Beatings will continue until morale improves!
Originally posted on my Blog in April 2014 - About 400 Words
New rules for the unemployed come in today. You won’t find the Labour party shouting about the latest round of bullying, they’ve got their own version of ‘bash the victim’ lined up in case they win in 2015.
From today if anyone has gone through a year on the work programme and still hasn’t obtained a job in the exciting world of office cleaning or burger flipping, they’ll need to jump through more hoops to get their pittance from the state. Some of you will picture the stereotype of young men, lounging at the shops, kicking the wall and annoying passers-by and you’ll think ‘Good! Get tougher.’
The problem is that the benefit system is a one size fits all system and the bullying will not only hit the workshy, it will also hit the people in their 60’s who paid years of tax & NI. It will also hit the sick & disabled who’ve already been bullied off sickness benefits and shouldn’t really be trudging along to the Job Centre anyway.
Pension credits are being phased out, so you could well see people made redundant at 63 or 64, being put through the beating up machine that unemployment benefits have become. How do you fancy seeing your grandparents being on the work programme and being trained to work at Nandos? And let’s face it there is a limit to the number of people who can be jammed into low paid retail jobs or phoney self-employment.
The answer of course is for the government to give genuine help, to actually create a few genuine jobs and opportunities, but they never do that. Much easier to claim that bullying and harassment is for people’s own good and hope they go away.
It’s interesting that George Osborne and Iain Duncan-Smith are the architects of the new bullying, yet neither of them have the kind of CV most of us would think of as indicating a hard working life. George Osborne was born into money and Duncan-Smith married well!
© Ed Cowling ~ April 2014
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