To pick up from a previous post.
It seems that society is being restructured. It is not however the kind of restructuring that will bring justice for the poor.
I have to confess that I haven't watched Benefits Street on Channel 4. So that makes me something of an expert1 Though I have followed the debate and found it to be instructive.
The restructuring we are experiencing is being defined in a number of key ways. The smaller state. Benefits for the wealthy that will 'aid the recovery'. The reduction in the welfare bill.
There are crumbs thrown occasionally. Raising the minimum wage. Increasing the tax threshold.
But the inequalities illustrated by programmes such as Benefit Street are growing and an unequal society will never be a fair society, a society at ease with itself, nor will it ensure justice for the poorest.
I have lived in various locations around the country, some more salubrious than others and generally speaking I have managed to get by without falling out with the neighbours.
As I understand it the programme describes the lives of a group of neighbours in an inner city area of Birmingham.
I lived in Birmingham for six years.
I had a psuedo academic job in one of the Selly Oak Colleges and to make sure that I had a weekly reality check I also became an Assistant to the Chaplain at Winson Green Prison and covered for the Chaplain on his day off which was a Thursday.
In time I worked for a while with the East Birmingham Task Force and ultimately with the Birmingham Drugs Prevention Initiative, part of the Home Office.
Birmingham is a fantastic city and I enjoyed living in an outer City suburb, on the edge of the area known as Bourneville, the model village built around the Cadbury Factory, chosen because the house was affordable and I could walk to work, thereby saving on travel costs.
Benefits are an increasingly difficult concept and one of the common threads running through the discussion generated by the programme is: What is a benefit?
Is a pension a benefit?
If it is then I now live on benefits. It is certainly true that there is a connection made between what was paid in and what is received by pensioners, but in reality what I have paid in paid for the pensions of those who were pensioners when I was working, it is in fact those who are now working who pay my pension, collected via the taxes they pay, and indeed, the taxes I still pay because I am fortunate enough to have an occupational pension in addition to my State Pension.
In fact pensions take up nearly 50% of Britain's Welfare Spending compared with Job seekers Allowance at 10%.
Yet pensioners are protected and have been promised that they will continue to be protected with the triple lock guarantee recently renewed by the Prime Minister.
Whilst job seekers it is implied are 'shirkers' in contrast with 'hard working people'.
This knotty thread is tangled further by the commonly held view that benefit fraud is undertaken on a massive scale whilst in reality it is a minor issue, in the millions, compared with tax avoidance in the billions.
When the plans were laid for the re-development of Birmingham City Centre, around the canal basin, which coincided with the introduction of Right to Buy, there were rumours that tenants in the tower blocks around the re-development area received letters offering to fund the purchase of their flats with a guarantee that they could remain in them as long as they wished.
It may well have been an Urban Myth, it might possibly have been true, but what is clear that in London and other large Metropolitan Centres, that a high percentage of previously local authority flats are now owned and let by private tenants.
My experience, as a parish priest in both inner and outer city suggests that if we want to live peaceable lives where each individual and family enjoys a quality of life, at ease with themselves and their neighbours then the security we require is the security of home and income that allows us to develop a quality of life, whether on Benefits Street or anywhere where we choose or can afford to live.
To achieve this we need two things.
A plentiful supply of good quality homes with a variety of tenures and social as well as private landowners contributing to a mixed economy. Housing Benefit secures the housing needs of people across a wide spectrum of ages and classes and itself costs less than half the cost of pensions.
The second essential is a guaranteed social wage pegged as is the pension at the level of RPI, Inflation or 2.5%.
These two essential benefits could be achieved if the Treasury focused its attention not on Benefit Fraud which costs marginally over a billion a year, and which a guaranteed social wage would probably eradicate, but instead sought to address the leakage of almost fourteen times that amount through what we usually call tax avoidance, so much more polite and so much less threatening than fraud.
It seems that society is being restructured. It is not however the kind of restructuring that will bring justice for the poor.
I have to confess that I haven't watched Benefits Street on Channel 4. So that makes me something of an expert1 Though I have followed the debate and found it to be instructive.
The restructuring we are experiencing is being defined in a number of key ways. The smaller state. Benefits for the wealthy that will 'aid the recovery'. The reduction in the welfare bill.
There are crumbs thrown occasionally. Raising the minimum wage. Increasing the tax threshold.
But the inequalities illustrated by programmes such as Benefit Street are growing and an unequal society will never be a fair society, a society at ease with itself, nor will it ensure justice for the poorest.
I have lived in various locations around the country, some more salubrious than others and generally speaking I have managed to get by without falling out with the neighbours.
As I understand it the programme describes the lives of a group of neighbours in an inner city area of Birmingham.
I lived in Birmingham for six years.
I had a psuedo academic job in one of the Selly Oak Colleges and to make sure that I had a weekly reality check I also became an Assistant to the Chaplain at Winson Green Prison and covered for the Chaplain on his day off which was a Thursday.
In time I worked for a while with the East Birmingham Task Force and ultimately with the Birmingham Drugs Prevention Initiative, part of the Home Office.
Birmingham is a fantastic city and I enjoyed living in an outer City suburb, on the edge of the area known as Bourneville, the model village built around the Cadbury Factory, chosen because the house was affordable and I could walk to work, thereby saving on travel costs.
Benefits are an increasingly difficult concept and one of the common threads running through the discussion generated by the programme is: What is a benefit?
Is a pension a benefit?
If it is then I now live on benefits. It is certainly true that there is a connection made between what was paid in and what is received by pensioners, but in reality what I have paid in paid for the pensions of those who were pensioners when I was working, it is in fact those who are now working who pay my pension, collected via the taxes they pay, and indeed, the taxes I still pay because I am fortunate enough to have an occupational pension in addition to my State Pension.
In fact pensions take up nearly 50% of Britain's Welfare Spending compared with Job seekers Allowance at 10%.
Yet pensioners are protected and have been promised that they will continue to be protected with the triple lock guarantee recently renewed by the Prime Minister.
Whilst job seekers it is implied are 'shirkers' in contrast with 'hard working people'.
This knotty thread is tangled further by the commonly held view that benefit fraud is undertaken on a massive scale whilst in reality it is a minor issue, in the millions, compared with tax avoidance in the billions.
When the plans were laid for the re-development of Birmingham City Centre, around the canal basin, which coincided with the introduction of Right to Buy, there were rumours that tenants in the tower blocks around the re-development area received letters offering to fund the purchase of their flats with a guarantee that they could remain in them as long as they wished.
It may well have been an Urban Myth, it might possibly have been true, but what is clear that in London and other large Metropolitan Centres, that a high percentage of previously local authority flats are now owned and let by private tenants.
My experience, as a parish priest in both inner and outer city suggests that if we want to live peaceable lives where each individual and family enjoys a quality of life, at ease with themselves and their neighbours then the security we require is the security of home and income that allows us to develop a quality of life, whether on Benefits Street or anywhere where we choose or can afford to live.
To achieve this we need two things.
A plentiful supply of good quality homes with a variety of tenures and social as well as private landowners contributing to a mixed economy. Housing Benefit secures the housing needs of people across a wide spectrum of ages and classes and itself costs less than half the cost of pensions.
The second essential is a guaranteed social wage pegged as is the pension at the level of RPI, Inflation or 2.5%.
These two essential benefits could be achieved if the Treasury focused its attention not on Benefit Fraud which costs marginally over a billion a year, and which a guaranteed social wage would probably eradicate, but instead sought to address the leakage of almost fourteen times that amount through what we usually call tax avoidance, so much more polite and so much less threatening than fraud.
an unequal society will never be a fair society
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