h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It is reported today that 30% of households in the UK get MOST of their income from benefits.

I haven't researched this yet 'cos I'm at work, but note it say MOST of their income, not PART of it. Can this be true? and if so doesn't it show that the system needs root and branch overhaul?

Novo

And the award for most confusing thread title goes to ......

Actually, this doesn't surprise me. We're told that 50% of Glaswegians are "economically inactive". We've got a benefit culture so deeply ingrained that people don't want to work. Encouraged by Labour who know that benefit junkies will never vote Tory.

There was a Professor Robert Wright in the news yesterday, advocating that unemployed over 50's be given £270 a week benefits and not pressurised to seek work. He argues that re-training anyone over 50 is a waste of time.

This guy is a Professor.
This guy advises Government.

IMO, this guy is a moron and an oxygen thief.

It does sound pretty surprising. But what %age of that is made up of pensioners? IF you take them out, and 10% of the remainder still 'qualify', is this still proof of our imminent ruin etc?

Pedro,

As I said, I haven't researched the article yet, so I cannot comment further, yet!

SWL,
Please feel free to change it - it was a bit hurried......

Novo

>Encouraged by Labour who know that benefit junkies will never vote Tory<



And not at all encouraged by Tories who know people in inner cities will never vote Tory so why worry about them?

See how knee-jerks work both ways?

Don't worry about the title Novo - it's distinctive.

Are you suggesting that the Tories encourage a benefit culture Blues?

No, I'm suggesting they don't care about solving it *in reality* because there are no votes in it for them.

But I'd be interested to see *proof*, and not just assertions, that the Labour Party encourage a benefits culture either.

>>"Actually, this doesn't surprise me. We're told that 50% of Glaswegians are "economically inactive"."

Does that include children and the retired? Or people who choose not to work? More information would mean the figure might be meaningful.

Proof?

Aw c'mon Blues Starting with the Tories, successive govts have fudged the figures to obfuscate the jobless total. It's now estimated that around 5 million are out of work in the UK. Ridiculous proportions of people are on Disability Living Allowance, largely because on DLA you don't have to sign on or show that you're looking for work. The largest group of disabled are those saying they've got a bad back. But the Govt doesn't mind because they don't count these people as unemployed.

The Tories actively developed schemes to get people back to work. This govt does SFA, preferring to ship in immigrants.

Yeah, and they're all *MUSLIMS* and they are all coming just to *personally* wreck *your* way of life.

I did say *proof*, not some wild assertions based on the age old Government habit (which even you admit started with the Blessed Party of the Right (forever blessed be their name, may they walk in eternal sunlight)) of fiddling stats.

Oops, sounds like you need to get yourself off on a diversity awareness course Blues. Nobody mentioned the "M" word or even alluded to it.

Or do you naturally associate immigrants with Muslims? That's rather racist isn't it?

Seriously, given that all the stats have been manipulated to hell & back rendering them effectively meaningless by every Govt since 1979, do you think unemployment has risen or fallen in the last ten years?

No idea. Not sure what the point is either when talking about 'encouragi9ng a benefit culture'.

As to the Muslim point, I was saving you the bother. You would have got there eventually, because you always do.

Ah, making assumptions then

<<Seriously, given that all the stats have been manipulated to hell & back rendering them effectively meaningless by every Govt since 1979, do you think unemployment has risen or fallen in the last ten years?>>

As the economy has grown constantly for over ten years, unemployment has probably fallen. The Labour Force Survey collects information by interview, and is widely recognised as the most accurate way to find true levels of unemployment. It's used internationally, to find comparable rates of un/employment between countries.

Unfortunately, finding figures on the web's a bit of a bustard, and I'm going out now, so if some brave soul wants to fanny about here for a while to find out, be my guest.

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/Source.asp?vlnk=358&More=Y#datacoverage

You'd call it making assumpations.

I'd say extrapolating from known patterns of behaviour.

Is that set of stats more reliable than this lot?

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/stats/ses2000/secs-55.asp

Here's a link to the Telegraph story
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/12/nwelfare12.xml

One in three households are apparently dependent on the state for over half of their income - 7 million households. These are government figures, but the rest of the report in the Telegraph refers to a right wing think tank report from Civitas.

I must admit I was surprised at these figures. As they're government figures, consistency means that I need to take them at face value (and I could add that consistency requires that SWL must reject them out of hand )

The question is, what to do about it? Labour actually has done quite a lot to encourage people back to work through programmes such as the New Deal, but reports are mixed as to its success (and reports divide - predictably - along party political lines) so it's difficult to get a true sense of the picture. But it's certainly false to claim that Labour has done nothing.

There are a number of ways of reading these statistics. One way is to say that this is a good thing, and without Labour's work at reducing poverty (and in particular child poverty), these families would be even worse off. Poverty has reduced, and the worst off are better off under Labour, although inequalities are increasing at the same time.

If there are a large number of families who are poor or relatively poor and the government increases help, that will increase the number of households who get over half their income from the state - but the headline news should be that it reduces poverty, no?

And what's the alternative? If we assume for the sake of argument that recent governments (including the Tories) have done their best (with mixed results) to get people off benefits and back to work, and the number of households in poverty is still high, what should the response be? Should it be to

(a) raise the living standards of the poorest through benefits
(b) increase the minimum wage
(c) ignore poverty and cut benefits for the poor and taxes for the comfortably off

"Ridiculous proportions of people are on Disability Living Allowance, largely because on DLA you don't have to sign on or show that you're looking for work. The largest group of disabled are those saying they've got a bad back."

Absoloutely loving that mindset SWL. That's the mindset that had my dad humiliated by a series of government officials and insurance companies for being unable to work because of a 'bad back'. Of course that means he's a scrounger, (Admittedly his bad back was the result of a car accident and can be easily diagnosed by the fact that two of his vertebrae aren't there, having been that badly damaged they've been replaced by a metal cage and pin setup, but hey, who cares about facts?) as anyone would love to stop being a well paid barrister and start spending most of their lives bored watching Trisha.

Scrap the disability benefit I say, if you can't get a job then it's to the workhouses for you!

<>

New Deal? Do you know anything about New Deal? Do you know that you have to be unemployed *and in receipt of JSA* for 18 months out of 21 to be eligible? Do you know the requirements for JSA? This changes frequently, but 4 years ago it was along the lines of you had to have been in full time employment for four out of five years.

Do you know the requirements for receiving help with the financial cost of training. Four years ago, I was out of work. I got zero benefits because I had been self-employed. My savings were gone caring for my sick wife. A factory offered me a job as a fork lift driver if I got the relevant training. The course cost £255. The employer offered to pay half. I contacted the dole and asked if assistance was available. I was told no, unless I had been in receipt of JSA for six months. (Actually, I was told there were ways for me to get it, but you lot wouldn't believe me). So I went door to door cleaning windows to raise the money. Somebody reported me and I lost the 10% reduction in Council Tax I had been receiving as a "carer" for my wife. Backdated for 6 months.

Don't give me pish about Labour helping people back to work. They don't.


This link, http://www.poverty.org.uk/27/index.shtml?3, supports Pedro's point about the economy growing but phrases things differently, counting the people who want to work but can't.