The Liverpool Times

It’s the rich who have their snouts into the trough of state hand-outs!

New labour, in their mission to dismantle the British system of welfare benefits, has threatened to force unemployed people to work for their benefits. Perhaps some of the idiots up there have already missed the boat – but the fact remains that unemployed people are already forced to work for their dole.

The ‘leaked’ plans (they want us know what’s coming to see if we object) propose that incapacity benefit will be scrapped within five years and the unemployed will have to ‘work full-time after two years out of work in exchange for the dole’. American style work-projects are already being set up.

The rewards for those involved in running the companies and agencies which will oversee the destruction of the welfare state are colossal, but the actual rate of return for the tax-payer, will be of little significance. Like most of the privatisation schemes – the actual loss is staggering when we see the massive rewards handed out to the various chairmen and chief executives and other chiefs at the top. Bonuses of a million pounds are not unusual – and the disparity of wealth is surely going to lead to the poor, the working class, being reduced to peasant status.

David Freud, an investment banker, and grandson of the famous ‘head doctor’ Sigmond Freud, (took cocaine and invented a con called psychiatry) is the man who has advising the Department for Works and Pensions (DWP) and new labour that “up to two million people are unnecessarily claiming incapacity benefit.”

Below, the altered sign above Dachau reads Freedom through Work. This could be the motto for the U$A and UK plc ‘workfare’ style schemes.

It’s not the unemployed who eat up the great chunks of expenses that are stripping the national coffers at a staggering rate with no return for investments. Public cash, as ever, is given out with more generosity to the undeserving rich than it is to the deserving poor. To this end, private companies have been told they will be rewarded for forcing disabled people to work. Compare this to old folks homes being closed, due to the value of land being worth more than our own elderly.

In other words, we scrap the Job Centre’s role in securing jobs for local people, and out-source it. We pay two people, whereas one used to be paid. That’s pretty much how the new labour system works.

A good wage makes you ‘equal’. The dole turns you into a kind of underclass. Both new labour and the Tories found it cheaper to leave people on the dole, as they destroyed industry. Now industry is gone, the next step in the plan is to destroy the welfare benefit system by claiming that almost everyone on incapacity benefit is lying.

Maybe Mr Freud (or is that Fraud?) has some investments lined up for that scenario? Siphon off the money that used to go to the poor, and make it go to the rich.

In Kirkby, a number of firms are already dipping snouts into the trough of state hand-outs to the rich – the hand-outs which nobody ever refers to as ‘scrounging’. Some agencies in Kirkby, to which the unemployed are sent to by the Department of Works and Pensions, are already sending the unemployed to work for sums of £15 per week. The unemployed will spend 2 days a week in some laughable course being told how to job – and three days working.

The same is happening all over Liverpool and the UK.

An agency in Kirkby town centre, A4E, is paid a slice of cash for every ‘dolite’ they can grab hold of.

Like the dockers who once stood in the pen in the hope of a days work, today’s unemployed are also put into a pen, or onto an agencies books or database. Unlike the old days, those chosen from the ‘pen’ to actually work might not even get the pittance of a minimum wage for it. They will also have none of the rights workers employed direct will get. No pensions, no sick pay schemes, no holidays either. No perks of the job for the average agency worker – you’re usually an outsider, and a closed shop means that any good jobs are long lined up for the workers employed direct.

The agency worker ends up doing the donkey work, and can easily be exploited by unscrupulous employers because a fresh fish on the job tends to swim more than most.

Both unemployed adults and local youth are forced or cajoled into working for their benefits via a number of methods through a number of agencies flush with handouts.

Adults in Kirkby and other parts of Liverpool are already doing ‘work experience’ for their dole payments.

Work experience might just count for something if unemployed people are buddied up with someone doing a decent paid job of work that people can perhaps learn on the job. Nobody will mind working for a few months or longer to learn a decent trade which is going to put a nice bit of honest poke (cash) in your pocket. An apprentice always gets a lower wage than the tradesman or woman. That’s not an issue. However, when we have some local shops using unemployed people to stack shelves for ‘work experience’ – you have to ask if the companies using local unemployed are just taking the pi** rather than passing down essential skills.

The unemployed working in local shops and other businesses get the princely sum of an extra £15 per week on top of benefit payments. But given that you always spend a bit more when you are in work – the ‘extra’ fifteen pound sterling a week, soon gets eaten up in expenses.

Local youth, already competing with everyone in Europe (and the world) for British jobs, are well and truly facing a harder task than any of us ever did. Whereas in the 80s, you could flee to many others areas of the U.K. to escape the poverty doing a variety of jobs on farms, packing factories and shift work and seasonal work of all varieties– the jobs once there are now taken up and wages cut in some instances. The bosses have never had it so good – and landlords also are raking it in as two million or more extra workers pile in to grab a job and accommodation.

Give the youth a chance

The youth, or some of them, find themselves trapped in a local area doing what many of us did under Thatcher; namely the old ‘work experience’. This means local youth are taken on as a ‘trainee’ or probationary worker, with the wage paid by some government grant for the duration of their work ‘trial’. Depending on the actual job they are sent to – it’s possible they will work productively from day one – adding to the profits of the factory or small business.

As with the days of Thatcher, many companies and individual bosses might see this as a neat way of getting a free worker every so many months. As one youth’s grant runs out – they might be told “we have no work at the moment to employ you”. But as he or she walks out, in walks another youth, on a work trial, wages paid via some grant.

New labour has well and truly shafted the very people who built the foundation stones of the labour party. For this and their wicked murderous war mongering ways, it looks like new labour is going to be battered worse than the Tories were back in the 97 General Election. We could be looking at the end of the labour party as we know it – and a slide to the far right if my perception of the mood of the nation is right.

But there’s another article.

To deny a working man or woman a living wage or the chance to be gainfully employed to do so, is a sin in itself.