[Apologies in advance if this particular post appears somewhat disjointed, it's a rant that was desperate to escape my head yet was hastily written whilst refereeing three disgruntled and rather manic children]

There is often so much emphasis on the figures relating to how many people are claiming unemployment benefits with very little attention to the glaringly obvious fact that there is simply not enough jobs to match that figure whilst the government try and exacerbate this issue by attempting to force even more people into the already over saturated job seeking pool such as stay at home parents, the sick and the disabled.  It doesn't take a mathematical genius to realise that if we have x people actively seeking employment with a vast deficit in available jobs, forcing more people to seek employment which doesn't exist will simply equal a rise in those seeking unemployment/job seeking benefits.  Lets not forget the abomination that is Workfare which essentially allows the Government to temporarily alter statistics giving the false picture that unemployment is going down. Ditto with unfair sanctions and those that are appealing work capability assessments all temporarily leave 'gaps' in the unemployment benefit claimants numbers giving the illusion the numbers are reducing.

Yet perhaps the questions that should be asked is not how many people are unemployed and claiming benefits but how many people who are employed yet still in the benefit trap.  For you see, that is exactly what it is, a trap.  Even when employed, many families are still reliant on benefits of the tax credit variety.  Remove these benefits and rent/mortgages won't get paid, homes won't be heated and bellies won't be filled., despite people working hard day in and day out in paid employment. In 2010-2012 alone, 90 percent of new claims for housing benefit were made by people in employment*.  

You can trace a direct link from this to two things:

* The National Minimum Wage

* 0 Hour Contracts

Simply put, the minimum wage alone, isn't sufficient to support an adequate basic standard of living.  So, why don't the government raise the national minimum wage or indeed introduce a much needed 'living wage'?  Good question. The getting down to basics answer is control or more aptly the loss of it.  The most effective way to control someone is financially.  People need money to survive.  Control their finances and you have control which you can assert over them in order to gain obedience.  The government want people to be dependent on them, they're banking on it.  Literally.  So long as we're dependent on working tax credits and child tax credits they can dictate to us.  They can tell us when to work, how much we must work, who should work etc.  They eliminate the fundamental right of choice.  You can't choose to be a stay at home parent and live on one wage at a basic 'bread line' standard of living because that wage isn't enough.  The choice here is to be unable to survive or to bow down, accept government financial dependency and then be granted enough money to survive whilst being controlled and dictated to.  You need tax credits.  Yet to become eligible for tax credits, after a certain point, both parents must work x hours and earn y amount.  If you fail to do this Big Brother can step in and insist you work more or even push you to seek alternative or in some cases additional employment, just to be eligible for the tax credits that you need to live.  They will control you. 

Employment should bring freedom, especially financial freedom yet for the millions of working class people in unskilled or low skilled employment all it achieves is another struggle, another layer of misery as it becomes painfully obvious that they're not enough. 

What exactly is wrong with these jobs?  Could society function or even exist without them?  Not everyone aspires to a career. Some people just want a job.  They want to go to work, do their jobs to earn their money and go home and enjoy the life they have.  They don't want prospects, competitiveness, stress, responsibility and authority that come with many well paid middle class careers.  They may see their job as a means to an end and quite frankly, why bloody not? Why shouldn't they?  Why can't they clock on at 9, off at five and not have work infiltrate their life until the next morning in exchange for a living wage? Yet why should they be punished for this through an inadequate minimum wage? Why should they be subject to the merry dance they have to participate in to be eligible for enough government benefits to live on?  Surely working full time should be enough to sustain a decent basic standard of life?

Being a house wife or a stay at home parent used to be a choice.  You willingly sacrificed a better lifestyle (financially) to be one.  It may have meant missing out on luxuries, tightening the belt and a bit of financial juggling but it was do-able.  It was a choice you could make and was neither frowned upon nor seen as a privilege.  It was respected and accepted equally as the choice many make to work. These days a housewife isn't a woman who chooses to run the household and family full time, working bloody hard to do so, it's now a privilege, a label....a choice only worthy of those who can afford it.  Often so called housewives are from affluent families many of which do very little housework nor hands on parenting instead utilising nannies and cleaners.  Yet the real housewives, the real stay at home parents who tirelessly work full time in the family home are now considered scroungers, lazy, unwilling to work and unnecessary.  Perhaps this could be adding to the dissolution of family life and maybe even a result of a hungry disposable society (where nappies are thrown away, clothes are replaced not mended and ready meals make up the so-called healthy diet) Where is the time to live? To enjoy the so-called fruits of your labour? Depression and stress related illness' are on the rise, family time is being eaten away, latch-key generations are being born.  The governments answer?  Rather then make it easier for families to choose whether both parents work or how much they should work ( I have full respect for families who's parents both choose to work in order to gain a better standard or living or even to save sanity but the pivotal point here is choice.  They however should not both have to work, just to sustain a basic standard of living, unless they're willingly living beyond their means) the government work harder at removing the choice, do we really believe introducing free child care from age two to low income families is to help the child or parent?  Or is it merely the first step to push mums into work earlier?  Do we really believe their preposterous and potentially harmful suggestions of longer school days is to help children and families or yet another step to increase mandatory conditionality for the much needed tax credits thus once again forcing both parents into longer working days too and denying the basic human right to a family life.  Whatever next?  Mandatory full time boarding nursery from six weeks of age for all children who are a product of families earning under 22k a year?  

Working should be for financial freedom, a necessity to sustain or elevate your quality of life.  It should not be to conform to eligibility requirements and conditionality so that you still require financial assistance from the government just to be able to financially survive and be under their control.  

They want you to need them.  They are depending on you falling into their benefit trap.  They want to control you and your family.

The real issue isn't unemployment benefits at all.  It's the ridiculous necessity of benefits for those already working.

* http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/tenancies/majority-of-new-housing-benefit-claimants-in-work/6521183.article

Social Housing myths debunked

There is an awful level of misunderstanding when it comes to Social Housing among those who happen to not live in it with many pernicious myths and propaganda being fed to the public through politicians and media.

In all honesty a lot of the time it rather stinks of sour grapes.  'Why should they get cheap rent when we're paying x amount for a smaller house!' They being whom exactly? If an unemployed person happens to be in social housing, they're undeserving scrounging scum getting everything for nothing.  If an employed person happens to live in social housing then they should be evicted as they're earning and clearly don't need cheap housing.  So who exactly can live in social houses without having proverbial stones thrown?  Surely the problem isn't the people in social housing but rather the soaring and often unjustified increase in the private renting sector and the abundance of over-borrowing of home owners resulting in wage devouring sky high mortgages? 

 Why shouldn't people live in social housing if they can?  Why should their entitlement to stay in their home once they live there be dependent on circumstances?  A tenant is a tenant regardless of how much rent they pay or to whom they pay it to. What if one was to say if your household income drops or better still it fails to increase, your mortgage should be terminated and you should be forced to move?

Who's more deserving of social housing, the job seeker or the family of two working parents?

There's cries out there that social housing tenants should be paying more, yet where are the cries that private sector should be charging less and be more regulated?

Virtually anyone, yes even you and you and you at the back there too, can apply for social housing.  Really.  Granted it may take you many years to actually get a home as rightfully so those more in need are of a higher priority yet you can still apply.

There seems to be some absurd notion that one simply requests a home and then walk straight into a beautiful desirable property.  Most times you get three chances.  If you're lucky enough to win the social housing weekly lottery of applying for properties you can only turn down three properties before being booted off or relegated to the bottom of the list.

If you genuinely need somewhere to live, you have to accept what you're given regardless of how undesirable the area is because lets be honest, the majority of the time it's only the shit holes that become available.  There's no weekends filled with viewing properties of your choosing as you exclaim on the size of the kitchen and how airy the bedrooms are and whether the garden is big enough whilst you weigh up the ofsted reports of the local schools.

More likely after spending months or even years applying every week at the crack of dawn for any old hovel that is remotely local you finally get told you can view it.  When you arrive, especially in my local area, you get to see a stripped bare empty property with metal boards on the windows and doors and you literally have to say yes or no there and then.  You move in and there is no flooring other than in the bathroom and kitchen, no decor and no carpet.  You're supposed to magically conjure these up, some mean feat if you're unfortunate enough to be on benefits though some do get a £50 voucher to decorate the whole house with (yummy.... magnolia!)

These properties are supposed to adhere to the local housings strict 'lettable standards' before you move in.  They don't.  It will often take many months of incessant chasing to get them to do what they should have done before you moved in.

Regardless of how much rent is, tenants are still paying rent for the property and for the service of said property.  Service which is often lacking.  Severely.  Take for instance a boiler breaking in winter of a family home with young children classing it as urgent yet it took one of the tenants to threaten to fix it themselves for someone to magically appear and fix it properly.  Never mind the fact it was the housings own workmen who caused it to not be working earlier that day.  Or how about the black mold and leaking windows in a family of asthmatics, say one of those was an infant who having been rushed to hospital on several occasions was told by medical professionals that this would be exacerbating it and yet it still took months to even get some of the so-called urgent work carried out an several formal complaints to even get that far.  The rest of the work over a year later still hasn't been completed.  Then there's the family home with young children and an unsafe wall outside that took over  a year to get repaired.  There's also the case of a family with an unusable garden of rocks, buried trash, mud, 5ft high nettles, broken walls that should have been sorted before they moved in yet took 18 months of complaints and chasing after they moved in to finally get remotely sorted.  Yet another prime example, a hotch potch abomination of a makeshift fence gets blown completely over in the wind, the housing team eventually turn up and in their words erect a temporary fence that several weeks later suddenly transpires is now miraculously supposed to be a permanent one. One more, what about the family that were left with no floor in their bathroom and possible asbestos? Where is the service here?  Are social tenants lesser tenants? Is their rent monopoly money? Yet those right wing orientated would still increase their rent despite the lacking service.  Because obviously that's fair.

So lets dispel a few of the most common myths regarding social housing in the UK:

It's a disgrace that young people go straight on the housing list as soon as they finish school and end up with their own flat in no time.

There is no age bias in gaining council housing.  Generally young people only need a one bedroom flat, these types of properties have a higher turnover rate of occupants so thus more readily available.  Its not their age that has the advantage here, it's merely the type of property they need.

All these young girls purposefully getting pregnant just to jump the queue and get a council house.

Do you genuinely believe this utterly preposterous myth? really? Being pregnant doesn't get you any special treatment when it comes to getting social housing. If she is genuinely homeless, she will be entitled to temporary accommodation i.e a hostel.  Yes, many of which are incredibly grim places for anyone let alone a young pregnant woman.  Until recently, once she was in temporary accommodation she would be put on the waiting list for social housing.  Once she got offered one, she would have to accept it regardless of suitability. Should she refuse it she'd be thrown out of temporary accommodation yet people on the housing list who weren't homeless could turn properties down thus resulting in many homeless families being in houses that the rest of the waiting list had already turned down and quite frankly didn't want.  See, she's really jumping the queue here with specialist treatment.

So in reality, lets just say a woman somehow managed to get pregnant and appear unintentionally homeless she'd be subjected to many weeks in a hostel followed by months and months in temporary accommodation to eventually end up with a one time only offer of a council house or flat that everyone else on the list had already turned down that she cannot refuse.  Seriously people, do you really think this is an ordeal someone people would purposefully but themselves through, especially when young and pregnant?  Oh dear, do wake up people.

Since last year, councils can now place people in private rented accommodation so homeless people let alone pregnant young ones and the housing list have no link whatsoever.

What about all those bloody immigrants who come over and get all the social housing?

Yes really, what about them indeed seeing as this statement is actually a complete fallacy.  Grow a pair will you and stop believe everything the BNP spout.  The majority of new migrants are actually unable to apply for social housing, they're simply not allowed and thus have to rent privately.  Long term migrants can apply however, they're treated exactly the same as everyone else on the housing list no special treatment and no priority.

It would appear that this myth would have you believe that the majority of social housing is being occupied by migrants yet the actual figure from last year? 9%. Yes just 9 percent of social lettings in 2012 went to none UK citizens and of this 9% over 50% of them were EU citizens.

Perhaps you were actually referring to asylum seekers?  You know, asylum seekers who are actually (despite popular belief) not entitled to any benefits whatsoever, no social housing, no homelessness aid and no welfare financial assistance.  Let me run that by you again, they get nothing.  Zip.  Nada.   It's just more ridiculous propaganda to incite hatred through false information.

So following on from the mention of benefits... let's tackle this old chestnut:

Housing benefit all goes to the unemployed, you know, the work-shy scroungers.

So the no brainer here is that yes, the unemployed do indeed get housing benefit seeing as their £71.70 a week is supposed to pay for all their food, clothing, insurance, telephone, gas, electric, bus fares etc   However, did you know that in 2012, out of all the new claims for housing benefit, 90% of those were from people in employment? Yes, working people.  Yet another glaringly obvious indication that the national minimum wage is insubstantial and backs the need for a living wage. Overall, out of total housing benefit claimants around 25% of them are actually retired, disabled or carers.  But of course it's infinitely more acceptable to just assume and then accept the assumption that it's all down to those pesky unemployed.

So saving the best till last, lets end with another absolute pearl...

All our hard earned wages get taxed to pay for and subsidise social housing.

Nice try but, no.  Seriously.  Just no.  Just think about it, when were the majority of council houses built? decades ago.  The cost of building them has been recouped many times over from the rent council tenants pay.  Council housing is actually, wait for it, a public asset.  So much so that it provides councils with far more money then it ever costs in maintenance and repairs.  Yup.  The councils make a profit from renting out council houses so much so that the government up until 2012 took a healthy £200-million pound slice of profit pie from it every year, because social housing makes money.

If you're that desperate to live on  a council estate and begrudge those that already do, by all means, get your name down but be clear about the myths from the truths and remember many people are in social housing because they simply can't afford to live anywhere else.  Oh and they're also not to blame for the shortage but hey, that's a whole other rant.

Living wage

The papers are rife with Welfare Reform, with The Government bleating and waxing lyrical about how it pays to work and they want to encourage more people into living without benefits.  However, we need to ask ourselves, do they really?  I think not.  They want it so we're working yet still to some extent dependent on welfare for the easiest route to controlling people is financially, making them financially dependent on you gives you ultimate control over them.

To have financial independence from them would deplete their control over us so they're being tactical, having us believe they're offering us freedom yet what it really is is just conditional independence riddled with threats and implications.

If they truly wanted people to have financial independence and be able to sustain a quality of life through work alone there are two main things they could implement:

1. Introduce a living wage.  The minimum wage in the current economic climate with the ever increasing rise in cost of basic living simply fails to sustain a person or family.  However it does qualify them to claim working tax credits to top up a wage to enable a person/family to be able to sustain a quality of life.  Through ensuring the minimum wage alone isn't enough, they're taxing you for working on one hand yet giving you money with another to keep you dependent on them and under their control and subject to their ever increasing rigid conditionalities.  Sneaky bastards.

2. Scrap the abhorrent slight to Human Rights that is WorkFare.  If there is a job available, employ somebody to do it and give them the appropriate wage which they can then be taxed on and spent thus helping to renew the economy and move off of benefits.  Yet the government would rather give companies cash incentives to take on workfare staff to do a job for free thus exploiting the unemployed whilst offering them no real benefit let alone an actual job at the end of it. If you're going to mandate people into temporary work, temporarily pay them the actual wage!

Obviously there are many more things that could be added to his list, perhaps I'll bore you with them some other time.  I try and keep clear of politics on here but sometimes....things just need to be said.

Workshy scroungers.

Prejudice is everywhere, all around us.  We do it all day and everyday often without realising and other times we simply don't want to admit we're doing it. Generally there are two main groups of those that are victim to this, one being those that are considered within society to be different be it homosexual, of an ethical minority, tattooed,  a young parent, an old parent etc it goes on and one and then there are those who rather than different are merely the unfortunate, victim to circumstance.  The different can fight back, the unfortunate are expected to lie down and take it.

When your so-called educated opinions are based on sensationalism and manipulation of perspective from the media, they become invalid.  You're merely regurgitating what they want you to think and believe.

Be it on teenage mothers or extended breastfeeders, the media will manipulate it into a televisual feast of sensationalism focusing on the extremes because the normality simply isn't as interesting, shocking or obscene.

Then there is the current tirade against benefit claimants, they're all scroungers and workshy. It must be true, the government and the media say so.  Obviously.  There's you working everyday to pay these layabouts for doing nothing.  Did you know that only 3% of the entire welfare budget it spent on Job Seekers Allowance? Oh and only 0.7% of the entire welfare budget is claimed fraudulantly.  Yes, really. Puts it into perspective a little more, no?

Households with out of work claiming parents just breed more people that will never be in work and live off the state.  The government told us this so it must be true, in-fact the Daily Mail probably said it too an they never lie. Generations after generations of unemployed people.

"Reality: The academics Paul Gregg and Lindsay MacMillan looked at the Labour Force Survey, the large-scale survey of households from which we get most of our statistics about who’s in work. In households with two or more generations of working age, there were only 0.3 per cent where neither generation had ever worked. In a third of these, the member of the younger generation had been out of work for less than a year. 

When they looked at longer-term data, they found that only 1 per cent of sons in the families they tracked had never worked by the time they were 29. What’s more, while sons whose fathers had experienced unemployment were more likely to be unemployed, this only applied where there were few jobs in the local labour market. So ‘inter-generational worklessness’ is much more likely to be explained by a lack of jobs than a lack of a ‘work ethic’. " - (http://www.redpepper.org.uk/mythbuster-welfare-reform/)

There's plenty of jobs out there if you really want one.  You're just not looking hard enough because they don't really want one.  Beggers can't be choosers, get off your lardy arses and get a minimum wage job and pay your own way.  Really? when was the last time you were long term unemployed?  Once upon a time you could walk into your local pub, shop or factory with a 'give us a job?' and they would.  You could walk onto any building site and get work starting the next day.  In case you haven't realised, we're in a recession, scrap that, we're in a depression.  We're talking about several hundred people all applying for the same minimum wage factory job or cleaning job.  Many of which got laid off this year or last year thus trumping the people who have been out of work longer.  Jobseekers apply for reams and reams of jobs every day of every week becoming further devoured by hopelessness at the bleak outlook as companies don't even bother to send out 'sorry but no' letters any more.  You're just left, hanging.  The simple truth out there is, there is not enough jobs.  Is it really so hard to grasp that concept? Add to this the abhorrent workfare and zero hours contracts, companies no longer need pay people to work when they can get a stream of workfare candidates there instead for free and on top of that receive a bunch of money from the government for doing this.  Generally there are no jobs given to these people (these people who have to participate or face sanctions, doing the same work other people get at least minimum wage for to keep their £74 a week job seekers allowance which works out at working for £2 an hour, with no paid job at the end of it. It's absolute exploitation. A disgusting affair.

Yet living on benefits is easy, there's no incentive to get off them.  You get money for doing nothing.  You work full time whilst they sit around watching Jezza Kyle on their flat screen plasma tv's paid for by you, or the 0.00000whatever% of your actual taxes that actually do go towards JSA as you raise an eyebrow at their can of Stella an pack of fags because they're supposed to be desperate and surely i they can afford to smoke they're obviously getting too much benefit money.  Oh and how very dare they buy their kids Christmas presents when they have no job! Never mind that the TV is actually on tick and they'll be paying quadruple it's worth in interest until they're ninety years old and Christmas is most likely paid for by a doorstep loan shark that again they'll be repaying double or quadruple the amount they borrowed just in interest.  Is it any wonder they have a fag or a drink? really?  Do you really begrudge them that?  It's not to exploit the fact they're on benefits, it's to try and help cope with the fact they're surviving..barely.  They're existing not living.  When you're at the bottom you have no choices.  When you've cut back on nearly everything you possibly can, there's nothing else to cut back.  It's hard, it's dark, it's bleak and you cope with this by attempting to numb yourself with the odd drink.

Your clothes are second hand,  Ditto with the majority of your furniture, which by the way is falling apart.  Your bed is so knackered you wake up in pain and your oven door has no handle.  You haven't had a holiday in years.  You can't afford one car let alone downsize just to one. You're obviously doing everything wrong because you don't have a plasma screen tv, yours is third hand and old style....so old that half the graphics on adverts etc aren't seen on the screen.  You weigh up what's more important, turning the heating on to keep your kids warm or buying value bananas and apples to try and keep them healthy.  You've sold everything of any worth you've ever owned including new clothes just so you can buy food and pay for school trips. You can't move to a less desirable area and less fancy house to save money because you're already on a council estate where you want to barricade the doors and windows every night.

If life on benefits is so easy, do it.  I double dare you.  Stop complaining about how easy they have it and join them.  Jack in your job and sign on.  I'm not talking about a quaint little experiment here with the promise of your own real life back afterwards, I mean long term.  It's not a case of tightening your belt, here you have no belt because that would be a luxury.

Fear, hopelessness, worthlessness, depression, anxiety and £74 JSA a week to live on.

But these people have never worked a day in their life! Bollocks.  Are you really so naive to believe that? Many people worked full time straight from school and well into adulthood before finding themselves unemployed due to recession or health.  Whilst you were at University (by the way even if Mum & Dad paid tuition fee's what they pay is only a fraction of what it costs, the rest is actually subsidised by the government) many of these cretinous scroungers were working full time thus helping to fund you with their taxes.  Not to mention that just like you the unemployed pay taxes on everything they buy, so are putting back into the pot.  The same pot they're entitled to also withdraw from should they need it.

Do you get child benefit?  The key is in the name...benefit.  I.e you're technically a benefit claimant too.

Many claimants of council tax benefit and housing benefit, are actually in work.

It must be incredibly comfortable up there, judging those below.  You think you have it hard?

The majority of people on JSA want to work just like the majority of young mums are good mums and the majority of extended breasteeders aren't weirdos.