Generous unemployment benefits?

[jimslip]

I'm sorry to say David, but again your New Labour are to blame for much of the poverty in the UK.

For example, by encouraging the bankers to lend money to all and sundry they turned the housing market into a money making casino, where the ordinary person can longer afford to either buy or rent a house or flat. In most of Europe a property is a place you live in, not something you speculate with and so people can afford to buy a property or rent one.

They could have easily stopped this madness happening by simply wacking Capital Gains tax on any profit made on a property purchased and sold within 2 years. This would have stopped everyone speculating on their properties. Why didn't they do this? It is such an obvious thing for a party that is supposed to represent the oppressed working man or the poorly paid young couple. They didn't give a toss, because many of the sods were speculating themselves!

Under New Labour, everything became , "A lark" from mobile phone companies, banks, to the utilities, all hiring people to think of a hundred ways of cheating and swindling the consumers to please their shareholders.

New Labour created a nation of corporate crooks and did not lift a finger to look after or protect the ordinary person.

They behaved as you would have expected a Tory government run by Michael Heseltine!

New Labour are traitors to the working man and woman. They should never be trusted again!

[David Johnson]

Disability benefits. I aint going there. Mainly because I havent got a degree in it which is what you appear to need to wade through the minefield that is disability benefits.

Like I said, if you have genuinely got a long term illness which requires support I do not have a problem with people getting an increased rate of support. Care costs! If people are fiddling the system that is fraud and I am not interested in the fraud, just the basic rates.

What I do know is that the government is planning to review the cases of everyone on disability in the next 4 years.

I kinda think the number will go down, don't you?

Cheers
D

[max_tranmere]

It certianly out to go down. 2.6m people on it - I can't believe they are all unable to work.

[Sam Slater]

[quote]It certianly out to go down. 2.6m people on it - I can't believe they are all unable to work.[/quote]

But of that 2.6 million the majority are classed as short-term unemployed (unemployed for less than 6 months). These are people who've just been laid off, made redundant, between jobs, just left education etc etc.

In 2004 (not current, noted) 34% of long-term unemployed people were people with disabilities. The percentage of people who were long-term unemployed and had no disabilities was 20%. I'll meet you half way between the 34% and 20%. So of that figure of 2.6 million we can reasonably say that 27% have been unemployed for more than 12 months.

That's 702,000 long-term unemployed. Out of that 702,000 you have to take into account single mothers (there are 1.9 million single parents, with 11% single fathers in the UK). So, since we have over 2.5 times the amount of single parents than we do the total number of long-term unemployed. What can we establish from these statistics? Well, we either have almost all single parents actually out working for a living (if only a third claimed unemployment benefit then that would take up 633,333 of the 702,000 long-term unemployed) or there aren't as many long-term unemployed, lazy-arsed, smelly scroungers as the likes of the Daily Mail and red tops would have you believe. Maybe less than 100,000 out of 62 million. Of course only around 50% are of working age in the UK but 100,000 is still 0.4% of 31 million.

You could say 100,000 is 100,000 too many, but less than half of a percent (and this is during a bad recession) is hardly catastrophic for the nation. Most taxpayers who complain wouldn't save 5p extra a week even if we got that 100,000 lazy arses down to zero.

Like I said, some of my figures were from 2004, so my estimates may be off. Still, it's a hell of a lot more realistic than just pointing to a 2.6 million dole queue and assuming we're all being shafted out of pounds due to them all. It's just not true.

[bogwort]

"I repeat, does anybody out there know what a single person, no savings, gets on income support? I know this is variable depending on amount of council tax and rents etc people pay, but there is a basic, fixed component isn't there?"

Not claiming benefit I wouldn't know what the "going rate" is.

If you're not addressing your requests to those who are claiming, and assuming you're not claiming either (otherwise why ask?), why not put in the effort to find this information yourself from more relevant sources than a porn site?

[David Johnson]

"Not claiming benefit I wouldn't know what the "going rate" is."

You miss the point. There have been a huge number of posts on this forum over the last few years about people living the life of reilly on the dole. Many stories of the "I know a bloke down the pub etc etc.

Hence I addressed my question at those people.

In the absence of any info, I have done the work myself, which is what the post with the subject If you want a job done properly.... is about

Cheers
D

[David Johnson]

Quite right Jimbo. I never got Athletes Foot until New Labour came to power.

Give it a rest. Eh?


Cheers
D

[David Johnson]

What I forgot to mention is that you can't even claim Sickness Benefit if you have been on a low paid part-time job (the vast majority of jobs created these days are part time, contract for a few hours etc etc). Nor can you claim sickness benefit if you are self-employed.

Secondly sickness benefit is only available for 6 months and you cannot claim it as well as ESA which has been brought in to replace incapacity benefit since 2008.

Not quite so rosy as you seem to think

Cheers
D

[RoddersUK]

She wasn't when I was made redundant you twatt.