larrygobfiend
Player Valuation: £40m
Can't tell if this is serious or not...
Current Affairs The General Election
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Can't tell if this is serious or not...
Disgruntledgoat
Player Valuation: £50m
No such thing as perfect, but I'm a lot happier here than I ever was in the UK. Which is ironic as I'm on my 3rd job in 5 years and (in the last 2 years) spent 8 months unemployed, got divorced and was off work sick for 10 weeks. All of which may explain my greater appreciation for the welfare state and taxation paying for social projects (a friend of mine literally walked here from Syria and is now training refugees to enter the job market).
jaycee
Player Valuation: £60m
"Hello Mrs Smith,I see you're late for your JC appointment by 5 minutes because your child was sick,we are going to sanction you,you will recieve £25 this month to feed yourself and 2 children plus heat your home,but dont panic,heres Bruce Wayne to teach budgetting and home economics"
larrygobfiend
Player Valuation: £40m
This noble advise always seems to come from people who live very comfortable lives. Guess I should've listened in school...
Reading the wonderful world of Twitter yesterday and the reason foodbanks are in high demand is it due to it being free.
Not that we high levels of poverty and people struggling to survive.
Not that we high levels of poverty and people struggling to survive.
abelard
Player Valuation: £35m
"And to really motivate you, we've cut funding to the only bus that serves your village, where you've had to move because you can't afford to live in the town where the three zero hours contract jobs we've forced you to take on while also raising children are based.
Didn't you know that you if you buy 5kg of Brussels Sprouts at a time (from a shop 15 miles from where you live), you can save up to £.0015 per individual sprout?
Also, why haven't you learned how to code yet? The library used to offer courses.... though it has since been closed."
bol-uk
Player Valuation: £50m
Indeed. They have been around for years but have coincidentally become infinitely more popular in the last 10 years
Those are cliches fed to you by the Labour comms team. My wife works with a large number of families on the breadline, and for them, learning how to eat well on a budget is an effective intervention, but such things have become demonised by the left because they've put the poor on such a pedestal that the only thing missing in their life is money to help them overcome the horribleness of the system. It's utter drivel.
You see it in the school figures, as migrants and ethnic minorities often have just as many financial challenges as white natives, yet do far better at school. That's ignored though because it's a bit too much like pulling yourselves up by your bootstraps. It's the same with adult education, as pretty much all the research suggests the biggest barrier to engagement isn't a lack of money or a lack of opportunity, but a sense that education is not for them and they can get nothing meaningful out of it. Will Labour's 'national education service' factor that in, or will it simply regurgitate the LSAs from the 90s that flopped?
bol-uk
Player Valuation: £50m
"You could get a cook book from the library but we closed it".
Disgruntledgoat
Player Valuation: £50m
People just love taking handouts to feed their kids. Makes them feel good about themselves.
Another example if you like. Across much of the developed world there are considerable health inequalities in operation, due in large part to the fact that towns and rural communities don't have the staff or resources that larger cities have. A load of studies have highlighted how things like telehealth can be beneficial in such circumstances, so you might think it logical to introduce that kind of offering, except the leading telehealth provider in the UK are a private company and Corbyn has said we must never allow private companies to do anything whatsoever in the NHS as they're devil spawn. So you get the 'made in the NHS' alternatives, which are frankly a bit [Poor language removed].
There are interventions in my borough that do just that, and (from my wife's testimony), are both well attended and received.
You see, that's the kind of [Poor language removed] up thinking I talk about. You create some fantastical scenario that covers a tiny proportion of the population and presume that's the debate finished. You're typical of the intellectual elite who lionise the poor but think them too stupid to ever do anything except accept your pity.
Disgruntledgoat
Player Valuation: £50m
There is a degree of 'noble savage' around the contemporary Left's view of the poor. But on the other hand, we have a situation now where due to the last 40 years of government treating large corporations as gods there are vast swathes of people who would, in the past have been skilled labourers who now are working rubbish jobs for a pittance. Work doesn't pay any more as evidenced by the fact that it is nigh on impossible to have the life even my parents enjoyed (my dad a clerk, my mum a primary school teacher) where owning your own home and being able to raise a family is a realistic option on a working class income. My mother took 4 years out of work to be with her kids, it's just not possible now.
The Blair governments trashing of vocational training in favour of university shredded a lot of these jobs also, leaving a huge skills gap that has never been filled. Wages haven't kept pace with inflation for 2 decades meaning most people are seeing a real terms pay cut every year.
I feel I'm rambling here. What i am trying to get to is that the solutions you propose do work, no doubt about it, but they require early intervention. By the time somebody is long term unemployed or on minimum wage and raising kids it's too late. These programmes also need to be funded, which seems to be impossible in the current climate in the UK.
Something has to change structurally.
2 things can be true at the same time though Bruce.
Education, local initiatives and encouraging self sufficiency can obviously be beneficial to those in desperate need, but similarly, taking steps to redress a decades worth of cuts by raising the safety net a bit higher also helps.
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