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But who could afford to buy its own anyway.
So, you penalise the people who have just a bit more than the poor, who then become poorer?
The people in the upper-lower/lower-middle range end up losing out because it is they who are paying for the government haemorrhaging money into schemes that are having no benefit to them or those extremely 'difficult to help' people.
Truly rich people wouldn't notice the difference, but then again where is the boundary of richness?
Truly rich people wouldn't notice the difference.
That would depend on who pays wouldnt it
I think difficult is probably a more accurate term than expensive. When you see documentaries based in developing countries, there appears to be a far greater appreciation of the importance of a good education and a willingness to learn than often appears to be the case in this country. Now of course this could just be a distortion caused by the nature of film making, but assuming it isn't, it would suggest that absence of finance isn't itself the root cause of absence of desire to improve your position.
Taxation is a tricky issue.
I do think that some people can't/won't be helped though.
When you see documentaries based in developing countries, there appears to be a far greater appreciation of the importance of a good education and a willingness to learn than appears to be often seen in this country.
Exactly. Wind back the clock a few decades and I suspect that you'd see the same sort of situation in the UK.
it would suggest that absence of finance isn't itself the root cause of absence of desire to improve your position.
Totally agree with generational poverty attitudes are they problem in part but with enough money and finance these problems could be overcome. If politicians dont think its worth it they should grow a pair and say it
It would probably be political suicide to say that it was a waste of money.
with enough money and finance these problems could be overcome
How do you propose spending the money then? Brain washing?
2 pages in and nobody's used the word '****less'!
This place must be mellowing.
education would be a good start
i have met a few people who have pursued degrees in various healthcare fields and their families have accused them of getting ideas above there station. In two cases other sisters were council house single mums as were the parents.
What kind of society do we live in where people are attacked for trying to do better?
What kind of society do we live in where people are attacked for trying to do better?
That's the underclass for you....
What class are you then Mudshark?
Well I'm not one of the underclass....
We do educate the population.
School education is free at the point-of-use in the UK and there are various schemes for adult learning, which is a good thing. I hope that people make use of them.
Sending everybody to university isn't the answer.
Healthcare is also free at the point-of-use, but that doesn't prevent quite a number of people failing to take their children for immunisation, health checks etc. -As a result, we have people who go to the homes of these 'difficult to help' people to try to carry-out the various health procedures.
[i] What kind of society do we live in where people are attacked for trying to do better?[/i]
That's the underclass for you....
No, that's the 'difficult to help' class. I don't think that throwing money at them is the answer though.
I've spent time with school leavers in a council estate in London with an organization involved with trying to help them become employable; they're very difficult to help - it's a generational thing. They're used to being provided for by the state so don't see the need to do anything differently and think there's no point anyway.
i know this sounds harsh, but i think that the only way to help some of these people is to remove all benefits and force them to do something. Make it impossible to sit back and do nothing for ever.
You'd have to give many of them a lot of help as they're fairly clueless.
mastiles_fanylion - MemberWhere is that lad in green tights
What will Peter Pan do to help?
Don't be so sily MF, he must mean the Jolly Green Giant.
I blame the teachers for this kind of foolishness.
'Human nature' is the reason that is desirable to keep the rich-poor gap as low as possible, even if it simply means reining in the rich.
For most of human history our psychology has evolved to live as hunter-gatherers. Such societies have almost no major difference in material wealth between the great or the lowly- Status is aquired by deeds and actions.
True Hunter-gatherers have surprisingly low levels of mental illness, depression, crime and at least within the tribe, violence, All problems that our modern societies excel in.
Now, much as it would be nice, nobody is going to turn the clock back, but those nations and cultures where there isn't a big (and obvious) wealth gap also seem to show less of those undesirable traits.
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(now, where did I leave the keys to my Lambo)
But its when you read comments such as this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8481534.stm
/p>
[i]By retirement, the difference between rich and poor can be "colossal", the report added.
The panel pointed out that half of those who have worked in the top professions have net assets worth more than £900,000, while a 10th of those who have had unskilled jobs have property, savings and possessions worth less than £8,000. [/i]
So 1/2 of the very top have over £900k in assets while 1/10 of the very bottom have less than £8K - talk about apples vs pears!
And TBH I do agree that social mobility has reduced (in my lifetime), but most of that is due to the government meddling, complicating everything and increasing the price of the basics (it controls) and dismantling 'society' so that we've now a greed-based culture.
The fact that a supposed Labour government failed to do anything about it is equally shameful though.
The didn't fail to do anything about it. I think you'll find that they made it a lot worse.
i know this sounds harsh, but i think that the only way to help some of these people is to remove all benefits and force them to do something. Make it impossible to sit back and do nothing for ever.
That would make us more like the US then, a rich country without a social safety net. The have roughly the same Rich/Poor divide as us but markedly higher social problems. More than 750 people / 100,000 in the states are in jail (compared to less than 150 here or 93 in the Netherlands or 66 in Norway). Infact almost a quarter of the worlds prison population are in the states. They do everything big.
I'm quite sure I don't aspire for us to have any of the problems the US creates for itself.
We're also presuming that the poor don't/won't work. While there are people who play/cheat the system there just aren't enough of them to get in a twist over. There are plenty of poor people in employment and doing important jobs. There are also the sick, the disabled, the elderly and their carers. Included in those are roughly 2 million people who've been made sick, many terminally, by their work.
epicsteve - Member
The fact that a supposed Labour government failed to do anything about it is equally shameful though.
The didn't fail to do anything about it. I think you'll find that they made it a lot worse.
I think you'll find they made it a fair bit better
Do we import people to work in our lower paid jobs because Brits won't do them, or do some Brits lack jobs because we import people to work in our lower paid jobs?
I'm down in London for a few days, working from our office near Liverpool Street, and it seems that a lot of the people working in the shops and bars are foreign. I went in Evans at Spittalfields for a browse and all the staff there appear to be Australian.
We're also presuming that the poor don't/won't work
Whilst that is true of many poor people the underclass are unlikely to want to work and that's a generational problem for them.
t seems that a lot of the people working in the shops and bars are foreign
well London is a cosmopolitan city, you could say the same about any capital city
The huge increase in the underclass during the 80s WAS largely Thatchers fault, as mass unemployment was 'a price worth paying'
The fact that the unemployed were encouraged onto disability benefits as a way of reducing the figures was another great Tory idea. And we're still seeing the effects of it to this day.
I think you'll find they made it a fair bit better
I've only skimmed the full report so far but one thing that stands out is the graph of full-time earnings from 1968-2008 (for men and for women). What that shows (and is mentioned in the narrative) is that earnings for the median, 10th and 90th percentile all rose pretty steadily to about 2000, but levelled off (or, in the case of the 10th percentile, dropped) after that. The certainly appears to show the gap in income between the rich (90%) and poor (10%) continuing to widen througout Labours time in government.
well London is a cosmopolitan city, you could say the same about any capital city
But is it because the locals don't want or aren't available to fill the jobs?
Hmmm, well my understanding is that the underclass is something that has been ingrained over several generations so 'twas happening before Thatcher.
Of course it EXISTED before Thatcher, but the huge increase in the long term unemployed numbers is something that resulted from her policies.
The people I know who would fall into the group who have never worked all had a grandparent who was employed in manufacturing during the seventies.
That big cultural shift took place post 1979
Labour have stopped the gap widening rapidly as it was when they came in, although they have failed to reverse it.
School education is free at the point-of-use in the UK
Just cause its free doesnt mean that those in more afluent areas dont get a better education.
But is it because the locals don't want or aren't available to fill the jobs?
Its a cosmopolitan city - locals/foreigners are the same thing - you were working there and you were form out of town.
The figures are hugely skewed. One faux-aristocratic ponce (CFH anyone) can individually widen the gap by a considerable margin.
The figures are hugely skewed. One faux-aristocratic ponce (CFH anyone) can individually widen the gap by a considerable margin.
Isnt that the point or am I being thick?
Isnt that the point or am I being thick?
I think the point is that it might be easier to understand who's really in poverty if an income (after benefits) value was used rather than a percentage of the median. For example if your country suddenly was to become a haven for the rich it'd push the number of people in poverty up (as the median point would go up) without any decrease in what money or standard of living the people at the poverty point actually had.
Which is what 'relative' poverty is all about. Social misfunction goes hand in hand with widening inequality. Its accepted that it does, but I don't think it should be accepted. Governments talk in terms of skewing benefits and taxation one way or another to favor one class or another but thats because those are the only levers available to a government to pull.
The presence of the rich makes the poor self destructive in a myriad ways, surely there must be a more subtle, social and cultural ways of tackling that with P60s and UB40s?
we are talking about the gap between rich and poor not poverty, to come into the discussion and say that a few rich poeple will squew the results is mind blowingly stupid IMO
I think we [b]started[/b] talking about the gap between rich and poor and moved on to absolute poverty. We're now discussing the difference between the two and which is the more useful measure. Do you see how conversations flow?
The gap between rich & poor is irrelevant IMO
Well it depends what you believe in ...... doesn't it ?
If you believe in social justice, then the gap between rich & poor is all important and crucial. Because if a society has a huge gap between the rich and the poor, then it clearly suggests that some are helping themselves to more than their fair share of the nation's wealth, whilst others [i]aren't[/i] receiving their fair share.
And poverty in Britain cannot be simply dismissed on the grounds of extreme poverty in third world countries. It is still scandalous that 19% of children living in the capital city of the 5th richest nation on earth, are experiencing "severe poverty".
Although of course there is nothing new in this. During the Victorian era when Britain was the wealthiest nation on earth, millions lived under the most appalling poverty. The Victorians weren't too hot on "social justice".
Can we pin this one on Thatcher? Well certainly the gap between rich and poor started to widen 30 years ago as a direct result of deliberate government policy. But the recent further widening of the gap is 100% the responsibility of New Labour, absolutely no one else is to blame for it.
Of course despite all of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's fancy promises about irradiating poverty, none of this is in the least bit surprising. Because their entire and only strategy to reduce poverty, was through tax/benefit handouts, ie subsidising the poor. Complete and utter tosh imo.
Unfortunately, the real solution was far too unpalatable for Blair and Brown. And the clue to the real and lasting solution to poverty, can be seen in why the rich aren't "poor". The rich aren't poor because they have higher incomes. The only solution to poverty is full employment [u]and[/u] decent wages. There is no other solution. And this is precisely how poverty has been successfully reduced in the past in Britain.
But as I say, the real solution is far too radical for a government which, as has already been pointed out, is [i]"intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich"[/i]
Churchill believed that in the same way the rich inherit their riches, the poor inherited their poverty. He believed poverty could be eradicated by simply preventing the poor from breeding.
I doubt whether Churchill actually said that. Although admittedly, politics was never his strong point - he didn't for example, seem very certain about which political party best represented his own particular views and beliefs, and very few people today describe themselves, or others, as "Churchillian", in the way people talk about Kensiyan, Thatcherite, etc. In fact, I don't know any.
He did write/make rather good speeches though.
But anyway, whether he said it or not makes no difference - it's still complete bollox either way. What the poor inherit is their society. And it is the society which creates poverty, as indeed it does the wealthy. Individuals do not create poverty, they never have, and never will. You can only irradiate poverty by irradiating the conditions which cause it - not the individuals.
The figures are hugely skewed. One faux-aristocratic ponce (CFH anyone) can individually widen the gap by a considerable margin.
Figures on what, you were talking about poverty figures were you? I think I understand how conversation works, I also understand how statistics work and I think your point is at best either misleading (or trying to mislead morons), blindingly obvious or at worst plain stupid
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's fancy promises about irradiating poverty,
What, they were going to nuke the poor? 😉
As it currently stands the issues of education and housing are paramount.
Too many of the best paid jobs are in London and the south east, Too London Centric,
People from former industrial towns and cities cannot afford the house prices in the south east, which really has been the killer for social mobility.
Where I live I'm getting bombarded with Valuation offers/someone wants to buy a house in my neighbourhood, simply down to parents wanting to get their kids into the local schools. We have some excellent schools(supposedly) in the area and this puts house prices up and prevents parents from lower income families from moving here, it also has a knock on effect of preventing "essential workers" from living here also, not to mention driving out those on lower incomes who have lived here long before all this started. Its become a middle class ghetto.
As Ernie says, its also about a decent wage. But employers love economic immigrants as they do just the opposite and drive wage costs down.
I'd accept blindingly obvious.
What, they were going to nuke the poor?
LOL ! What a **** I am ! 😀 You know, I felt there was something "slightly" wrong with the word, but couldn't quite figure out what it was - the spelling looked fine. In fact it was the wrong word altogether ! So I'm going to have to reluctantly agree with you El-bent.... "education" is paramount - well, when it comes to word poverty anyway ......