Hey folks,
These blogs represent un-planned writings where I draw from sources and put words onto a page. I re-structure the writing after completing the blog but in comparison to the work I created whilst writing in academia they are not well structured. I hope you find them informative on some level, or at least I help people realise the importance of the welfare state.
As we all know, I am an insanely boring man that likes to obsess over politics, the future and the present lack of everything. I am currently resting in a chair that has long since lost it's cushion, my leg goes dead every few minutes if I do not move.
Our welfare state was meant to provide a bedrock and from it would grow educators, nurses, professionals, people that after being given some support, they would grow into productive members of our society.
Instead we have a Government that will sell those people via the Workfare scheme. Instead of providing people with support, we have given them shackles. Claimants are being told to do X for a company otherwise they will lose their "benefits". I must be adamantly clear that when someone says the word "benefit" they are playing a game with your brain. We all love the word "benefit" as it means something good, an added bonus. Therefore when we are told that unemployed people are given "benefit", that phrase invokes a sense of rage from people that work for a living and to be frank, earn bugger all for their work as their company are DELIBERATELY underpaying staff.
The Department of Work and Pensions does not hand out benefits. They try their damnedest to restrict how much money is spent on welfare by sending people on never-ending assessments. The housing "benefit" form is 29 pages ¬____¬ Some claimants are given less money than there are pages in the form. You may only be granted £20 towards your rent and this is after having some bureaucrat comb through every detail of your personal finances.
Without the support of the welfare state I would have never have gone to university, school, to the doctors or elsewhere. My family would have been unable to flee from where we once were and these words may have never been written. I view it as a "benefit" of living in a society that is compassionate, not a benefit of having the audacity to be poor, sick, disabled, unemployed or even a woman (because women are still fighting for equality and the welfare state picks up the tab when employers fail to pay women a decent wage too). A lot of men are not being paid a living wage either and the Welfare state supports them too if they are not overwhelmed by the anger of having a full-time job and still not earning enough to pay for rent.
Essentially our welfare state provides a floor for people to stand on when they have fallen through the cracks and into the horrifying dark void that is poverty, illness and ignorance. It was intended to enable people to move on. The Workfare scheme however demands that people work to receive their welfare payments instead of providing them with an actual job. There are people like Lord Freud that said disabled people are not really worth the minimum, he mentioned that they deserve around £2 an hour! How is one meant to stand tall when shackled into a system that tells you to work for peanuts or freeze in the cold?
You might work your entire life and think that you are safe but I ask you, how many have heard about elderly people lacking enough money to get fuel this winter? How many of you are human and will have the damn audacity to live long enough to claim your pension? (This is called a "straw man argument where writers or commentators or even leaders ask an outrageous question designed to get you angry, watch out for it!) The answer is "I don't intend to die in the next five days Bailey, I intend to live old enough to get that free bus pass damn it! What can I do?
There are people out there trying to dismantle the Welfare state and a good chunk of them are Members of Parliament that have been elected. If you think voting changes nothing why not given it a go anyway? Because it'll change nothing right? So what have you got to lose?
Revolutions will not happen over night and votes on their own will not change things. The rise of UKIP has gotten the Tories worked up about immigration like never before. I feel that we young folks have the power to swing it the other way. We cannot enable the older adults that sold off OUR bloody council houses to get their own way again. ('cause how many 20 year olds have a mortgage? What's that? HOUSES TOO EXPENSIVE? There were these things called council houses but the last generation sold them. They voted for a woman that said she would sell them on the cheap. Honest. Voting helped them acquire a cheap house and screw with the markets. Ask your parents :D )
Russell Brand hasn't got a bloody clue. He has access to a remarkably spectacular and most verbose vocabulary that sometimes stupefies myself into silence. However Brand has failed to address the intrinsically pervasively invasive nature that is our societies acceptance of apathy. Apathy that has become so imperative for the continuation of consumerist society because when we are sad we buy something, when we are happy we buy something and when we are outraged we do something. Usually people buy something.
Naturally Brand would avoid tackling such an issue like apathy head on as the man needs to sell books, tickets and head out on tours so our media empowers him to speak and share words for as Brand himself admits, he does not lead the revolution. Brand's outrage generates a lot of hype but that is because he grants the young instantaneous sanctification via anger, he reaffirms the stigma held by older generations which is "young people are most amusing" by advising them about how doing nothing is more ideal than doing something. As we live in a society that prefers people to be apathetic than angry or involved with politics, you find yourself (someone anxious about talking to others about politics) listening to an appealing message as Brand says we need a revolution but y'know don't bother voting.
Votes enable politicians to carry out the misguided will of the people. A will that is cultivated via a bias media hell bent on selling us half the story.
The great problem with Brand's idea is that people are still voting and the people that vote tend to be choose those that seek to destroy the welfare state. (Update: In 2015 the British public elected the Conservative party. I dislike being right.) People are voting UKIP. (In 2015 UKIP received 3.9 million vote). UKIP appear to love British values but if you talk to a few behind closed doors one can easily uncover that they want to flog the NHS, punish single mothers and one Councillor blamed gay people for having the power to change the weather.
The Welfare State was created for politicians represent the will of a nation and when the people chose to elect those that suggested the creation of a welfare state, the people of Britain found themselves with a welfare state. When the people of Britain wanted to see unions weakened for the sake of economic stability and for the ability to buy a council house on the cheap, they chose to elect a Government that promised to do just that. The media told us to hate people on benefits and following the lies of how we live in "bankrupt Britain" the people chose...nothing. We had a hung Parliament but the Coalition stepped up and did attacked poor people anyway because bankers are usually able to afford decent lawyers. Our Government is not as brave as the Icelandic one.
I understand why people do not want to vote. No one willingly voted Liberal hoping to see the Tories get in. No one voted Labour and expected Saddam to be swinging from a noose whilst Iraq burned to the ground. No one voted Thatcher and expected unemployment to reach a point that it decimated communities.
All of that is our fault for failing to remain eternally vigilant whilst living in an age tyranny.*
The welfare state is being dismantled. We can stop this. We can be the generation to say "No". What is Britishness? Well at one point it was about creating a nation where people could not worry about ignorance, hunger, poverty and sickness. I want to see us bring those ideals back into the forefront.
I have now found myself employed and again I feel urged to persuade people that the Welfare state is something worth protecting. That means protecting the NHS, free education, social security (pensions, disability payments, "benefits".) and hopefully council housing if we haven't sold the last lot off to a subsidiary of a larger housing association.
I like this web page. It is a decent webpage and yes it is a GCSE webpage but it explains things in bitesize chunks.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/mwh/britain/welfarestaterev1.shtml
Please think twice and support the welfare state.
Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.
This was Bailey's blog.
If you want to see more...scroll down.
*The problem with voting is that whomever wins the election is given the legitimacy to rule however legitimacy to rule is bad for the country when those ruling it have no moral integrity. To rule without any moral integrity is to rule as a tyrant. Tyrants are able to pass legislation that is legally binding but morally bankrupt and in the end a country will suffer for it.
Whilst we lack an alternative voting structure I feel we cannot simply give into apathy. I will probably throw my vote at the Greens because austerity can go to hell.
These blogs represent un-planned writings where I draw from sources and put words onto a page. I re-structure the writing after completing the blog but in comparison to the work I created whilst writing in academia they are not well structured. I hope you find them informative on some level, or at least I help people realise the importance of the welfare state.
As we all know, I am an insanely boring man that likes to obsess over politics, the future and the present lack of everything. I am currently resting in a chair that has long since lost it's cushion, my leg goes dead every few minutes if I do not move.
Our welfare state was meant to provide a bedrock and from it would grow educators, nurses, professionals, people that after being given some support, they would grow into productive members of our society.
Instead we have a Government that will sell those people via the Workfare scheme. Instead of providing people with support, we have given them shackles. Claimants are being told to do X for a company otherwise they will lose their "benefits". I must be adamantly clear that when someone says the word "benefit" they are playing a game with your brain. We all love the word "benefit" as it means something good, an added bonus. Therefore when we are told that unemployed people are given "benefit", that phrase invokes a sense of rage from people that work for a living and to be frank, earn bugger all for their work as their company are DELIBERATELY underpaying staff.
The Department of Work and Pensions does not hand out benefits. They try their damnedest to restrict how much money is spent on welfare by sending people on never-ending assessments. The housing "benefit" form is 29 pages ¬____¬ Some claimants are given less money than there are pages in the form. You may only be granted £20 towards your rent and this is after having some bureaucrat comb through every detail of your personal finances.
Without the support of the welfare state I would have never have gone to university, school, to the doctors or elsewhere. My family would have been unable to flee from where we once were and these words may have never been written. I view it as a "benefit" of living in a society that is compassionate, not a benefit of having the audacity to be poor, sick, disabled, unemployed or even a woman (because women are still fighting for equality and the welfare state picks up the tab when employers fail to pay women a decent wage too). A lot of men are not being paid a living wage either and the Welfare state supports them too if they are not overwhelmed by the anger of having a full-time job and still not earning enough to pay for rent.
Essentially our welfare state provides a floor for people to stand on when they have fallen through the cracks and into the horrifying dark void that is poverty, illness and ignorance. It was intended to enable people to move on. The Workfare scheme however demands that people work to receive their welfare payments instead of providing them with an actual job. There are people like Lord Freud that said disabled people are not really worth the minimum, he mentioned that they deserve around £2 an hour! How is one meant to stand tall when shackled into a system that tells you to work for peanuts or freeze in the cold?
You might work your entire life and think that you are safe but I ask you, how many have heard about elderly people lacking enough money to get fuel this winter? How many of you are human and will have the damn audacity to live long enough to claim your pension? (This is called a "straw man argument where writers or commentators or even leaders ask an outrageous question designed to get you angry, watch out for it!) The answer is "I don't intend to die in the next five days Bailey, I intend to live old enough to get that free bus pass damn it! What can I do?
There are people out there trying to dismantle the Welfare state and a good chunk of them are Members of Parliament that have been elected. If you think voting changes nothing why not given it a go anyway? Because it'll change nothing right? So what have you got to lose?
Revolutions will not happen over night and votes on their own will not change things. The rise of UKIP has gotten the Tories worked up about immigration like never before. I feel that we young folks have the power to swing it the other way. We cannot enable the older adults that sold off OUR bloody council houses to get their own way again. ('cause how many 20 year olds have a mortgage? What's that? HOUSES TOO EXPENSIVE? There were these things called council houses but the last generation sold them. They voted for a woman that said she would sell them on the cheap. Honest. Voting helped them acquire a cheap house and screw with the markets. Ask your parents :D )
Russell Brand hasn't got a bloody clue. He has access to a remarkably spectacular and most verbose vocabulary that sometimes stupefies myself into silence. However Brand has failed to address the intrinsically pervasively invasive nature that is our societies acceptance of apathy. Apathy that has become so imperative for the continuation of consumerist society because when we are sad we buy something, when we are happy we buy something and when we are outraged we do something. Usually people buy something.
Naturally Brand would avoid tackling such an issue like apathy head on as the man needs to sell books, tickets and head out on tours so our media empowers him to speak and share words for as Brand himself admits, he does not lead the revolution. Brand's outrage generates a lot of hype but that is because he grants the young instantaneous sanctification via anger, he reaffirms the stigma held by older generations which is "young people are most amusing" by advising them about how doing nothing is more ideal than doing something. As we live in a society that prefers people to be apathetic than angry or involved with politics, you find yourself (someone anxious about talking to others about politics) listening to an appealing message as Brand says we need a revolution but y'know don't bother voting.
Votes enable politicians to carry out the misguided will of the people. A will that is cultivated via a bias media hell bent on selling us half the story.
The great problem with Brand's idea is that people are still voting and the people that vote tend to be choose those that seek to destroy the welfare state. (Update: In 2015 the British public elected the Conservative party. I dislike being right.) People are voting UKIP. (In 2015 UKIP received 3.9 million vote). UKIP appear to love British values but if you talk to a few behind closed doors one can easily uncover that they want to flog the NHS, punish single mothers and one Councillor blamed gay people for having the power to change the weather.
The Welfare State was created for politicians represent the will of a nation and when the people chose to elect those that suggested the creation of a welfare state, the people of Britain found themselves with a welfare state. When the people of Britain wanted to see unions weakened for the sake of economic stability and for the ability to buy a council house on the cheap, they chose to elect a Government that promised to do just that. The media told us to hate people on benefits and following the lies of how we live in "bankrupt Britain" the people chose...nothing. We had a hung Parliament but the Coalition stepped up and did attacked poor people anyway because bankers are usually able to afford decent lawyers. Our Government is not as brave as the Icelandic one.
I understand why people do not want to vote. No one willingly voted Liberal hoping to see the Tories get in. No one voted Labour and expected Saddam to be swinging from a noose whilst Iraq burned to the ground. No one voted Thatcher and expected unemployment to reach a point that it decimated communities.
All of that is our fault for failing to remain eternally vigilant whilst living in an age tyranny.*
The welfare state is being dismantled. We can stop this. We can be the generation to say "No". What is Britishness? Well at one point it was about creating a nation where people could not worry about ignorance, hunger, poverty and sickness. I want to see us bring those ideals back into the forefront.
I have now found myself employed and again I feel urged to persuade people that the Welfare state is something worth protecting. That means protecting the NHS, free education, social security (pensions, disability payments, "benefits".) and hopefully council housing if we haven't sold the last lot off to a subsidiary of a larger housing association.
I like this web page. It is a decent webpage and yes it is a GCSE webpage but it explains things in bitesize chunks.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/mwh/britain/welfarestaterev1.shtml
Please think twice and support the welfare state.
Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.
This was Bailey's blog.
If you want to see more...scroll down.
*The problem with voting is that whomever wins the election is given the legitimacy to rule however legitimacy to rule is bad for the country when those ruling it have no moral integrity. To rule without any moral integrity is to rule as a tyrant. Tyrants are able to pass legislation that is legally binding but morally bankrupt and in the end a country will suffer for it.
Whilst we lack an alternative voting structure I feel we cannot simply give into apathy. I will probably throw my vote at the Greens because austerity can go to hell.
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