The Sickening State of UK Welfare.. - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15038191
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.standa ... html%3famp

"London children 'relying on charities to avoid starving', campaigners warn as child poverty set to hit new record"

https://www.gov.scot/news/impact-of-uk- ... -revealed/

Impact of UK welfare cuts revealed
Published: 13 Sep 2019 14:22
Part of: Children and families
Scottish families facing fall in income.

Thousands of families are being pushed into poverty – with UK Government welfare changes set to reduce spending on social security in Scotland by £500 million a year, Social Security Secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville said.

The 2019 Annual Report on Welfare Reform shows the largest welfare cuts since 2015 are as a result of the benefit freeze, two-child cap, and changes to the work allowance.

Other findings include:

8,500 Scottish families have already had their income cut by the Universal Credit (UC) two-child limit – and that figure will reach 40,000 at full rollout, bringing up to 20,000 children into poverty
86% of UC claimants have seen a fall in the amount they can earn before losing UC entitlement
91% of Scottish households affected by the Benefit Cap contain children – and the cap has impacted on more than 3,000 households which are losing an average of more than £3,000 per year
around 5,600 Scottish couples could lose up to £7,000 per year by 2023/2024 because of changes to Pension Credit eligibility
Social Security Secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville said:

“The UK Government is still refusing to listen to the overwhelming evidence that Universal Credit, the benefit cap and the benefit freeze have caused significant hardship and misery to thousands of people and families.

“Yet this report – the seventh we have produced - lays bare the evidence that households are having to cope with a reduction in their income of thousands of pounds – many of them with children.

“The Scottish Government will not stand by and let people who are already struggling continue to face a reliance on food banks and the stress of debt and rent arrears.

“We will continue to spend at least £100 million each year to mitigate the worst effects of the UK government welfare cuts – part of the £1.4 billion we spent last year to support low income households. This is money we should be able to invest elsewhere to help pull people out of poverty but we instead we need to use to protect the poorest and most vulnerable in our country.

“And we are introducing the Scottish Child Payment to tackle child poverty head on. But there is no doubt that without the cuts inflicted on families this could go so much further.

“It is clear that by entirely devolving social security to Scotland we could create a system with the people of Scotland for the people of Scotland.”


More perspective:

Poverty in the UK is 'systematic' and 'tragic', says UN special rapporteur

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co ... k-48354692

Fullfact comprehensive guide to poverty

https://fullfact.org/economy/poverty-uk ... d-figures/

UK elderly suffer worst poverty rate in western Europe

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.thegua ... s-pensions

Long term trends... ( :roll: )
Image
#15038324
"Homeless deaths see biggest increase on record as two die every day in England and Wales"

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indepe ... html%3famp

Some of the highest rents in western europe; some of the loxest happiness ratings/highest stress. A toxic atmosphere against the poor in this country; and a purely nasty, vindictive PM who once said that £250k was 'chickenfeed'. He was part of the Bullingdon Club who supposedly burned money in front of homeless people...

Say whatever you like about Corbyn, and I'm not his biggest fan, but he's better than that bunch..
#15038764
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailyr ... 380246.amp

Food poverty leaves Scots suicidal after going for days without food
The report revealed delays to Universal Credit payments, low wages and zero-hour contracts left people vulnerable.

BY ANDY PHILIP
Scots families are struggling to feed themselves
Food poverty is making Scots suicidal after going for days with nothing to eat, a damning report reveals today.

Campaigners have exposed the grim reality of hunger for people struggling on low wages or with slashed benefits.

Hard-hitting findings blame delays to Universal Credit payments, insecure zero-hour contracts and the lack of an efficient social security safety net.
....
In March, it emerged food banks are handing out twice as many parcels as previously thought.

Researchers combined figures from the UK’s largest provider, the Trussell Trust, and merged them with independent community food banks. Over 18 months, it was estimated 480,583 packages were provided.
#15047503
How do you expect to maintain a generous welfare system with open movement of people?

It's not sustainable long-term, under those conditions. There's been a huge influx of people from other impoverished and war-torn parts of the world.

Pick and choose. You can't have both.
#15047532
Like many European nations we have an aging population and shrinking workforce.

The UK currently has 800,000 job vacancies. Every one of those represents a loss of productivity, GDP and tax income for the government . We need to train those people were have and welcome those who come to do the work.

The open door policy was the choice of our government, there is nothing in the single market that forces a country to accept people who don't come to work.
#15047797
BeesKnee5 wrote:Like many European nations we have an aging population and shrinking workforce.

The UK currently has 800,000 job vacancies. Every one of those represents a loss of productivity, GDP and tax income for the government . We need to train those people were have and welcome those who come to do the work.

The idea that bringing in hoards of migrants from other distant parts of the world could be a solution to the aging demographics problem was based on numerous false assumptions, in my opinion.

Though I'm not going to get into that here.
_________________________________________________________
Edit: For further discussion on that you can go to this thread: the problem with bringing in foreign workers to take care of the old
viewtopic.php?f=28&t=177461
Last edited by Puffer Fish on 11 Nov 2019 06:40, edited 2 times in total.
#15047798
Puffer Fish wrote: and
Though I'm not going to get into that here.


Why not?
A generous welfare system is a choice and is a small proportion of the welfare bill when compared to the cost of pensions.

More than this, our welfare system is skewed to support the wealthy rather than the poor. The dismantling of social housing has caused the housing benefit bill to rocket and the only beneficiaries have been private landlords. The removal of regulated rents in 1989 allowed a huge boom in the rental market and the later closing of the rent officer service means there is no one checking the quality of the properties being offered.

Our government have chased wealth and swallowed trickle down economics. It has failed because the solution is to invest in things that reduce the cost of living rather than propping up banks
#15047802
You think adding more people to fill up the lower paying jobs - jobs that Europeans do not believe they can afford to live on - is going to result in an overall increase in standard of living?

I don't think you realize just how much it costs in government services to have additional people.
If total incomes don't increase in proportion to increase in population, then that will mean less money per person.

If one of these people is not earning higher than a certain amount (which is much higher than you think), it's not going to be a net contribution.

Many people who were already working in those lower level jobs are going to be pushed out by the lower wages and competition, and that's just going to add to the welfare burden. (i.e. a working foreigner isn't going to add revenue if they just took a job away from someone else)

You want to flood the country with poverty, and somehow you don't think that will result in turning it into an impoverished Third World.
Answer me this: WHY are other countries so poor? You don't know, and you can't answer that question.
#15047836
Puffer Fish wrote:.
Many people who were already working in those lower level jobs are going to be pushed out by the lower wages and competition, and that's just going to add to the welfare burden. (i.e. a working foreigner isn't going to add revenue if they just took a job away from someone else)

You want to flood the country with poverty, and somehow you don't think that will result in turning it into an impoverished Third World.
Answer me this: WHY are other countries so poor? You don't know, and you can't answer that question.


Yet here we are with record vacancies and Schrödinger's immigrant.

None of the workers on low pay have been pushed out by immigration. There in lies the fallacy. They didn't take away a job from someone else if there is 800,000 vacancies.

What raises to the welfare burden is corporations profiteering at the expense of their workers and leaving the public purse to pick up the bill.

Answer me this. Why are the poorest areas in the country those with the lowest levels of immigration. The North East, Wales, Cornwall and Northern Ireland. Could it be a lack of investment that deters business and the reduction of public service jobs that has made them poorer?

Why are other countries poor?
Generally because they can't compete and are exploited by richer nations. Their climate is harsh and so more effort has to be spent on basic subsistence. Their currency is weak and so they have to borrow in dollars and euros which means they cannot use sovereign currency to meet their expenditure.

Immigration of the poor to the US didn't make the country poorer, it provided the manpower to build a nation. A nation short of manpower will not grow, look at Japan, huge public debt and economic stagnation.

Flooding the country with poverty is a nonsense, you are blaming people who come here to work and earn a living for the choices of the UK government. The non EU immigration has always been in our governments control.
#15047860
Presvias wrote:"Homeless deaths see biggest increase on record as two die every day in England and Wales"

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indepe ... html%3famp

Some of the highest rents in western europe; some of the loxest happiness ratings/highest stress. A toxic atmosphere against the poor in this country; and a purely nasty, vindictive PM who once said that £250k was 'chickenfeed'. He was part of the Bullingdon Club who supposedly burned money in front of homeless people...

Say whatever you like about Corbyn, and I'm not his biggest fan, but he's better than that bunch..


Poverty is not solved by giving fish to the poor. Poverty is solved by teaching the poor how to fish.
#15047963
Harvey Weinstream wrote:Money spent on kids getting some cheerios and their parents being able to pay rent in OK with me.

It OK as a temporary solution. Otherwise this state of dependency leads to nihilism. Have you visited San Francisco, Seattle, and LA? The idea of giving away free stuff is creating a dystopia of major proportions.
#15048145
BeesKnee5 wrote:None of the workers on low pay have been pushed out by immigration. There in lies the fallacy. They didn't take away a job from someone else if there is 800,000 vacancies.

There are vacancies in any normal economy.

You will start to see the unemployment rate go up long before you get down to 0 vacancies. The fact that vacancies exist does not mean there is no unemployment.

Then there's also the phenomena of illusory vacancies, where the company could easily hire a worker if they were willing to pay more, but they're preferring to just wait around and see if someone is willing to work for less, because they are in no real urgency to hire a new worker.
That's not a real worker shortage.

Many of these "vacancies" are in high cost of living city areas, where native people can't afford to take that job at that level of pay because the rents are so high. So instead of wages going up in those areas, they bring in foreign immigrants.

Also you'll see the most desirable job opportunities being taken first, and then only the least desirable are left. (In a normal economy, normally you'd see wages start going up to compensate for that, and working conditions improving to try to attract workers into that field, or there might simply be many open job positions that go unfilled, but not when you have a surplus of labor)
#15048148
Harvey Weinstream wrote:Money spent on kids getting some cheerios and their parents being able to pay rent in OK with me.

If we're having to pay normal lower working class people money to pay their rent because they can't afford it, there are too many people in the country. They don't need to bring in more.
#15048150
BeesKnee5 wrote:Answer me this. Why are the poorest areas in the country those with the lowest levels of immigration. The North East, Wales, Cornwall and Northern Ireland.

Because the poorest areas of the country do not have high housing costs, and it's been mainly high housing costs that have resulted in a vacuum of native lower income workers, and those areas being filled by foreigners.

Foreigners would never come to some rural area in Ireland because there's already a surplus of native workers there to do all the jobs. In an expensive area like London, the rents are so high, all the native Britons who don't have higher paying jobs have left.

And in any case, adding more people to drive down wages just pushes away those few who were barely clinging on in these areas with high rents, trying to survive.
Last edited by Puffer Fish on 12 Nov 2019 23:17, edited 2 times in total.
#15048151
Puffer Fish wrote:There are vacancies in any normal economy.

You will start to see the unemployment rate go up long before you get down to 0 vacancies. The fact that vacancies exist does not mean there is no unemployment.

Then there's also the phenomena of illusory vacancies, where the company could easily hire a worker if they were willing to pay more, but they're preferring to just wait around and see if someone is willing to work for less, because they are in no real urgency to hire a new worker.
That's not a real worker shortage.

Many of these "vacancies" are in high cost of living city areas, where native people can't afford to take that job at that level of pay because the rents are so high. So instead of wages going up in those areas, they bring in foreign immigrants.


800,000 vacancies is a record high. It's not a normal level, it is the product of a skills shortage and underinvestment.

Don't kid yourself that a vacancy is illusory, it's there because there is demand for whatever a company produces or sells. If it's not filled then the worker doesn't gain and the company doesn't grow. If anything the reverse is more common, zombie companies that cannot sustain their staff and do not benefit the country who eventually go bust leaving other companies with unrecoverable debts.

Rents are high because our government deregulated them in January 1989 and sold off all the social housing that made it possible for the average person to manage in cities. However, many of these vacates are highly skilled jobs and are found in more rural locations.
#15048152
BeesKnee5 wrote:800,000 vacancies is a record high. It's not a normal level, it is the product of a skills shortage and underinvestment.

Who's going to pay for all these skills?

And as we've already seen in the US, just encouraging blanket education without regard to actual specific skills that were truly in demand, led to an education bubble, with a huge section of the productivity in the economy wasted on higher education.

Look, you already have some people on the verge of starvation in the UK. Time to stop bringing in more poverty.
Last edited by Puffer Fish on 12 Nov 2019 23:21, edited 1 time in total.
#15048153
Puffer Fish wrote:Because the poorest areas of the country do not have high housing costs, and it's been mainly high housing costs that have resulted in a vacuum of native lower income workers, and those areas being filled by foreigners.

Foreigners would never come to some rural area in Ireland because there's already a surplus of native workers there to do all the jobs. In an expensive area like London, the rents are so high, all the native Britons who don't have higher paying jobs have left.


The lack of investment cuts the GDP of an area, cutting the money that is spent, thereby reducing the number of jobs. There are plenty of vacancies in these poorer areas but they are for skilled jobs. A solution would be to train people to do those jobs.

Always blaming the foreigner for filling jobs doesn't solve the he underlying problem. A good example is agriculture, is a choice invest in automation and pay one person a good salary to operate it or get a bunch of cheap workers from abroad to have pick. I'm advocating the former in the way the Dutch have been successful, you blame the foreign worker.

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