The idea of stopping whole families sponging off benefits is old, implementation long overdue. I watched Freud, some new minister-donkey on a couple of programmes yesterday, and heard him puking very old lines, including some Nulabour drivel about job advisors working with clients on a personal basis. Most of the places I visit have their Swamp or Everglades, but very few have reasonable jobs available for anyone, let alone the kind of human gunk Gadget describes to a ‘T’. I’m not in Wiltshire much, but it would be interesting to know whether there are real jobs available there. If so, it would indicate very real problems in interesting our Swamp and Everglades tribes in working.
What we have quite a lot of up North is sweat shops, paying half the minimum wage to people on benefits and illegals. I haven’t come across anyone complaining they can’t recruit, other than spivs running timeshare-like scams. It may be different near Swindon. Its much easier for me to find work down South. I just find myself wondering just what kind of employment our Evergladers could handle. I see no signs of any such jobs on offer. It’s easy to think that work discipline might get them out of bed more often, help stop them thieving, make them shower more often and show at least some respect for others and gain something to lose. The ones I meet, for book research, are far too hopeless to work in any situation where employers have a choice. You rather run a man light than be handicapped with any of this lot.
This ConDem stuff looks like hot air to me. I’ve heard it before. Very sadly, I think its more likely to breed a new species of homeless, potential violent crooks – vagrants in the old sense. It’s also going to take benefit income off many who will steal to replace it. I see none of it getting to the real disabled.
I hope I’m wrong, but I feel Toxteth in my waters. This Government is as out of it as Nulabour and is only playing with spreadsheets rather than working practical plans out. The real pain will start soon and we will see more of the organised bricks of anarchy. The Met has already set up a demonstration of how dated ‘softly-softly low profile’ is and killed-off one ACC’s career (was this planned too?). They were mostly students, not a patch on the local fusiliers who will riot in the not too distant future. ConDem’s Freud seemed to admit to 5 million not working who could. Another million are about to join them. Telling them being jobless is their own fault and beating down their benefits and dignity in JobCentre Plus may raise a hornets’ nest to fever pitch.
Decimation meant killing every tenth soldier to encourage the others. We are going to need cops. Are they being primed in this manner? We need the jobs before we can force people into them. In Burnley, the situation is so bad they have rogue gang-masters and below minimum wage jobs, more than suggesting there are no real jobs on offer. We need new solutions, not this clapped out drivel, even though it contains the easy to agree with aspects of trying to stop the benefit frauds.
Allcoppedout's Blog 
Back in the early 1980s one of my ‘tea spots’ was a job centre, the manager there always said “there is work for anyone who wants to work” , the rhetoric suggests that to still be true today, I have started to doubt it.
We have turned into a nation that does little else than shuffle other people’s money about expensively or, work in some subserviant toil for a pittance. Decades of mismanagement bollocks probably precludes the creation of any meaningful options for graft any time soon. It is unlikely a politician (of any party colour) can provide the answers. More radical thoughts and processes required I think and we both know how inept the political and commercial leaders of this society are at ‘radical’!
As I write the NHS ‘turkeys that don’t vote for Christmas’ announce “probable loss of 27,000 jobs, we can’t rule out these being frontline” on the radio. A sea change is required but I’m unsure of from which way the wind will blow?
I lost faith in the ‘there are jobs if you really want one’ before the 80’s. It was on a rugby tour in Cumbria. Bitter was 8 pence a pint in the Millom British Legion. We were put up in the homes over people in the teams we played and shown massive hospitality. There were blokes in street corners the way we get kids now. Poverty was clearly ramped up a few fold from what I was used to in ‘wealthy Warrington’. In 83 I went south from a Northwest with no jobs I could see and found a Jobcentre with loads in in Tunbridge Wells. A mate of mine prints out local Jobcentre jobs for me every couple of weeks and I rarely spot any real ones. What I have spotted is some weird ones that are not jobs at all but seem planed in there by Jobcentre staff. Others are farcical, like 16 hours on minimum wage in London with no accommodation. Talking to a woman who placed an advert for a driver (grocery store plus), she told me the job had gone before the ad got into Jobsworth Centre and she’d had to take the phone off the hook when it did.
I can make a statistical case from the work I’ve been doing, but what glares at me is finding the sweatshops. If there was proper work no one would be doing this.