BENEFITS FOR ALL
The Dependency Mentality
(Comments: tony.papard@btinternet.com)
In March this year, 2005, I turn 60. I will then, as a Londoner, be entitled to a Freedom Pass giving me free travel on the capital's buses, tubes, trams and trains, and next Christmas I will get £200 Winter fuel allowance. Everyone in the capital who is 60 or over is entitled to the travel pass, and everyone in UK to the annual Winter Fuel Payment. Yet many of us are still working - we don't really need these benefits which must cost the government millions of pounds.
Many pensioners over 80 with very limited savings get their weekly income topped up to a level many of them can't possibly spend, even if they blow nearly £50 a week on cigarets. Middle-class students expect to get grants, paid out of tax-payers' hard earned money, to enable them to go to university and eventually earn much higher salaries than working-class people who probably don't get the privilege of a university education. Even worse, many middle-class students, when they got grants, studied useless subjects 'for fun' or as a 'hobby' with no intention of ever getting a better job as a result, all paid for by working people.
About the only thing Tony Blair has done right is make these privileged parasites pay back their student loans when they start working and earning a high salary, thus stopping them from studying 'frivolous' subjects which won't get them a job after they leave university. I have known middle-class people who were getting grants as 'students' reading quite useless subjects from their teenage well into their 40s. Others have taken two years off work, at government expense, to study things like English Literature or Political Science at university just 'as a hobby' or because they are 'bored' with working for a living. Middle-class people have all the contacts, and know how to work the system. My partner, on the other hand, who was extremely intelligent and could have benefited from going to university as a mature student to study, say, librarianship, when his line of work (telex) became obsolete, couldn't get information, help or a grant. Working class people simply don't know how to go about it, and no-one at the DSS was willing to give advice. The middle-class person who became a mature student for two years because she was bored with work had the cheek to tell me: 'Oh no, your partner won't get a grant. Universities don't want people who've been unemployed for a long time.' Apparently they only want middle-class ponces who are bored with working for a living, not working-class people who can't get a job because they have been denied career training or a university education.
So, should I refuse my travel pass and Winter Fuel payment, and older pensioners who don't need weekly payments of well over £100 (with attendance allowance nearer £200) a week refuse the extra money they don't need? No, certainly not. Until benefits are means tested, if some people who don't need them are getting them, then we all should. I can always give the extra money to a charity of my choice. After all, if you refuse these benefits the government, or the local authority as the case may be, will only waste it. A few million quid in Tony Blair's pocket would no doubt be spent on another Trident nuclear warhead, or some more bombs to drop on innocent civilians abroad.
What I am saying is that benefits should be means-tested, however hated that word has become. I wonder, do all the aristocracy in UK, up to and including The Queen, get Winter Fuel payments and travel concessions for public transport? Benefits should be reserved for those who really need them.
Apart from all the above, there are thousands, probably millions, of people claiming other benefits they don't really need. For instance, everyone in UK diagnosed HIV+ before a certain date get benefits for life and never have to work again. This was introduced when life expectancy for HIV+ people was just a few years, probably 10 at the most. Now, with modern medication regimes such as combination therapy, many of these people have been on benefits for 10, 15 or 20 years and if things continue as at present could be on them for another 20 or 30 years or so till they reach retiring age. Yet those of us diagnosed after combination therapy became available quite rightly have to work for a living, we can't get any benefits. There are people claiming benefits for all sorts of medical and psychological conditions, real or imaginary, who could be doing a useful job. I know one, now retired, who claimed benefits for years because he persuaded his GP that simply being gay made him 'psychologically unsuited' to work for a living. He claimed people laughed at him at work because he was 'camp', and anyway he might be mugged if he had to come home after dark!
Others simply commit benefit fraud. A woman I know, happily married with a child, put 'father unknown' on the birth certificate so she could continue claiming benefits as a single mother. The husband was earning and living with her, but she never told the local authority and they never checked up. I rang the local authority, without giving the name or address of this woman, just to tell them the sort of thing that was going on in their borough. The reaction was: 'Oh, we know. We can't check up, it might upset the woman.' The implication was the child might not be her husband's, and the council didn't want to ask 'insensitive' questions. At the very least the council should have checked up whether she was living with a man who was earning, but they didn't. Apparently the woman's sisters also put 'father unknown' for their children by their husbands in order to claim benefits as well. Apart from the benefit fraud, these poor kids, and their fathers, are saddled with these false birth certificates for life just so the mothers can get some extra money out of the system.
It is high time all these benefits handed out willy-nilly were subject to some sort of control, and that can only be done by universal means testing. Unemployment benefit should also be abolished - the government should create jobs for everyone. There is plenty of work needs doing in hospitals, in charity shops, cleaning up litter and graffiti in the streets, etc.. If you are unemployed you should be required to work so many hours a week, not full time by any means, in order to earn your benefit. This would stop 'moonlighting' and people claiming the benefits because they are too lazy to work or look for a job. My partner was unemployed for a long time, but worked voluntarily several hours a week for Oxfam. All claimants should be required to do similar work whilst looking for full-time employment, or else undergo some kind of career training.
Coupled with this new, controlled benefits policy should be a commitment by governments and local authorities to use the money saved for the public good, not for armaments, wars or to waste on silly unnecessary projects. If I knew the money saved would go into more council housing (some hope in Blair's Britain!), or more aid to the under-developed world, or some similar worthwhile project I would willingly give up my free travel pass and my Winter Fuel payment until such time as I retire in five years and may need these things to supplement my pension.