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|   | Subject: Can you live on £26,000 a yr[ £500p/wk]? (UK Centric)
Posted Feb 1, 2012 by  Z
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1 of my siblings didn't bother with school at all, and is still at home and unemployed.
Between the other three of us we have
15 A Levels (12 As 3Bs 1C)
4 undergrad degrees
1 masters degree
1.5 PhDs (I'm only half way through mine)
We're all working and paying tax (I gave up a 45k a year job to do my PhD).
| | Subject: Can you live on £26,000 a yr[ £500p/wk]? (UK Centric)
Posted Feb 1, 2012 by Z
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The assumption that benefits trap children in poverty is one that needs to be challenged.
If it wasn't for benefits we'd probably have had to leave school early to support our family, and we would be unlikely to have paid as much tax as we did. Benefits meant that we could stay at school, and that we could go to university and get reasonable jobs.
I see. Cass, talking about the past doesn't change now. Talking about theory doesn't feed people. Talking about the *should* of the thing in terms of history or massive change to the system is great, but it can't solve a damn thing. If you take away the money that people use to feed, clothe and shelter themselves and their dependents, at the best they will become homeless. Most likely, crime will rise, illness will rise, the health services and the police would become HUGELY over-stretched and we would have proper rioting in the streets with homes and businesses being severely damaged.
So, while pointing out the flaws in the system is useful, for now we have a situation and you simply cannot just change it to how you like it without severe impact on people's lives. So being realistic with one's arguments helps on a thread like this with a specific, real time, relevant to current life question.
by the way, you can still make a living working with heavy horses. Ploughing perhaps not so much but if you still have the skills, go into forestry. Then you can do ploughing as a hobby at fairs and competitions.
| | Subject: Can you live on £26,000 a yr[ £500p/wk]? (UK Centric)
Posted Feb 1, 2012 by HonestIago
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I think you might just have been one of the lucky few Z - a life on benefits can be a trap. When parents have never worked what sort of role model are they going to be for their kids? What sort of opportunities are they going to have? Britain has some of the lowest rates of social mobility in Europe and you do see unemployment becoming generational.
Reading that account from the family on £26,000 of benefits really annoyed me, but I suspect it was supposed to. They're not on the breadline if they can afford nearly 30 cigs a day - have no idea how much cigarettes cost, but would I be right in saying that's about 15 quids worth of cigs a day, 100 quid a week? Nearly half their shopping budget. The excuse of why the wife hasn't quit is pretty pathetic too: she missed an appointment and she was booted off the course. Even if we pretend she's telling the truth, what else has she got to so that would cause her to miss the appointment? To look at it in a different light, they're spending more on cigarettes a week than I spend on food a month, and I'm a greedy  .
Similarly, Sky TV - I can't afford that and I work 30 hours a week. I'm guessing they're not watching it on an old TV. I don't buy the "they're not getting any pleasure" line: life is hard, deal with it, and we're not all guaranteed pleasure. I don't have the money to do a lot of things that would make my life pleasurable, but I've got some stuff that's free or as good as. Ditto mobiles - I use my phone *a lot* and my bill is £6 a week, compared to their £32. Again the excuse was pretty galling:
"You try telling teenagers they're going to have to do without their mobiles and there'll be hell to pay."
 It's called parenting - they should try it sometime and again, it's not like they've got anything better to do. The family can't afford the phones - end of. They've also said they're at home all day, every day and they have a landline - why have the mobiles at all?
I do believe some people on £26,000 benefits can be justified but this isn't one of these cases. They have a whole heap of luxuries they're expecting others to pay for and it's not right.
There's psychology in spending what you don't have, when you have nothing.
As for the whole living on benefits shebang, there's a lot of people currently relying on the state temporarily. But it doesn't matter how temporary it is, you can lose your home in a month or in a lifetime if you're not paying your rent, get behind on it, can't pay your mortgage...
| | Subject: Can you live on £26,000 a yr[ £500p/wk]? (UK Centric)
Posted Feb 1, 2012 by CASSEROLEON
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Chief Cat Herder
As I have mentioned in a previous post I spent my working life trying to help pupils do that so I am not surprised..
And the early Sixties study of "Education and the Working Class" showed that a large proportion of those of us who (a) went to grammar school ,and (b) stayed on after 15 to take O levels Alevels etc- became schoolteachers determined to extend the "ladder of opportunity to all". Many of us embraced the comprehensive movement that promised to offer all children the chance of the same kind of rigorous education that we had received.
But part of the whole argument for the Welfare State was that the lives of "the working class" had been blighted by the Beveridge Giants and that the new opportunities offered by the State would slay those giants and allow everone to become self-reliant and to make the most of living in an advanced Civilization that needed everyone's contribution in order to cope with the challenge of the Future.
Unfortunately Beatrice Webb, the rich middle class Unitarian who was one of the main architects of the Welfare State, was obsessed for much of her "Apprenticeship" by Goethe's Faust- and came to see herself in that heroic mould, going down into Hell to save people and bring them up to the light of Christian Civilization.
But the Ancient Greeks knew that Siren voices were often misleading. They appeared to be beautiful damsels in distress waving to people to come and rescue them. But they did not actually want to escape. They wanted to trap people into their world. And this is in part at least what happened with the Welfare State.
This was most clearly shown up in the case of the boys that I taught in the late Sixties who came from Jamaica. In most cases their parents had made the decision to make a new start and they had great hopes that their children would "make it". Of course it was not easy, and others told them soon enough that with racism in the UK it was not going to be easy. But also their indigenous South London classmates soon told them that education was a waste of time, and that life in the UK with no education was not like in the slums of Kingston. Here you got money to live on, and free flats, and medical care etc. So just enjoy yourself- and make the best of it.
What of course they did not tell them was that it was true in 1967 that boys leaving school with no qualifications had been able to get jobs while the UK employment policy for all parties was full-employment, and it was because of Labour shortages that Enoch Powell had arranged for unemployed West Indians and others from the New Commonwealth to come to do the jobs that "Brits" chose not to do. And most firms in the Lambeth region seemed to operate on a very sensible human basis, first of all asking present employees whether they had sons, cousins etc who were looking for work. This meant that trusted existed employees vouched for the new recruits, and no doubt "taught them the ropes".
A key court ruling was the judgement achieved by the Race Relations Commission that found that these policies as practiced by the huge Ford plant at Dagenham and elsewhere were racist, since the inherent tendency of this "incrowd" system was often actively associated with a tacit or sometimes explicit policy of refusing to work with anyone who was not black. With the spread of equal opportunities too to "the fair sex" all appointments are likely to be looked at and judged against proven criteria of merit and qualification.
Hence perhaps the news yesterday about how pupils and parents have been misled about school courses that really did not help pupils in the job market.
Cass
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| | Subject: Can you live on £26,000 a yr[ £500p/wk]? (UK Centric)
Posted Feb 1, 2012 by CASSEROLEON
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Robyn Hoode
The people trying to run the Present are trapped by the momentum that they carry forward from their understanding of the Past. As I have written in terms of modern politics and history- the twentieth century was overshadowed by the Nineteenth Century ideas of Communism and Capitalism. The Labour Party was almost totally wedded until Tony Blair removed one or two Holy Cows, to the ideas propounded in the great Bradford Conference of c1894 which tried to create a Labour Political movement inspired by the recent Parliamentary success of Socialists in Germany. As people lost faith with Socialism and Communism, and they became associated largely ultra-conservative regimes and groups seeking to perpetuate their own power and privilege, radical change in the UK was associated with the Thatcher Revolution that was a conscious throw-back to Gladstonian Liberalism. New Labour "stole its clothes". In opposition David Cameron espoused "progressive conservatism"- but progressing forward as in that great age when people really did believe in progress the age of Disraelian "One Nation Conservatism".
For some people and in some ways the Welfare State was an acceptance of a reality of a world of winners and losers, the affluent and the less affluent. One group would earn the money and the group would be kept occupied and looked after with the wealth that they generated. Somewhere I have a borrowed copy of the Church of England report on the Welfare State from back in the eighties. It is entitled "Not Just for the Poor" and it takes to view that it is good for the soul of the rich that their money should help the poor.
But I have frequent conversations with the call centres that earn a living making calls for the various charities that I support. They all tell me how much better it would be if I set up a direct debit. And I tell them that I have lots of Direct Debits for Bills and things that I can not really be bothered to think about. But I do think that I should consciously think about giving money to charity. I give little enough. But it should weigh on my conscience. As an adolescent I remember rattling a can in the centre of town and having people passing by tell me that they pay their taxes for the State to take care of things now!!
I'm going to unsub here now, it's getting too wall-of-text.
| | Subject: Can you live on £26,000 a yr[ £500p/wk]? (UK Centric)
Posted Feb 1, 2012 by Z
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| | Post: 109
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Is it a social class thing rather than a unemployment thing. Do the children of manual workers and cleaners go to university? Are they more likely to go to university than children of unemployed manual workers and cleaners?
Our parents were unemployed artists (is there another sort of artist) but the rest of our family were teachers, academics and doctors. Without question the reason we did well academically is because we were middle class and our parents never questioned whether we were entitled to go to university.
I've had hundreds of rows with my dad when I realized that my mother can't afford fresh food because he spends the benefits on fags and booze. It does make buying presents easier though! This Christmas I gave my mum some bodyshop hand lotion, a butternut squash and a pineapple and she wrote me a 4 page thank you letter saying how amazing they were.
| | Subject: Can you live on £26,000 a yr[ £500p/wk]? (UK Centric)
Posted Feb 1, 2012 by Moderator004
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Hi Casseroleon,
While we certainly don't want to discourage people from posting their thoughts and feelings here on h2g2, your lengthy and robust monologues are pushing our culture of topic drift to its limits and can be regarded as quite disruptive, especially if you use several 300+ word posts to address Researchers individually. If you have a relevant point to make then please do, but we would kindly ask that you do not hijack threads in this way as it is rather off putting.
| | Subject: Can you live on £26,000 a yr[ £500p/wk]? (UK Centric)
Posted Feb 1, 2012 by Peanut
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| | Post: 113
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| | Subject: Can you live on £26,000 a yr[ £500p/wk]? (UK Centric)
Posted Feb 1, 2012 by CASSEROLEON
This is a reply to this Posting.
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Chief Cat Herder
You wrote "Is it a social class thing rather than a unemployment thing".. Short answer "yes".
When a Society has no coherence and falls apart into classes or Hindu 'castes', that define people according to their economic role, then people tend to get "fenced in" to a fate.
One pupil whose parents refused to allow her to be educated to A level because they were 'shoemaker caste' and they wanted to "sell" her to a bridegroom from India, only achieved her goal of becoming a midwife thanks to the selfless and heroic intervention of a colleague.
And we also have families who would rather their sons (sic) became merchant bankers than struggling artists.
| | Subject: Can you live on £26,000 a yr[ £500p/wk]? (UK Centric)
Posted Feb 1, 2012 by Storm
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| | Post: 116
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It's interesting to put some figures on this. Z's family of four would be approaching the £26k in todays money (I know where you grew up Z so I can make an assumption about housing benefit levels). However these families are relatively unusual; 62,000 are expected to be affected by the 'cap'.
Couple 105 per week income support (105x52=£5460)
Tax credits family 545
Per child 2555
Family Allowance per child per week 20.30 (eldest £1055.60) 13.40 after (£643 per child)
Housing benefit per month (650x12=7800)
Council tax benefit not sure how much; it would be under £1,000 as you would be unlikey to rent a high banded property for £650 per month.
Then there are other benefits that aren’t going to be included in the cap, free prescriptions, free school meals, school uniform grant.
However if you were looking at a single mother with one child the income support/job seekers allowance is around £60 and housing benefi would be capped at £450 per month.
For large families the poverty trap is very real; my family was a bit like Z's and my dad once calculated that he'd need to earn 26k to break even at a time when the average wage was 21k. He had no work experience/degree/references.
| | Subject: Can you live on £26,000 a yr[ £500p/wk]? (UK Centric)
Posted Feb 1, 2012 by Storm
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| | Post: 117
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A part of this cap refers to the cost of housing; and the argument that people who aren't working should live in low cost areas. A few years ago there was a 'pilot' programme to move unemployed families from the south east to Huddersfield. I Huddersfield there was an excess of social housing over need. Would this be a good idea?
| | Subject: Can you live on £26,000 a yr[ £500p/wk]? (UK Centric)
Posted Feb 1, 2012 by CASSEROLEON
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| | Post: 118
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Edward the Bonobo
Quite- The educational revolution around the time of Disraeli's One Nation Conservatism made sure that there would be no national system in England (unlike France and Germany and Scotland?) and it has left an unfortunate legacy which makes the mainstream of Western Civilization often appear to some just "too establishment" and "middle class".
That early Sixties study of Education and the Working Class urged a belief in an equaly valid "working class culture" that grew out of older folk cultures prior to the Enlightenment and the Scientific and Techonological revolution.
All of human experience and thought everywhere and throughout all time is part of the wealth of our inheritance. We learn by experience and the wider the experience the better. But it seems to be societies at the "cutting edge" of Civilization that have the most dynamism. And I believe that dynamic and productive societies produce things that other people value- i.e wealth is a by-product of true creativity.
| | Subject: Can you live on £26,000 a yr[ £500p/wk]? (UK Centric)
Posted Feb 1, 2012 by Z
This is a reply to this Posting.
| | Post: 119
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That's interesting, I didn't think we'd have been anywhere near the benefit cap. We certainly didn't live in luxury, though we didn't have skye TV and Dad could have stopped smoking. He wouldn't though, every time the cigarettes went up in price he would stop for a week and then we'd be cutting back on food again.
I think the biggest contributor to the poverty trap is that if your parents are on benefits you can't get a part time job as a teenager because the money comes straight out the benefits. A part time job introduces teenagers to the world of work and also gives them an advantage for their first full time job. Lots of people start of as part time staff when at school and then go full time. When I was 17 I worked for £2.50 a hour full time for the entire summer and I ended up using it all to pay the mortgage, because it meant that the housing benefit was cut. I had to get an overdraft to pay the train fare to go to university.
Casseroleon: I agree about the class system. I wonder if we are comparing the wrong thing in terms of social mobility. Britian has never been that socially mobile. Are we more socially mobile than we were before.
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