My dear man, please work out how many people will end up both jobless and homeless under these provisions. Each public-sector sacking will probably result in a private-sector job loss, since public sector employees - this may surprise you - spend the same money other people do, and when they can't spend it, shops and businesses suffer in exactly the same way as they do when private employees are sacked. But what scares me the most is the blow to rented accommodation. When you are proposing to let an awful lot of people suffer a heavy drop in their income, you cannot at the same time cut housing benefit and shoot the price of council house rentals upwards without discovering that a very large number of people will find the underside of bridges and the inside of packing crates the only economically viable place to stay. This will also punish all the buy-to-let landlords, whose market will drastically shrink, without doing anything to diminish the abnormal and damaging percentage of mortgage holders, which is the most distorting single factor in Britain's economy.
Benefits, especially housing benefits, were not designed as a device to rob the poor unfortunate rich on behalf of the undeserving idle shiftless poor. To the contrary, they were set up on the clear understanding that it was better for the whole country that the lowest levels of society be housed decently and with a minimum of consideration for health. When there wer such things as slums, everyone was eventually forced to understand that the ill health, the crime and the disorder they fostered were not kept within a cordon sanitaire, but affected the whole of society. To make sure that some damned unemployed tinker did not live five at a room with other equally miserable creatures or spend his nights in a ditch also diminished the chances that the Duke who lived three miles down the road might die of a disgusting contagious illness or be knifed one night at random by some sturdy beggar who would never be identified or convicted (because his likes were too many in one place). Well, council estates may be unpleasant places, but they are certainly, even now, incomparably better (and safer) than the things they replaced. And to deliberately indulge in a kind of politics that will result in placing people on the street - literally - is a crime not only against them, but against society at large. Add to this that the Ministry of Justice had its funds slashed while the budget insured that its services will be more needed than ever, and you will begin to have an idea of what I see coming down the road. AND ALL OF THIS BECAUSE A BUNCH OF FUCKING BANKERS WERE NOT ALLOWED TO GO BUST AS THEY DESERVED.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Re: Right, itâ™s a fair cop. ACPO and All That.
Date: 2010-10-20 03:25 pm (UTC)Benefits, especially housing benefits, were not designed as a device to rob the poor unfortunate rich on behalf of the undeserving idle shiftless poor. To the contrary, they were set up on the clear understanding that it was better for the whole country that the lowest levels of society be housed decently and with a minimum of consideration for health. When there wer such things as slums, everyone was eventually forced to understand that the ill health, the crime and the disorder they fostered were not kept within a cordon sanitaire, but affected the whole of society. To make sure that some damned unemployed tinker did not live five at a room with other equally miserable creatures or spend his nights in a ditch also diminished the chances that the Duke who lived three miles down the road might die of a disgusting contagious illness or be knifed one night at random by some sturdy beggar who would never be identified or convicted (because his likes were too many in one place). Well, council estates may be unpleasant places, but they are certainly, even now, incomparably better (and safer) than the things they replaced. And to deliberately indulge in a kind of politics that will result in placing people on the street - literally - is a crime not only against them, but against society at large. Add to this that the Ministry of Justice had its funds slashed while the budget insured that its services will be more needed than ever, and you will begin to have an idea of what I see coming down the road. AND ALL OF THIS BECAUSE A BUNCH OF FUCKING BANKERS WERE NOT ALLOWED TO GO BUST AS THEY DESERVED.