Agree with this.

You can see the anger in him too when he's being interviewed about such things. His face physically contorts to show the anger and contempt. I hate this man more than I hate Cameron, Miller, McVey and Grayling put together.

I am afraid some charities are as bad as poundland et al.

Have a read of this:

[urlhttp://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/shame-of-the-third-sector-how-charities-got-it-wrong-on-workfare/[/url

It's an old article but shows they were just as wrapped up in the scheme as private companies.

I don't see why anyone should be forced to work full time anywhere for their JSA. Charities like poundland do employ full time staff and I am sure free labour is as attractive to them as it is a private company, even more so being a charity I dare say but if any normally paid positions in charities are being replaced by workfare free labour than that is just as bad as it is at poundland.

I give to several charities on a monthly basis including the BHF who are apparently still involved in the scheme. I can see my donations heading elsewhere.

Here is a more up to date list of organisations and companies and their involvement:

[urlhttp://www.boycottworkfare.org/?page_id=16[/url

That's a depressingly large number of companies.

It would be nice to give people whatever they wanted with no strings attached but we have a bit of a dilemma. The UK isnot only becoming a low wage economy it is also becoming a low productivity economy, with productivity falling more than real wages. A major reason for that is probably employers keeping people on in this recession rather than laying them off. Two other big contributors to that are falls in North Sea oil production and reduced productivity in the financial services sector. The latter two look unlikely to recover their past glories. Output per worker in the UK is a massive 39% behind the USA's and 21% behind the G7 (excluding UK) average.

Bottom line is everyone needs to work harder for less real reward (as I have said since the financial crisis broke) and we need more investment in capital goods in the manufacturing sector. Until the economy picks up, is rebalanced and productivity increases we'll all get poorer. So, it's not just about bad employers and bad politicians it is the reality of the situtation we are in. We need to get used to it as things ain't going to change for a few years yet.

If you recall the reasons for the financial crisis it was not to do with Poundlandand Tesco or even "casino" banking it was largely to do with extending too much credit to give themasses the illusion of being better off than they really were.

My thoughts exactly when I read it.

What this says to me is the workfare is simply a means to subvert the minimum wage.

None of that has got anything to do with workfare schemes where employers are getting free labour paid for by the tax payer and people are being compelled to go on these schemes under threat of having benefits withdrawn.

To be fair the previous analysis is fair enough but if thats the case why not just accept unemployment will be where it is and forget trying to force people into non existant jobs to make the stats look good. Subserdising big companies might help them but not anyone else and I wonder how many Workfare sign up companies pay accountants massive sums to avoid or reduce their tax payment.

Unemployment has been much higher in recent recessions and once the economy picked up so did the employment situation and unemployment fell as a consequence.

Fiddling the figures fools very few and "under employment" is just making the situation worse for thousands of people. Tax/NI breaks for those employing new staff on full time hours (or moving part timers into full time work) might be another option to increase the overall revenue from those in work.

On a slight tangent, there's a good piece of sensible writing on the subject of large families claiming benefits in The Guardian [urlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/19/mother-11-mansion-media-families-benefits[/url which raises the issues again of "divide and conquer" politics where sections of society are targetted by Ministers and fed to certain parts of the news media for a well orchestrated public humiliation, follow the link to The Sun in that article if you want to see how to present a totally one sided news story in a national newspaper in order to support your prefered flavour of government.

I agree that the woman shouldn't be publicly named and shamed, but the taxpayer shouldn't be expected to fork out what is a significant sum of money each year because she can't keep her legs closed.

Any suggestions as to an alternative?

Its not so much the demonising of individual families by government departments and ministers, its the mis-information that is printed in news media that openly and publically supports that flavour of government.

The local authority are presented with a situation that they have a responsibility to cater for, they own some land that a developer is interested in developing for a private housing scheme so they sell that land to the developer (all local authorities have been tasked with identifying tranches of land for development) and in the planning permission they have an allowance for a percentage of social housing (this is normal and well established in all new developments now) which, because the local authority aren't allowed to develop their own social housing they hand over to a social housing association to handle, one of those requirements is for one house to be larger than the standard two or three beds, again, this is normal.

Thats the story, or non-story.

What The Sun do is take that non-event and turn it into a witch hunt, they first of all question the price of the land that was sold to the developer without informing its readers whether it was the going rate, discounted down, or extortionately high - they give the impression though that the council almost gave it away by stating "only £240,000" but don't expand on that.

They then make a big point about the houses being "eco-friendly" presumably to make a spurious point that these houses will be more expensive to build, but failing to point out that ALL new housing developments are built this way now to the extent where a development close to me include garden bicycle sheds to encourage the cycle to work scheme and washing line posts c/w a washing line to encourage residents not to use tumble dryers - these are eco-friendly in the same way that those houses have dual circuit central heating and highly insulated walls and roofs.

Calling a six bedroom £400,000 rental property a "palace" and a "mansion" is just pure sensationalism and another of their reports today states that the family involved have a horse and want two more at a cost to the taxpayer (haven't found that story yet, just heard it on the radio) - pure bollox as I have never heard of a horse benefit payment, nor does a horse need to be a thoroughbred hunter to qualify as a horse, you can pick them up for a few quid, for leisure or food purposes apparently.


We all know what The Sun is all about and what they have done to the story is nothing less than we'd expect, the problem is that too many people actually believe even half of it.