Lifestyle choice

[spot]

I herd this on the radio a couple of weeks ago and I've been turning it over in my mind since. It's from a debate in the House of Commons on work and employment:

"taxpayers recognise that while there should be a welfare state to act as a safety net, it must not be a lifestyle choice"

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Common...16052642000321 - go to the top of the web page and you can reed the entire debate.

Discerning members will deduce that the speaker, Mr Ranil Jayawardena (North East Hampshire), is a Conservative.

I have come to the conclusion that he's wrong, even after you remove his emotive terminology. I think there's a net benefit to society if paid employment were a lifestyle choice as opposed to a financial obligation.

I take particular exception to his mandatory "must". It was the "must" which caught my attention as I was listening to the radio report in the first place.

[AnneBoleyn]

Saw this today on news, found a link:

Switzerland's voters reject basic income plan
"Swiss voters have overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to introduce a guaranteed basic income for all."

Switzerland's voters reject basic income plan - BBC News

[spot]

There are other countries considering it, and I think it's relevant that the Swiss took the question as far as they did. If England gets to that stage too I'll be moderately pleased.

New Zealand and Finland spring to mind.

[Bruv]

It is more a life style with a lack of choice.
If you are brought up on a sink estate in a formerly large industrial town, where your grandfather lost a job that had sustained your family for generations, your father has had several short term jobs but is currently unemployed although he has a trade.
And every job you have applied for has had queues of others, some with a bit of experience unlike yourself.
Despair sets in.

[spot]

I've been wondering for some weeks whether to try a thread focused tight into Cleator Moor, which is a town in Cumbria, and from there down to a single estate and a single street. It fits perfectly with what you've written here.

It starts with the Irish Famine back in the 1840s, when many of the subsistence families who survived did so as economic migrants moving to wealthier countries. Cleator Moor had private iron ore mining which was expanding and by the mid-1850s the miners were predominantly Irish Catholics, so many that a mission church was set up. That's when a nucleus of working class labourers built a working class industry to the profit of the landowners.

By the 1930s two things had happened. A council estate had been built to provide housing, and the iron ore mine had closed not long after. The descendants of that working-class Catholic mining community have now been stuck on that estate for eighty years. There have been two major employers since, the Kangol factory which closed a decade ago and now employs maybe a dozen clerical staff and the industries down south at Barrow in Furness - Vickers Armaments and the Windscale/Sellafield nuclear complex. For those who don't get qualified, there's sod all. They've sat there and festered in that council estate for so long that nobody's left who can even remember why they existed in the first place. It's surrounded by barren hills which I doubt even sustain sheep now, it's a community in utter collapse.

Part of my family lived not far north from there on the coast around Whitehaven, which is why I googled a bit when the town hit the news last month. The estate has been news time and again over the years and on every occasion the stories are of catastrophe. Drug trafficking, endemic violence and pit-bulls, with no remediation at all as far as I can see. A community has been left to descend into feral criminality and then blamed for the state it's reached.

Places like Cleator Moor need mending, it wasn't broken by the people who have to live there, it was broken by capitalist economics.

[Bruv]

Cleator Moor is as much a victim of a changing world.
The town probably only grew due to it being near a source of energy, and that brought other energy hungry industries and so the population boomed.
Maggie had a hand in it I suspect and then the rise of the far east as a manufacturing center with cheap labour and a willing population.

Lifestyle choice my derrière.

[tude dog]

It is unfair to the recipient we taxpayers supply an income so they can sit on their butts all day watching TV. We rob them of their dignity and sense of selfesteem.

I am sure there are plenty of work for the money we give. I see a couple of jobs for loafers to come and do in my town. See how fast they find a real job.

I'll donate a shovel and a couple of rakes towards their reclamation of self worth.

[Bruv]

It is unfair to the recipient we taxpayers supply an income so they can sit on their butts all day watching TV. We rob them of their dignity and sense of selfesteem.

I am sure there are plenty of work for the money we give. I see a couple of jobs for loafers to come and do in my town. See how fast they find a real job.

I'll donate a shovel and a couple of rakes towards their reclamation of self worth.

Who is the 'We' you speak of as in 'rob them of their self esteem' ?
If you saw a man stumble in the local mall, would you help him up ?

[tude dog]

Who is the 'We' you speak of as in 'rob them of their self esteem' ?
If you saw a man stumble in the local mall, would you help him up ?

I wrote

It is unfair to the recipient we taxpayers supply an income so they can sit on their butts all day watching TV. We rob them of their dignity and sense of selfesteem.

I am a former Boy Scout always looking out to do a good deed. Helping somebody who stumbles fits my definition of a good deed.

[Bruv]

I am a former Boy Scout always looking out to do a good deed. Helping somebody who stumbles fits my definition of a good deed.

So helping a fellow through hard times/between jobs should come easy to you.

Now we have discovered you are a nice guy really, we need to find a way to make sure these unfortunate people have work again by supporting local industries so creating jobs for them.