Rant - "Social Protection"

[keith_henson]

Just read this on bbc news

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4572219.stm

Its just plain crazy!

http://www.stuii.co.uk/images/sitesu...-16-income.jpg

this one shows total revenues for the UK, income tax = 127 billion

http://www.stuii.co.uk/images/sitesu...-16-expend.jpg

this one shows total expenditure - 140 billion on social protection. Thats rater a lot more than income tax!

Now, I'm going to assume that "Social protection" is a big fancy New Labour term for "benefit". I don't think that's an unreaonsable assumption since there's nothing else on the pie chart that it could be. So, am I right in thinking that the amount this country spends on benefits exceeds its receipts in income tax?

Basically, more than 100% of what we pay in income tax goes straight into the pockets of those on benefits, a large proportion of which are people who choose not to work and milk the system for all it's worth. Essentially, the government takes 30+% of everyones salary each month, and gives it to someone else, to reward them for doing absolutely sweet FA!

Rant over

Keith

[ahar]

Don't forget that the Social Protection category also includes the state pension and tax credits. Tax credits are only available if you're working and they're not really a 'benefit'.

The problem with 'benefits' and policies designed to discourage scrounging is that they generally hit the innocent hardest. A good example is the story you linked to on the BBC site. Given that the three girls are still at school and that I doubt the mother has a good job and earns enough (if any) money to support the family, you have to pay a lot of benefit money to the family to ensure that the babies get everything they need. They shouldn't be punished for their parents failures - in fact, the poorer the babies are while they grow up, the more likely that this will happen again to them.

However, it doesn't stop the feeling that the new grandmother in the story deserves the word Scrounger written on her forehead in indellible ink.

[aclivity]

Not getting into the benefits vs tax collected discussion, for me the saddest thing in this story is the (grand)mother's assertion that the fault lay wholly with the childrens schooling.

Nothing to do with education at home being below acceptable standards?

Nothing to do with a lack of morals and values being imparted at home?

People nowadays seem to duck all sense of responsibility - "it's not my fault" is a common cry. It reminds me of the Officer Krupke song in West Side Story.

It's part of a greater social malaise IMHO. "Where there's blame, there's a claim". People claim damages for injuring themselves whilst burgling properties and get compensation. Drunk driving? Blame the landlord, the car manufacturer, the highways agency and probably even the bus company for making driving home with a skinful the best option you can think of.

Gosh this ranting is therapeutic.

[Mr T.]

Originally Posted by aclivity

Not getting into the benefits vs tax collected discussion, for me the saddest thing in this story is the (grand)mother's assertion that the fault lay wholly with the childrens schooling.

Nothing to do with education at home being below acceptable standards?

Nothing to do with a lack of morals and values being imparted at home?

People nowadays seem to duck all sense of responsibility - "it's not my fault" is a common cry. It reminds me of the Officer Krupke song in West Side Story.

It's part of a greater social malaise IMHO. "Where there's blame, there's a claim". People claim damages for injuring themselves whilst burgling properties and get compensation. Drunk driving? Blame the landlord, the car manufacturer, the highways agency and probably even the bus company for making driving home with a skinful the best option you can think of.

Gosh this ranting is therapeutic.

Amen to that - will green you when allowed to Cop for this, apropos the above...


It's too late for mere 'respect', far too late
David Selbourne
(Filed: 22/05/2005)

There are no boundaries of class or party among those who sense, or know, that British society is in profound trouble. Yet the consensus that this anxiety has created remains largely unexpressed. Politicians dare not tell the whole truth about it for fear of adding to public alarm, and losing by it. Complaint over the quality of public provision, or about the education system, or about the statistics of violent crime regularly break surface, but in fragmentary fashion. Those who specialise in intellectual evasions even deny the facts of civil society's disorders; many who have pointed to them have retreated from the scene. In 1994 I wrote The Principle of Duty; I would find it difficult to get published now. In the book I argued that limits must be set to selfish individual entitlement if our free social order is to be preserved. Today, libertarians of every stripe command public debate and such argument is increasingly perceived as reactionary rather than enlightened.

The blame for the disabling of previously existing moral assumptions about the right management of our affairs is widely shared. All three main parties have offered to a disintegrating body politic the same kinds of vacuous notions about "choice", "value for money", improved "delivery" of public (and privatised) services to the "customer" or "consumer", and other related market ideals espoused in freedom's name: the same notion of liberty which, in the 1840s, Carlyle dismissed with scorn.

The Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties have all squandered their moral inheritances as their policies have converged. In the take-over of Labour by meretriciousness, its nonconformist traditions, rooted in the world of work, in mutual aid and self-improvement have largely gone.

Conservatism's national and civic philosophy, which rested upon a different but equally powerful sense of the common good, has similarly been sacrificed to the thinnest notions of private interest. The mantra of "low taxes and a smaller state" shames the Conservative patrimony, while the nature of Liberal Democrat beliefs escapes identification. That the moral capital of all three parties has been dissipated is not lost on the public, whose contempt for the political process has grown.

On balance, the greatest damage to the body politic has been done under "New" Labour's rule. It has some excuse. The worldwide defeat of the "socialist project" left it without overarching purpose. The search for a replacement cause brought with it shallow opportunism, the honing of public relations skills and a ragbag of nostrums, some of them purloined from its political opponents. Even old Trotskyites restyled themselves - with rimless spectacles and fashionable haircuts - as cabinet ministers and Downing Street advisers in the new amoral dispensation.

Labour's traditional espousal of the virtues of public service, shared by old Conservatism, has given way to market demands. Its commitment to the virtues of self-elevation through education has been undermined by a retreat from fundamental pedagogical disciplines. Its old sense of the need for a social ethic has disappeared in its acceptance of a free-for-all in which each individual is his or her own legislator in matters of conduct. Meanwhile, an uncritical pluralism has devalued the concept of citizenship itself.

The dismantling of much of the public domain, a process started under "Thatcherism", has exacted a heavy toll on the fabric of civil society. Above all, "New" Labour has corrupted and debased most of what it has touched. It is a regime - rather than a government - which has profited and profiteered from office, practised nepotism on an extensive scale, sold peerages, packed the Lords with placemen, and shown a contempt for parliamentary democratic practice.

In these circumstances "New" Labour does not possess the ethical status to call for a "greater sense of mutual respect in society", as it did last week. It was an imposition on the person of the monarch that she was constrained to read out the falsehoods which her speech to parliament contained. It promised to "reduce poverty further", yet poverty and inequality have increased during Labour's period in office. It pledged to "build on the progress already made to improve educational standards for all", yet report upon report has shown that educational standards are falling.

It is also a comment on the condition of the Conservative Party - vividly expressed in its over-reliance on immigration issues during the election campaign - that it can command no greater moral authority with the public. Issues of the common good, of the national interest, and of the well-being of civil society as a whole were once the ground on which it stood four-square. Much of this has gone too; the politics and ethics of the market has again seen to that.

Many of the social disorders to which the Queen's Speech in semblance addressed itself are now beyond cure save by the most unacceptable and draconian of measures. Moreover, none of the leading parties can command the language or the means to address the problems caused by the evaporation of the public service ethos, and the ever larger encroachment of private interest upon the public domain in the name of "modernisation". The new Bills add to the existing confusion. The renaissance of a battered society which has had its sense of identity and direction dislocated requires a national effort equal to that which wars have in the past demanded. Without it the institutions and ethics of a truly free civil society will not be recomposed.

Instead, the Queen's Speech randomly promised more regulation of conduct here, and less regulation of conduct there; more "choice" in some respects, but more circumscription of personal freedom in others; greater investment in public provision here, greater divestment there. However, one truth stood out. The policies being offered in the Queen's Speech to (what remains of) the nation were claimed with pride by the Prime Minister to be "quintessentially New Labour", and in their arbitrariness and incoherence this was so.

They were a "quintessence" which was not the concentrated essence of anything at all. Rather, they were an expression of the loss of direction of a once powerful social movement which in the past knew its own purposes, agree with them or not as the case might be. The proposals thus accurately reflected a wider crisis, as does the eclectic range of policy options on offer from the aspirants to the Tory succession.

The notion of each citizen belonging to a social and moral order worth defending has slipped through our fingers and smashed to smithereens on the ground. In such circumstances a bemused public - now little more than a random aggregation of individuals - must stare helplessly at accounts of "feral youths" stalking the streets, while with ancient ceremony empty promises of redemption, as in the Queen's Speech, are addressed to the air.

[andy_chesney]

Bleeding disgusting this, surely good behaviour of the children starts at home. Yes it is the responsibility of the teachers to teacher the children academic things but come on all three sisters getting pregnant at that age, surely this is due to the parents not bringing the children up. Its always the same somebody blaming someone else for their own down fall. And six hundred pound a week thats more than most people that take responsibility for their actions earn, no wonder this countries in a mess

[Mr T.]

You can't write comedy like this


Sisters pregnant at 12, 14 and 16. So what does their mother do? She blames the school
By Hugh Davies
(Filed: 23/05/2005)

Three sisters have each had children while still at school, the youngest at the age of 12.

Jemma, Jade and Natasha Williams, who receive benefits totalling more than £31,000 a year, are raising their babies alone after they became pregnant within three months of each other.

The sisters, aged 12, 14 and 16 when they gave birth, live in Derby with their twice-divorced mother, who holds the education system responsible for their plight.

"I blame the schools - sex education for young girls should be better," said Julie Atkins, 38. "More and more kids are getting pregnant younger and younger and sex education needs to start a lot earlier.

"If I could turn the clock back I would definitely prefer them to not have children as their education is so important. They've all ruined their lives because they are all too young to have children."

Jemma, the youngest sister, was the first to become pregnant, giving birth to her son T-Jay in February last year. Then, in November, Natasha, 16, who had already had two miscarriages and an abortion, had Amani. The next month, Jade, 14, gave birth to daughter Lita.

Jemma and Jade, who is about to take her GCSEs, are still in school.

The family lives rent-free in a three-bedroom council house, which they claim is too cramped. Their mother claims benefit for Jade and Jemma, now 15, as well as for their children. However, she said that day-to-day life was a struggle.

"It's really difficult to survive on what we have," she said. "My average shopping bill is £90 a week, and then there's all that extra stuff like toys, nappies and medicine.

"The house is far too small. I have to share a bedroom with Natasha and Amani which is very cramped. Hopefully we may be able to get a bigger house, but who knows?"

Mrs Atkins, who had her first child at 20, said she was astonished that her daughters had become pregnant so young. "It just doesn't seem possible," she said.

"I was so shocked when I found out about Jemma. She thought I would hit the roof and didn't tell me for seven months. I only found out when I took her to buy a new bra and as she was being measured I saw her huge bump."

Jemma said: "I didn't tell anyone because I was too scared and didn't know what to do. I only told my boyfriend, who was 14 at the time, but I didn't want to have an abortion.

"He was my first love. He was great to start with, but he's got a new girlfriend now. I was so frightened when I went into hospital to have my baby. It was so painful and I was in labour for three days."

Jade said she had been determined not to do the same, after seeing all the dirty nappies and her sister enduring sleepless nights. But she became pregnant after "a one-night stand".

She said: "It was just one of those things really. I wasn't using contraception and I suppose I just thought it wouldn't happen to me."

Natasha said her pregnancy, while unplanned, had pleased her. "I don't really want to be anything but a full-time mum," she said.

The father, 38, came to see the child "from time to time", but "he's Asian and still lives with his parents, so they don't know about me or Amani".

Earlier this year, the Government's tax and benefit system was said to be responsible for making Britain the single-parent capital of the world.

The Centre for Policy Studies think-tank said married couples on average weekly salaries were only £1 better off than single mothers who never worked and had no contact with the father of their children.

[Mr T.]

Whilst this is genuinely tragic, I can't shake the feeling that it won't be long until all three of them have agents, lawyers and stylists and are appearing on Richard & Judy or some 'reality TV' show


Caption Competition:



"Where's your daddy?"

[Pigpen]

Originally Posted by Mr T.

Whilst this is genuinely tragic, I can't shake the feeling that it won't be long until all three of them have agents, lawyers and stylists and are appearing on Richard & Judy or some 'reality TV' show


Caption Competition:



"Where's your daddy?"

I doubt they'd even know who's the daddy !!

[Mr T.]

[Rod]

And as a tax payer I am paying for thier benefits. What is happening to my country?