UK Politics: Iain Duncan Smith introduces death penalty for poor people

[Masonity]

The problem is that the next government will have to do some mix of continuing austerity and raising taxes. Getting away from food banks would require some mix of raising wages, raising benefits and lowing the cost of living. None of which look particularly viable in the current politics so I don't see an easy narrative here. It certainly feeds into Labour's line on the cost of living, but I guess that politically they want to make that as broad an issue as possible rather than highlight the people who are using food banks :dunno:

Raising benefits (especially the more socially acceptable in work benefits like tax credits) is a great way to both decrease food bank usage and kickstart economic recovery.

Poor people tend to spend any extra money they receive rather than save it. They tend to spend it locally, as they can't generally afford foreign holidays. So what you do by giving poorer people money is increase spending in these poorer areas. This leads to growth, which leads to more jobs which leads to more in work benefits (and less out of work benefits) which leads to more money spent in the area which leads to growth.....

And as long as it's in work benefits, it won't isolate too many of the hardline right, so it's something that even the Tories could consider. After all it's easier to sell "Lets give those poor minimum wage workers who work 40 hours a week and only earn around £12k a year a bit of extra money. Maybe the unemployed will then aspire to work!" than it is to sell out of work benefit increases.

In an ideal world both would go up significantly, but lets be realistic.

[Slick Mongoose]

Cameron just predicted Spurs to win this weekend. :eek:

This is the true test of his premiership.

[The Undead Martyr]

Yes, side with Labour, they may well be incompetent,wasteful idiots but I'm in full agreement with them on this issue and find the disdain the Tories show for the poor cringe worthy.

They sound like the Democrats at the best of times...

[Tears of Lys]

Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses??



(I've been just waiting to use that quote!)

[The Marquis de Leech]

Why? Seems like this insistence that the government should stop spending when the economy is in the shitter is part of the problem.

Krugman did an article on UK austerity the other day:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/the-three-stooges-do-westminster/?_r=0

The comparison graph is truly something to behold.

[The Marquis de Leech]

(I've been just waiting to use that quote!)

Humbug!

[Gneisenau]

Well the UK did also try to ban porn from the internet.....

[Essan]

Is anyone else intrigued how you have a mobile phone for £5 per Year?, I know I am.

To be fair it's probably more like £10 a year. And yes, on PAYG

It's because I'm 47 and only use a mobile for emergency and so that I can be contacted when away from home/work. I probably make about half a dozen calls and a similar number of texts a year, but I do also use it to access weather data, train times etc when travelling.

Anyway, back on subject, obviously most here don't agree we me so I'll not say much more. But I think this is worth mentoning:

If you give a man a fish he eats for a day

If you teach a man to fish he eats for life.

I don't see food banks as a solution - IMO they only perpetuate the problem. I suspect that a lot of those using them would be better given help with budgeting and sorting out their priorities, ensuring they are claiming whatever benefits are due to them and even in some cases being taught how to shop and cook. And I suspect IDS would tend to agree with me. I wouldn't ban food banks, but I do question whether they are really helping in the long term.

As I'm on a very low income, despite being self-employed (and also running a charity for which, incidently, I am paid £0.00p per year), I receive nearly £50 a week Working Tax Credit. If I didn't smoke and drink (too much!) that would be more than enough for all my living costs excluding rent, council tax and utility bills. I appreciate my circumstances are unusual (for a start, I'm single so that helps!), but I do believe people can survive on a lot less than they think, but it's something you have to learn to do. And no, Christmas is not ruined if you can't afford the new Xbox!

That's not to say people should have to survive on such a low income, but that's a whole different story ....

[Maltaran]

On a lighter note, 11 film posters made better by Boris Johnson

[Daeric]

A couple of those need this to make them even better.

[Horza]

People positing the growth in food banks as a 'solution' in this thread: 0

[Lummel]

Ha! The silence of Boris Johnson, if only...

[Alex.]

Cameron just predicted Spurs to win this weekend. :eek:

This is the true test of his premiership.

I fucking hate it when he pretends to be into football. Just go away.

[paddington]

Well the UK did also try to ban porn from the internet.....

Not overally sure about banning, more about restricting access. I think they were proposing an ISP to give customers an opt in/out of allowing porno access. We already do have laws restricting porn in film/print.

[Werthead]

I don't see food banks as a solution - IMO they only perpetuate the problem.

No. The problem perpetuates food banks. If people had enough money to live on, food banks would not be needed.

I suspect that a lot of those using them would be better given help with budgeting and sorting out their priorities, ensuring they are claiming whatever benefits are due to them and even in some cases being taught how to shop and cook.

This I would agree with, and it's something schools (as far as budgeting goes) and benefits offices used to do. They don't do it any more.

And I suspect IDS would tend to agree with me.

You're deluded if you think so. It's under IDS that benefits offices have stopped giving such advice and are now basically working to deny people benefits they are legally entitled to. They certainly don't help people out willingly any more (or rather they still try to do so, but it's against government directions).

As I'm on a very low income, despite being self-employed (and also running a charity for which, incidently, I am paid £0.00p per year), I receive nearly £50 a week Working Tax Credit. If I didn't smoke and drink (too much!) that would be more than enough for all my living costs excluding rent, council tax and utility bills. I appreciate my circumstances are unusual (for a start, I'm single so that helps!), but I do believe people can survive on a lot less than they think, but it's something you have to learn to do. And no, Christmas is not ruined if you can't afford the new Xbox!

The problem is that this is a sanctimonious and strawmanning argument. You are basically saying that people are poor because they cannot budget. This is not the case. In many cases, people are poor after they budget extremely carefully. It's not about buying cigarettes and six-packs of beer, it's about people spending the money they have on the necessities of life alone and still coming up short.

There are insane inequities in the benefits system that don't make sense. If you are a family, you're okay. Myself and my partner have both been unemployed for eleven months (I have a new job starting in February, fortunately). Because she has two children, and we both had fairly substantial savings, the money we get is enough to survive on. In fact, we'd have a more comfortable existence if we didn't need to run and maintain a car, which is a severe drain on our limited resources. But since my partner's son goes to school on the other side of town and we have not been able to move him to a nearer one after four years of trying, we have no choice.

If you're single, you're also okay. Before I moved in with my partner, during a previous bout of unemployment I got just enough to live on. That was much harder, and fortunately that period was much briefer, but again it was possible (and I don't smoke and rarely drink outside of big social events) with very careful budgeting.

If you fall into the category inbetween, most notably single parents, you are screwed. You don't get 50% of what a couple with two children get (i.e. supporting 2 people as opposed to 4), you get a lot less, not a huge amount more than if you are a single person living alone in a houseshare. This is the most vulnerable group and the one, other than pensioners, that is most dependent on foodbanks. They literally don't have enough money to pay for everything each month after paying for necessities, not cigarettes and alcohol. This group is also the one that struggles the most to get work, because they are dependent on family support to look after their children (childcare now being largely unaffordable for even the middle classes, let alone anyone less well-off) and this frequently does not exist, leaving them without the necessary flexibility and time management to get a job. This group appears to be being discriminated against largely because of stereotyping: if you are a single parent, it's because you're an irresponsible teenage workshy reprobate. The notion that you might be a 40-year-old woman whose hitherto stable and strong ten-year marriage collapsed suddenly leaving you with a young child to look after simply doesn't enter the Tory mindset.

Official Tory policy is, and has been for decades, to punish the poor for being poor, and to blame the poor for being poor even when the economy has completely collapsed. Logic and nuance do not exist in their world. The biggest problem is that Labour under Blair and Brown seemed to start adopting that mindset as well.

People positing the growth in food banks as a 'solution' in this thread: 0

I don't recall anyone doing that in the thread. The Tories themselves did in the debate though, which is rather more worrying.

[Lummel]

I don't think that budgeting and sorting priorities is particularly helpful because it assumes, erh, equality of personal circumstances - ie that you will get sufficient support with sufficient regularity to be able to meet your basic needs. But if your income is unpredictable, and that can be true of benefits as well of wages, then a budget will go out the window if you don't have a large enough cash float or financial resources like an overdraft to tie you over. Not to mention cost of living increases above wage or benefit increases.

The less money you have, the more effective you will be at budgeting by necessity. Red bills are a harsh teacher.

I remember at school that we were taught in maths classes about HP and using credit cards and we had to do sums to demonstrate to our secondary modern levels of intelligence quite how much more expensive it is to buy something that way rather than by cash. All of which is lovely, perfect and completely unhelpful if you are on a tight budget and your fridge freezer dies, oven stops working, car breaks down and you don't have cash savings, might not have a realistic chance of ever being able to save up the capital sum.

I don't think I would begrudge food banks, I'm sure that even in good times there will always be people because of their individual circumstances who can be helped by them, but they do nothing to address the problem which is the disparity between the cost of living and income levels. My worry about food banks is that they get embedded into the system, particularly with the rise of in-work benefits (well the need for them), however the people using them aren't going to disappear, as a whole body of taxpayers we'll have to pay to maintain them in their relative poverty throughout their working lives and then again when they become poor pensioners. I find it hard to escape the feeling that we have this low wage economy developing with subsidised poverty through the benefits system. But maybe I'm just being optimistic.

[Werthead]

I find it hard to escape the feeling that we have this low wage economy developing with subsidised poverty through the benefits system. But maybe I'm just being optimistic.

Exactly, and this will cause us to have huge problems moving forwards. Just as the previous recovery was the wrong sort of recovery - built on credit which a decade and a half later blew up in our faces - it looks like this one is as well, because again it's being built on credit but, much more dangerously, it's being built on a rewriting of the definition of 'work'. Previously most people would agree that work would constitute a stable, reliable job with reliable hours (even if only 6 or 10 or 15 a week) that was paid for with a wage greater than the cost of living per-hour. The current recovery is being built on the notion of zero-hour contracts, people working unpredictable hours which they can't budget on and then the state making up the difference (but unpredictably, with abrupt reductions in allowances on often meritless grounds), and a refusal to raise the minimum wage by anything more than miserly amounts so people are now earning way below what they need to survive.

The fact that 'only' 2.5 million people are out of work (and that's not counting a rough 800,000 on the government slavery workfare programme who are paid an amount equivalent to JSA, but are not counted as 'jobless') isn't really the problem. It's the estimated 3 million (minimum) on top of that who are underemployed and are claiming benefits and tax credits to make up the shortfall in work. This situation is encouraged by the government because if you are on a zero-hour contract working 20 hours a month or something equally pathetic, you are still classified as 'in work' and are off the 'jobless' lists, which makes the government look good. This government has failed to provide a recovery that guarantees full-time work for a lot of people, instead providing only the illusion of one.

[paddington]

I guess high employment figures are better political captial, than discussing what a lot of those jobs cost in benifits.

So the large tax dodging coffee company came out with they were providing 9000 jobs for the British economy. How many of those 9000 jobs didn't require in-work benifits of some sort or another. Is the country better off because those people have jobs, even if a good percentage of them are subsidised. I imagine as an individual working is better than not working. However as a collective should we subsidise large corporations.

I certianly don't begrudge people getting what they need to get by from the system. An my concern with food banks is that if they aren't funded theres no political pressure to change them.

[mormont]

I feel this thread has taken a much more serious turn than UK Politics threads are wont to. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. But it does give me an excuse to turn the topic to the news coming from the phone-hacking trial:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25450055

Now I know that Wills is the heir to the throne and therefore, by definition, one of the most upper-class people in existence. But I still find myself shocked, shocked I say, that anyone under the age of 50 actually still goes beagling.

Alas the article is silent on whether Kate agreed to accompany him.

I'm displaying my ignorance, I know, but I'm also wondering how one 'nearly' gets shot by blanks.

[MinDonner]

I've never heard of beagling. Is that what the upper classes call "dogging"?