TheGrimSqueaker wrote:
Who needs facts when you get by with belief and prejudice?
Some of us down there in the BTL murk have been fighting back - what bothers me most about many of the posts there and elsewhere is the level of ignorance about social security, and the hatred/resentment of some people who have no idea what it's like to be poor.
Overriding all these attitudes are two issues which really bother me - first is the regurgitation of DWP press releases and soundbites by the MSM (with little or no challenge) which emanate from "DWP spokesman" who is more likely than not to be a £90K PA SPAD recruited from IDS's very own personal thinktank, the Centre for Social Justice; second is the sheer mendacity itself, which is deliberately and cynically designed to give a misleading picture of what the figures actually say, thus fomenting more resentment and division.
The corker in the article you quote is the bit where the ubuquitous spokesman says that 3.9 Million families (not households) were languishing on benefits and nobody was working, but now all that's been sorted out and there are a tenth of that number today.
Egregious and specious bollocks - there were 5 million people on out-of-work benefits in 2010 and there are 5 million now.
Lone parents who did not have to search for work do now; carers ditto; sick and/or disabled people ditto; all set to get worse when UC comes in and those rules apply to people who work as well.....millions and millions of them.
And because they'll all be on the Work Programme they will not be unemployed any more and the whole sack of shite will be trumpeted as a resounding success.
I hope that when Labour get in to office - and they must or we are sunk - they go very noisily public about this constant lying about what really goes on in the world of benefits.
The ONS published some figures last year - if you discount people who cannot work due to disability or illness, who will always be around 2 million or more, you're left with people who claim JSA and people who are "economically inactive" for long periods.
The latter may well be people who cannot claim any benefits due to the new rules and who otherwise might.
The former - of 33 million working-age people in the UK, those claiming JSA for 10 years or more number.....930.
Meanwhile, the 5-year unemployment rate has more than doubled and the 3-year rate has increased more than tenfold.
I simply do not understand why Labour isn't screaming this from the rooftops.......
