David Craig, on November 13th, 2018(Tuesday blog)
Two related stories today.
1. What’s wrong with Universal Credit?
I watched yet another biased BBC documentary last night. This one was about the failures of the new Universal Credit (UC) and how the introduction of UC was pushing people into poverty, homelessness and helplessness.
As usual, the BBC found lots of supposed ‘victims’ of� Government cruelty and oppression. I do understand that there have been two problems with UC: claimants are getting less money than under the old five-benefits system and claimants are having to wait too long for their first payment. And I believe these two problems are being (too slowly) rectified.
But it seemed to me that there was one other problem with UC that the BBC carefully tiptoed around – the stupidity and financial incompetence of many claimants. As far as I understand (and that’s not very far) the biggest difference between UC and the previous five-benefits system is that under UC the Government is trying to make people responsible for their own finances by paying them their rent money directly rather than straight to landlords – private, council or housing associations. This puts the onus on claimants to budget properly. However, many claimants prefer to spend their money on their Sky TV subscriptions, fags and alcohol and so don’t have enough left for their rent and thus fall into arrears and risk eviction
There were loads of the supposedly ‘oppressed’ interviewed by the Biased Broadcasting Corporation bleating that they didn’t have enough money to feed their kids. But they all seemed to have large-screen TVs and quite pleasant homes that we pay for.
The British economy is booming; unemployment is at the lowest it has been for fifty or more years; over 3 million Europeans have come to Britain and found work; we have a benefits system which is encouraging most of the Third World to try to get to Britain; everywhere you look there are job vacancies and yet the BBC manages to find people who are supposedly starving to death. I suggest that many (though not all) of the BBC’s supposed ‘victims’ have wasted the 12 years they spent at school, have managed to leave school unable to read, write or do simple arithmetic and are too useless and lazy and irresponsible to get a job and/or manage their own finances.
They’re victims, I agree. Victims of their own idleness, fecklessness and uselessness. Many may also be victims of their own fecundity – churning out children with every passing stranger, children they expect the rest of us to pay for.
2. Disability? My large, hairy, flatulent a**e!
There was yet another gem from the BBC. It was on BBC Breakfast this morning. The reporter claimed that “one in five” Brits is disabled. One in five! I couldn’t believe this, so I checked. And it’s true. An estimated 19% of working-age adults and 22% of the whole population in the UK have a disability, according to the latest data published by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
A person is considered under law to have a disability if they have a long-standing illness, disability or impairment which causes difficulty with day-to-day activities in line with the Equality Act 2010 definition.
Since 2012/13 the proportion of working-age adults with a disability has risen from 16% to 19%. The proportion of all people with a disability is 22%, which has also been slowly increasing.
Looking at the chart, it seems that the proportion of ‘pension-age adults’ with a disability has fallen slightly while the proportion of ‘all people’, ‘working-age adults’ and ‘children’ claiming to have a disability is rising.
So, do we really believe that just over one in five people actually has a disability? Or might a cynic be tempted to wonder whether claiming to have a disability is so easy and so lucrative – disability benefits and carers’ allowances – that ever more healthy people are jumping on the financially-rewarding disability bandwagon?
I know what I think!
Category: 
The elephant in the room with Universal Credit appears to be the overall reduction in income for the work shy. It fundamentally contradicts the mantra of the Labour Party which is to throw money at this group, thus buying votes with the tax-payers� money
Great blog! I also watched the programme and came more or less to the same conclusions. I do, though, feel sympathy for people in their 50s and 60s who, having been “let go”, are genuinely unable to find work in an employment world which is obsessively youth-oriented, yet where State pension age is almost 70. They tend to come of a social class which traditionally has collected a pay packet on Friday and is broke by Thursday. They don’t have savings to fall back on; they never have had. A government which expects otherwise is merely demonstrating how ignorant it is of how at least half its electorate lives. Of course rent should go direct to landlords! As for the feckless and incompetent, there were ever such and modern education, which prohibits most disciplinary sanctions by teachers, is merrily producing more. Observing my fellow citizens, it seems to me that a large proportion of the “disabled” are merely grossly obese and that a significant proportion of children with so-called hyper-activity would benefit enormously from the imposition of a bit of parental discipline.
I would include Disability as one of the same class as the ..ism’s. They are all promoted to weaken us and our feelings of self worth, self subjugation all planned well in advance and intentional.Cannabis,Sex,Pornography,drinking,gambling, emptying the churches,spying on us CCTV,giving to Charities that are used to bribe third world gangster politicians etc.
All these home based mountain out of mole hills, fractious issues are meant to distract us from serious issues . The Fist World War Memorial being a prime example.
President Macron disgustingly tried to hijack the occasion to push for more Warmongering and a Euro Army that Treason May has already signed us up for, amply aided by that other traitor David Davis(see the UKcolumn.org to see about that as he muttered the truth under his breath).
Russia wan’t invited of course,they are the intended enemy of the next War and the target for Theresa Mays Propaganda department to please her bosses, the elite that want all the power and us to pay and become the victims of her actions.Job number one for Trump, Theresa May and Macron is to use Europe as a giant Nuclear Missile base pointed at Russia and that we be the hostages. Putin doesn’t want it, we don’t want it so why are we letting them take us to War again.Russia should have been at the Memorial parade for WW1 , more Russians died than any other nation , sent into battle with pitch forks is it any wonder they had 90% casualties.
Dont let them do it again , the stakes are higher still Nukes are nasty we will have 90% civilian casualties this time, I only hope the first one lands on 10 Downing Street.
I remember a period in my life on a council estate as a rent collector. A typical scrounger told me that as long as the benefit system worked with so many loopholes he would take advantage of them all. Just sounds like all those bums in the Commons and Lords who are doing the very same thing as the man on the council estate.
Isn’t this just part of the subtle march of the Fourth Reich to take over Europe entirely. Instead of weapons the socialists throughout Europe have implemented all the polices of the Frankfurt School, their overall objective being to create a state of hopelessness and alienation to provoke a socialist revolution. We cannot be far away from this. They have used equality and human rights laws to their advantage and this is what we see with the benefits culture. Anybody who thinks these people should work is seen a being heartless by the media and the young.
Compare Germany and the UK. After the war German rebuilt its industrial base, here our stupid socialists created a benefit culture which has resulted in the UK being bankrupt. Obama did the same in the USA. Germany now has highly successful manufacturing base and ours has been destroyed or taken over by the Germans. They have turned Greece into a basket case and might do the same with Italy. They have created the Euro which has given Germany a devalued currency and they can export all they produce whilst the rest of the Eurozone has an overvalued currency. Floods of immigrants have been encouraged by Merkel and they all have to be housed. In the UK most new flat development is bought by foreign investors and rented at taxpayers cost to immigrants and our own people on benefits.
How can this change when low skilled jobs are low paid? Nobody is going to earn a living by selling coffee and working in Amazon warehouses. A low skilled economy means more benefits being paid by fewer productive workers.
On BBC news this evening some superb examples of future Universal Benefits claimants in training in Manchester. Feral kids, some barely in their teens, relegated to permanent exclusion from mainstream schooling, leaping and prancing on desks (when they’re not overturning them), fighting, screeching, uncontrollable and unteachable, some already well acquainted with illegal substances. Look on today’s child-rearing, oh tax-payers, and despair!
I haven’t got a disability but I sometimes wish I had, that way I might end up as well off as someone I know, (probably one of many), who uses his posh motability car as taxi. The other wish I sometimes have is that I could be as well off as those people we see in documentaries featuring people supposedly in dire poverty people who,acting up for the media and loving their 15 minutes, complain about how difficult it is to make ends meet and how they can’t afford to give their poor kids everything their little hearts desire whilst sitting there with smart phones, massive televisions and junk food. But only sometimes, mostly I manage to not think about it. In any case, I’m disqualified from being disabled because I never learned to act and I can’t claim to be poor because I never learned to bleat.