, is living in a £500 a week house in Stamford Hill, when his ‘low paid job for a Jewish Charity’ only allows him to contribute £80 a week in rent. He has to live in expensive Stamford Hill because that is where the ’70 synagogues, Jewish schools and Kosher supermarkets are’ and he is able to follow his religion, which includes raising a large family and thus requiring a five bedroomed house that he can’t afford.

It doesn’t seem to occur to Manni that the 70 synagogues, Jewish schools and Kosher supermarkets are there precisely because he is there, rather than the other way round. Manni and his impoverished fellow Jewish charity workers have only just surfaced today, but in the depths of some Socialist (Unpaid) Worker’s dungeon they are probably preparing the ‘Stop Ethnic and Religious cleansing’ banners as we speak.

The Left don’t just need a new leader, they need a new name. They stand for just about anything and everything but honest labour.

Suggestions on a postcard please. Or in the comments, as you please.

Dave January 26, 2012 at 00:42

Bit late posting this but have been in bed suffering, yes suffering with
manflu.

I couldn’t help wondering whether the bleading hearts bishops actually read
their bibles. Every time I hear the quote some stupid “suffer the little
children” nonsense I instinctively respond with Paul’s instructions to the
Church at Thessalonica; ” For even when we were with you, we gave you this
rule: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” (2 Thess 3:10)

We worked our way out of the 1930s recession, but the Left shout down any
attempt to get their client base back into work. I wonder why?

RichieP January 24, 2012 at 15:25

Nobody ever seems to mention that the reason the rents are so high is that
the bloody landlords could be assured they’d get it from the system. The
reality here is that rents are far too high across the board. In Brighton,
even the smallest one-bed flats are priced at a minimum of £650 or more a
month. God knows what it’s like in London. I don’t support long-term welfare
dependency but I don’t support uncontrolled cynical profiteering by landlords
either – fair rents is an issue that needs to be addressed.

fake January 24, 2012 at 10:30

*But community is what it comes down to – people being forced out of where
they are now, children having to move school*

Yea, it’s like those places in africa, where people are forced out of their
homes at gunpoint to live on the streets, and the children whipped out of
school to go to workhouses.

Or rather, they are being moved from one modern home with heating,
facilities and access to services, to another modern home with heating,
facalities and access to services, OH THE HORROR!

And they may not be able to live down the road from their family any more,
just like billions of other people all over the world including England.

And children moving school, oh dear, what a terror that is, what DISRUPTION
to their lives!, it may even take them a whole month to adjust, it’s not like
people move house all the timber for various reasons, what horrors do these
people subject their children to?

macheath January
24, 2012 at 11:06

Might one suggest that, in some cases, at least, the local schools losing
these families might be profoundly grateful?

The same could not, however, be said for the myriad diversity and
outreach coordinators whose caseload would thus migrate away from the
comfortable south-east. Would they be forced to follow their raison
d’etre to less affluent areas, I wonder?

JuliaM January
24, 2012 at 14:54

No, they’ll just do day-trips to the hinterlands. On expenses.

GildasTheMonk
January 24, 2012 at 10:20

There was an excellant interview/debate between a salt of the earth fireman
and a house of lords bleeding heart merchant toff on the radio last night. As
the fireman pointed out, poverty is not children having to share a room: it is
going without food, shoes and school. The house of lords merchant wouldnt or
couldnt get it. Essentially he was arguing that people with large families
living in desireable parts of london would face a shortfall on their rent, and
thus fall into debt (adding the inevitable catch all “through no fault of
their own”). To which the fireman replied with the classic retort:
“move”.
10 nil to the fireman.
I read a piece in the Sunday Times about
the Somali (inevitably) refugee couple with umpteen kids living in a £25,000
odd per year house in Hampstead this week. That’s before the child benefit and
the rest. Neither has ever worked. There was a nice picture of the lady of the
house on her mobile. Who paid for that? Is a mobile a necessary item?
Walk
around any ordinary town and you will see pensioners who have contributed a
life time of toil eaking out an existence on a meagre state pension. They
could only dream of living in such luxury.
Every fixed set of rules will
inevitably throw up hard cases, but the system is being abused and is
monstrously out of kilter.

MTG January 24, 2012 at 08:17

We should never begrudge the less fortunate. In comparison, some of us are
so lucky that it proves impossible to visit a blog without avoiding selection
for a free chance to win a Mini.

Rick Hamilton
January 23, 2012 at 23:16

The Tax Eaters Party.

binao January 23, 2012 at 22:51

It doesn’t help to vilify those on benefits, unless they’re proven cheats.
I think there’s also a difference between short term need and long term
dependence that’s not disability related.
Problem is, we’ve had decades of
conditioning to expect more and more rights and benefits. We now have
expectations that are unaffordable, unattainable, and increasingly
divisive.
I cannot recall a time when we could ever provide jobs and
affordable homes for anybody who wanted to live near Mum. It is not a right.
We have to move,families too, sometimes, it really isn’t life threatening.
This is reality for a lot of us
Millions have moved here to find work, got
it, and settled, despite language and culture differences. A the same time,
millions of our own people have for whatever reason not competed for those
jobs, not moved for work, nor become self employed. An observation, not a
judgement.
Supporting a life style on benefits that many working families
cannot afford, and that’s what this is about, is divisive and
unnacceptable.

And yes, I like to see all the gravy train fatcats in Westminster, Brussels
and the banks squeezed too. Not instead of.

Bob January 24, 2012 at 09:23

It also doesn’t help to vilify those who pay for all this
generosity!
The PBWs, poor bloody workers.

Fabian the
Fabulous January 23, 2012 at 22:29

For a claimant, the perverse anti-economics of the current welfare system
mean “I need, therefore I shall have”; this misses out the middle stage that
decides the destiny of people in the real world… “therefore I must earn the
means”.

Michael January 23, 2012 at 21:47

I’m currently at risk of redundancy for the second time in twelve months.
Professional job (software programmer for one of the big banks), four kids,
big house, low rent, above average wage. I’ve worked out that my income will
go up slightly if I end up signing on.

I have no idea how people with real jobs can afford to live in places like
London where the rents are so high. The fact that Housing Benefit is
calculated on average rents seems to have distorted the market.

gladiolys January 23, 2012 at 19:43

It seems to me you are judging a whole load of people from a few isolated
cases that highlight your point of view as surely as “The Left” (because
anyone who thinks about community and fellowship is obviously part of this
amorphous mass and all those who do are exactly the same as one another) will
find cases that highlight their’s.

But community is what it comes down to – people being forced out of where
they are now, children having to move school, people having to move jobs…. but
who gives a flying fudge as long as the state saves money. Big Society my
arse.

Which is not to say the system does not need reforming… but you can’t blame
people for making the most of any situation they find themselves in, or being
pissed off at having no control over the changes they need to make.

Engineer January 23, 2012 at 21:08

Nobody should expect ‘the State’ to solve all their problems for them. A
state that allows a family £26,000 a year tax free is pretty damn generous
in my view, especially when there are plenty of families working and paying
taxes on an income less than that.

Even the Labour party admit that the welfare state had become an
unweildy, out-of-control mess. Frank Field tried to address some of the
problems early in the Blair administration, and got the sack for his pains.
At least this government is trying to grasp the nettle.

The cry of ‘not fair’ can equally be made by those paying for the
excesses, as well as those benefitting – arguably with rather more
justification at the moment.

The case that Anna outlines is not an isolated incident, and for anybody
trying to make ends meet the fair way, it is simply and straightforwardly
unacceptable piss-taking. It has to end, because the rest of us can no
longer afford it, and are no longer prepared to accept it.

Who the hell is going to starve on £26,000 a year tax free?

M Barnes
January 24, 2012 at 11:13

lots of people can starve on £26K per year – it depends rather on the
size of family doesn’t it? And the circumstances of that family.
A
system whose unintended consequences is to produce generations within one
family who have never worked clearly needs changing. That is not what
makes me uncomfortable. It’s the demonisation of the whole with a few
select stories of the few – a very cynical approach of ‘lets enflame the
public, get them on our side and then we can push this policy through with
no real debate about the nitty gritty’. A bit Daily Mail-ish isn’t
it?
All I am reading in the press is foaming stories of scroungers
living on £35k a year that ‘hard working families/poor’ are paying for. I
have questions:
Is it the total amount that’s capped or will it be made
up of sub-caps – a cap on housing costs, a cap on food costs, a cap on
utility costs etc
What happens if someones household size means that
they exceed the cap while living in a shithole on a crappy council estate
in a deprived region? Do they want them to find a shittier shithole on a
crappier estate? And how will this help them find a job? (deprived areas
being, by definition, job-free zones).
I am somewhat sceptical of this
– not because I disagree with IDS on the principle but because I am sense
I am being manipulated by a load of horror stories. That and because I
can’t find any bloody details on the damn thing. I am a rational person,
give me some information on how this will work because not everyone on
benefits is a scrounger and not everyone who is unemployed with a large
family is a ‘feckless parasite’. Designing a system for the abusers of
benefits, who I would assume are in the minority, instead of the majority
who use it as a temporary stop-gap is stupid.

I will own to a personal issue on this one BTW.
Dear old Maggie T
came to power and within a few short years my father was unemployed. There
were no jobs for him or anyone else in our town – the only expanding
business was the DHSS (they built an extension, I kid you not). I am from
a large family so this was a problem. Benefits started to get cut off the
longer you spent on the dole. My mother held down 2 official cleaning jobs
and my father took any part-time work going and and any cash-in-hand that
came his way. There were a few times they ‘weren’t hungry’ at dinner. This
lasted for years. I will type that again – years. So my father, who had
worked every day of his life, was described as a scrounger and a parasite
and feckless and told to get on his bike by Norman Tebbit because he
claimed benefits to some level or other for years. We didn’t move because
we didn’t have the money to move. And where would we move to? There
weren’t any jobs on offer anywhere and 5 million people were in the same
boat. At one point my father nearly got suckered by one of those scams
where you applied for a job and sent money off – that’s how desperate he
was. My parents didn’t have a load of kids because they expected the state
would take care of them – they had a load of kids because they wanted them
and knew that they could afford them because they worked hard. They didn’t
think maybe unemployement will hit 5million in a decades time, we’d better
watch out!
So I have a problem with the language being used by
politican here – and quite a few of the smugly judgemental posts on here.
The unemployed are not homogenous, they are not all on £35k and they are
not all lounging around watching sky sports on a flat screen TV in a
kensington townhouse dammit.
Funny how my scrounging parasitical
parents managed to produce so many law abiding, tax-paying, home owning,
upstanding citizens. Rant over.

macheath January 24, 2012 at 12:57

M Barnes, that your parents produced ‘so many law-abiding, tax-paying
etc citizens’ , far from being odd, is surely the result of a strong
work ethic and, I would guess, no small measure of self-sacrifice.

Granted, the media are falling over themselves to depict grotesque
examples but I do think that the current attitude of claimants towards
the welfare state differs from that of the previous generation, who had
experienced rationing and the genuine hardship of post-war Britain.

The expectations of a generation reared in a relatively affluent
society amid mass media are going to be far greater, as is their sense
of entitlement; I suspect your mother, like mine, would have fouind the
fashionable concept of ‘me-time’ or ‘because I’m worth it’ more than a
little baffling, if not downright odd when applied to motherhood.

I agree that it’s impossible to lump everyone together but, as you
say, something has to be done, if only to make all claimaints accept
responsibility for using the money they get as wisely as possible.

When a safety net gets too crowded, people lose sight of the ground
underneath.

M Barnes
January 24, 2012 at 14:13

As I said Macheath, I have no issue with changing things. There are
people out there who know how to work the system and who have no
intention of working for a living. That isn’t right.
But I want
information not insults and propaganda. I want to know how this will
work in practice because I know damn well how unpredictable life is. I
am in a comfortable place financially but things can change awfully
quickly. I am going to be pretty angry if, after 20 years of being a
higher rate tax payer, I’m called names and left to starve while I am
looking for a job so I can pay bills.
And I really really have a
problem with the perjorative language used but that’s historical and I
know it. Gives me shivers to hear it all again to be honest.

JuliaM January 24, 2012 at 16:04

Oh, Christ! Here we go again with a Maggie Thatcher horror story!

It’s a wonder she could manage to run the country, isn’t it, given
she spent so much time running around personally sacking people or going
back in time to encourage them to have large unsustainable families (and
yes, your family IS unsustainable if the only way of paying for it is to
be in continual, never-changing employment)…

M Barnes
January 24, 2012 at 17:46

Oh Christ! Here we go with another person screaming off into far
exaggeration. Did I say Maggie sacked anyone? No.

Everyone’s life is unsustainable if they do not have the employment
to maintain their homes or pay bills or buy food. Including yours. So
do climb down off that shaky ivory pillar you’re perched on sweetheart
– you’ll get piles, not a good look.

I assume then that you would prefer the country had no saftey net
for anyone. I admire your confidence in your ability to always remain
solvent no matter the state of the economy. Congratulations – the only
person in Britain with cast iron knowledge of what her future holds.
Gosh, you should write a book. I’ll bet your cheque book is perfectly
balanced too.

JuliaM January 24, 2012 at 18:21

No, not ‘cast iron knowledge of what the future holds’. Just a
determination never to live other than within my means, and always
with a weather eye on the horizon.

We are an industrial society now; where once a whole passel o’
chillun meant more hands to work the farm, now they mean that when
that job at Fords ups stakes and moves abroad, someone else picks up
the slack….

Ed P January 23, 2012 at 19:08

The Welfare Party

binao January 23, 2012 at 16:31

No doubt there will be some people with very special needs for whom we need
to spend above the norm on welfare. Those people won’t be well off as a
result, but they will receive essential support.

For the rest, to receive in benefits the equivalent of £35k/year gross, if
that is the true figure, seems to me to be outrageous, and a serious
provocation to those in work receiving much less.
Predictably, those keen
on handing out other people’s money, the often wealthy wets and liberal
lefties, try to present it as an attack on children and worse.
As one born
and brought up on a rough estate, and with decades of work with lowish paid
staff in industry, I reckon there will be plenty of low paid voters that will
be scandalised by serious opposition to this policy
From a very slow start
in his earlier political life, IDS seems to have come up with one of the best
policy wheezes in decades.

carol42 January 23, 2012 at 16:26

Why does anyone think the taxpayer should continue to pay for people on
benefits to have as many children as they like that they have no means of
paying for? For them children are an economic asset for the rest of us they
are a liability we have to make sacrifices for. Instead of trying to change
child benefit, which was intended as a replacement for the child tax allowance
but paid to the mother, and not a welfare benefit why not limit it to two
children. At least it might stop even more children being born to people who
expect other people to support them As it is only the very rich or those on
benefites can afford a big family. It makes me furious when I see my son
working all hours to support his wife and two small children, any more is out
of the question for them.

c777 January 23, 2012 at 16:19

Labour will do anything to protect their client state.
It is not about
concern for the so called poor it is about keeping the Labour votes coming
in.
Cynical ,keep ‘em poor ,keep ‘em dumb ,keep ‘em Labour.

Robert the Biker
January 23, 2012 at 16:04

You don’t have to worry about signs for Manni, he’s one of the Jooooos
y’know; they eat por leedle pallysimian babies an that the Joooooooooos do. No
lefty cretin is doing a sign for Manni.

macheath January
23, 2012 at 15:54

It’s the oft-repeated “This will impact on the children” that really gets
me – quite apart from the grammatical infelicity – with the implication that
parents will blithely continue as before.

If the measure can truly be equated with a household income of £35,000 –
though that is disputed – then there must be some slack somewhere in the
system; surely it’s reasonable to expect state-funded parents to make
sacrifices to ensure their children do not go without necessities. Stop
smoking, drinking or eating takeaways and ready-meals, forget about evenings
out, get rid of the computer games and exchange your contract phone for an
emergencies-only pay-as-you-go and see how much more you have left*.

Harsh? I can think of plenty of working parents – some within my own family
– for whom spending money on themselves would be unthinkable as long as it was
needed for the children. Perhaps self-denial is easier if you earned the cash
in the first place.

*Only you won’t, because savings will eventually count against your
entitlement; the benefits system, with spectacular irony, fosters a culture of
spend, spend, spend.

JuliaM January
24, 2012 at 06:00

“Perhaps self-denial is easier if you earned the cash in the first
place.”

Also easier when self-denial was seen as a virtue. Now, it’s all instant
gratification…

JuliaM January 23,
2012 at 15:28

“There is only one class of child, and one class of poor that any of the
Left are interested in. The poor who are prepared to remain trapped into
dependency on the state.”

Spot on!