Why People Can’t Just “Get a Job”

This morning, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves delivered her pre-budget statement ahead of the Autumn Budget, scheduled for 26th November.

Despite mounting welfare costs, Reeves offered no meaningful solutions — only strong hints that taxes will rise, paired with blame deflected onto everything and everyone except the government itself.

It’s no surprise, then, that Nigel Farage rushed out a bold announcement promising welfare cuts if Reform wins the next general election yesterday, while Tory leader Kemi Badenoch quickly followed Reeves with an online broadcast that, in substance, amounted to much the same.

As the government flounders, it seems poised to announce little of substance of savings on benefits or public services — yet millions already trapped in a financial vice not of their own making will see the cost of living rise again, working harder for ever-diminishing returns.

The Tories — who helped engineer the current crisis over their 14-year tenure up to summer 2024 — and Reform — now visibly undergoing their own establishmentisation makeover — aren’t offering help to people either. They’re offering help to the economy.

And that’s precisely where the problems began for those whose lives revolve around the benefits system today.

There are hard truths here. Truths that many untouched by poverty still find just a little too uncomfortable to believe.

There will always be people who are:

• Out of work for valid reasons

• Unable to work due to illness, disability, or caring responsibilities

But there are also many people who want to work and are able to work — yet still can’t. Why? Because:

• They can’t find jobs that match their experience

• They can’t find roles that fit their qualifications

• They simply don’t “fit” the mould employers are looking for

It’s easy to assume that anyone who wants a job can get one — any job, at any time. And it’s just as easy to judge those who don’t take “any job” as lazy, entitled, or abusing the benefits system.

But those who make these judgments often haven’t experienced what it’s like to be unemployed and dependent on state support.

The Reality of Benefits

Let’s be clear: basic benefits are not enough to live on.

We’re surrounded by comforting myths — stories we rarely question unless we’re forced to confront the truth. One of the most dangerous myths is that the National Minimum Wage is enough to live on independently.

Here’s the reality in November 2025:

• Universal Credit: Between £316.98 and £628.10 per month, depending on your circumstances

• Minimum Wage: £12.21/hour. For a 40-hour week, that’s about £2,116.40/month

• Actual cost of living: To live independently, a single person likely needs £16–£17/hour — around £2,773.33/month

That’s a shortfall of over £600/month, even for someone working full-time on minimum wage.

The Impossible Choice

Now imagine you’re unemployed, with no savings or support, and your only option is to claim £628.10/month. What do you do?

• Take a job that still doesn’t cover your basic needs?

• Or claim every benefit you can, just to survive?

For many, working full-time in a low-paid job — often under poor conditions and public judgment — while still needing benefits just doesn’t make sense.

The Myth of the “Benefits Culture”

The idea that claiming benefits is an easy ride is a myth. Genuine claimants are treated the same as those gaming the system. The rules are rigid, often making it harder — not easier — to find meaningful work.

Pushing people into low-paid jobs that still leave them reliant on benefits, food banks, or debt might reduce one type of welfare cost. But it could as easily increase the others — through the problems that an ill-considered attempt to push everyone into ‘work’ will create, like mental health issues, workplace burnout, and long-term poverty.

The AI Displacement Problem

A growing wave of joblessness is being driven not by lack of talent, but by the unnecessary and unchecked takeover of roles by artificial intelligence.

Skilled, experienced professionals — once vital to their industries — are being sidelined by automation that prioritizes cost-cutting over human value.

As more capable workers are pushed into the job queue, many will find themselves forced to claim benefits, not because they lack ability, but because the system no longer has space for them.

The Bigger Problem

Most people on benefits aren’t lazy — they’re surviving.

When life becomes a daily struggle, the benefits system can feel like the only option.

But simply cutting benefits without creating real alternatives — like jobs that pay enough to live on — risks pushing thousands into homelessness and crisis.

The Psychology of Work and Pay

Most people don’t need prestige — they need security.

If lower-paid or less challenging jobs guaranteed that workers could meet all their financial obligations and live with dignity, many would take them without hesitation.

The problem isn’t the work itself — it’s that the pay doesn’t match the cost of living.

When people know they can cover rent, bills, food, and essentials every month, they’re far more willing to contribute, even in roles that society undervalues.

What Needs to Change

We can’t fix the benefits system without fixing the economic system that creates the need for it.

If we want fewer people on benefits, we must:

• Build an economy where full-time work pays enough to live on — without top-ups

• Stop supporting a system that enriches a few by impoverishing the many.

Until the government legislates for a fairer system — one where the lowest-paid can live independently on a full day’s work — poverty will persist.

That’s where real change begins.

The Basic Living Standard Explained

The Basic Living Standard is a foundational guarantee that ensures every individual earning the lowest legal weekly wage can afford all essential costs of living—without falling into debt, relying on welfare, or turning to charity.

It defines the minimum threshold of financial independence, where core needs—such as food, housing, utilities, healthcare, transport, clothing, communication, and modest social participation—are fully covered by earned income alone. It also includes provision for savings, unexpected costs, and fair contributions to society.

This standard is not aspirational—it is structural. It affirms that full-time work at the lowest wage must equate to full dignity, autonomy, and security.

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No food banks. No emergency loans. No skipped prescriptions or unpaid bills. Just a life that’s livable, sustainable, and free from poverty.

We Need a New Constitution for The United Kingdom

And we need a completely new Establishment to run and deliver everything too

Your politics, religion, ideas, background, age, education or anything else that has, can or will be used to divide us, does not matter when it comes to recognising that for every one of us, there are parts of life that simply don’t work in the UK, anymore.

Whether we are being affected and impacted directly, or the problems we recognise are just something happening to other people or different communities that we can somehow see, we all know that things aren’t working as they should. And the horrible truth is that for some of us, nothing is working at all.

We could go down the rabbit hole of trying to identify, apportion blame and then demand that politicians and government change whatever we identify as needing to be changed. Or, that they step aside so that they can be replaced by whoever we believe will do whatever it is that they either cannot or are choosing not to do.

Indeed, many are doing just that, and already expect that all it will take is just a change in government. So that we have ‘the right people’ in charge.

It’s a nice idea and it’s appealing to many of us. Because this pathway also leaves the real work, commitment and doing whatever it will take to enact change, to someone else.

Unfortunately, we’ve been here before. And very recently too.

In fact, many of us genuinely believed that the downward chaos of all the Conservative governments between 2010 and 2014, which was aided and abetted by the Liberal Democrats between 2010 and 2015, would unquestionably be stopped by the election of Keir Starmer and The Labour Party in July 2024. Because Labour was supposedly offering something new and would know what to do, or in any case could never possibly be as bad as what we already had, could they…

It took just a few months to prove the point that the power of our vote can have consequences that are completely out of our control.

Whilst some seem prepared to make the very same mistakes all over again, the reality is that as things stand today, we can no longer trust anything that politicians promise or offer us as part of an election manifesto. Because they are without fail behaving the same as all the politicians we have ever known and will inevitably go on and do whatever they want to do once they hold the power, we trusted them with.

And once they are elected, they will do whatever they want to whilst telling us that it’s in our best interests, knowing there is nothing that we can do about it democratically until the time of the next election comes around, when we will hopefully by then have forgotten whatever they have done which might then be years before.

Whether we voted or not, millions of us made the mistake of electing yet another group of politicians who are out of touch with real life; are motivated by all the wrong things and above all, have no real control over the apparatus of government and the legislative devices that should be at their disposal. Either because they are too frightened; are being very badly advised or misled; are out of their depth and really have no idea what they are doing and what they could do; or a mixture of them all.

This page is not here to make excuses for this government, the Sunak government or indeed any one of many governments before them both that have harboured and given favour to the wrong politicians and what decades of poor, absent and self-serving non-leadership has given us, whilst we are somehow always the ones who are getting everything wrong.

This page is here to make clear that politicians and the political class that we have today, right across the tiers of government in the UK, are just a part of a much bigger problem. And they are the only part of problem that we cannot otherwise see.

If we need a divorce, we go to a lawyer. If we need our car fixed, we go to a mechanic. If we want and extension built, we go to a builder. If we want a load of bread, we go to a baker. If we want a beer we go to a brewer. But for decades, we have gone to the Polling Stations on election day and chosen who we vote for from a list of candidates that only Political Parties have offered up.

Specialist professionals and tradespeople like these that provide goods and services that we genuinely need, learn a very specific craft. And they get better at what they do, because they spend all their working time doing just that.

Yet when it comes to everything to do with government, governance and how every kind of public service and are systems of rules and regulations are managed and designed across the UK, we currently leave strategy, planning and everything important in the hands of a few people who are always there to represent what they Political Party wants first. So-called politicians who cannot possibly know or understand every part of life they are making decisions upon, and certainly don’t have the leadership skills, experience or awareness to listen, consider and then act appropriately on our behalf, only after referencing all the people that they really should be, whilst being sure that they are being impartial and working in the best interests of everyone at all times, too.

Anyone with a platform, the words and a great speaking voice can sound like a leader. But leadership is about the actions that genuine leaders take and in the case of politics, the actions they take when none of us are either looking or able to see what they are doing; where they are doing it and who they are doing it (for or) with.

In other words, to lead any Country properly, it takes integrity, purpose and a commitment to public service before Party or anything else.

The evidence from what we can see today, tells us that no politician or would be leader in the public eye has this purpose, spirit or a level of integrity that we can put our trust in that in power, they will always do the right thing – even when it might require that they step up and do some very difficult and perhaps unpopular things.

We can all see that genuine leadership and integrity don’t exist within UK politics today.

Unfortunately, both have been absent for so long that the whole system has been so corrupted and become self-serving that it must be completely replaced.

The system is so established with the way it works and operates that it continues appearing to function. Whilst the reality is that in whichever direction we turn and begin to look, every part of it is either dysfunctional or going completely wrong.

The illusion of effectiveness is only held in place by the reality that like everyone else, our politicians have fallen into the trap of believing that every problem can be solved with money. And that if politicians have enough public money available to spend, every problem for them can be addressed. No matter the problems their inability to lead and acts of avoidance using that money will and have meant that we and people in every UK community subsequently face as a direct result of their ineptitude and what they have(n’t) done.

This isn’t a problem that can be fixed with politics or politicians who are just about the politics.

Because politics has become all about the politics and who’s in charge of the political process. Rather than being anything to do with results, outcomes or whatever gets done.

Politics is now the biggest distraction of them all when it comes to the change and scale of change that we need. Because the way that elections and the electoral cycle work mean that we really are just going around in circles, whilst everything gets worse, and we keep waiting for the merry go round to come full circle so that the whole problematic rotation can begin all over again.

New Names, Old Games

Talking about and thinking about narratives isn’t just important today. It’s essential if you are to arm yourself with the truth and ultimately stand any chance of not being driven completely mad.

Unfortunately, the reasons that make critical thinking necessary, as we absorb and digest any of the information that constantly flows towards us, usually through the digital devices that we carry, are not just as simple as working out the credibility of sources, identifying the truth, or filtering out the rampant levels of views and opinion which have regrettably become the bigger part of the content of all news.

It is increasingly necessary to identify where names and the nomenclature or branding of ideas, approaches, systems and even recognisable activities have been deliberately changed with the intention to confuse. Usually to create the misleading idea, in our minds, that somebody is doing something or selling something to us that is completely new or specialised beyond our comprehension. Just so that they can gain advantage over us until such time as we have worked it all out.

Regrettably, the establishment – that’s government, the public sector and all the big businesses and money organisations that are actually running things – has reached the point where they change the names of everything, either to make more money or benefit themselves, or increasingly to give the impression they have stopped or moved away from doing anything that has been publicly outed as being wrong. But for whatever reason that’s important to them, they intend to keep on doing it anyway and believe they need to nothing more to cover it up than change the name.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Whilst it would be foolish not to acknowledge the power for good that some forms of digital technology and artificial intelligence have – in the right hands and when being used for the right reasons, the way that so many of us have taken the coming technical or AI revolution as read, and seem to have just accepted that many will no longer have jobs as a result, does illustrate the danger that we have become to both ourselves and to our own future. All because we don’t ask questions and simply accept whatever we are being told to believe – usually because it’s come from the voice of someone remote who we don’t even know!

The rather inconvenient truth that all those creating new terminology for whatever they control, are trying to control or attempting to regain control of; is that there isn’t much going on that’s genuinely new, as we consider life in the aspect of 360 degrees around us.

It is just made to look and feel that way.

Indeed, most of us would quickly grasp this, if we were to refuse to just accept the sales pitch and ask what they are selling us, what it will do and how it works.

This approach is applicable to method as well as to machine.

We would all be wise to take time to consider everything that touches our lives in some way, in terms of the pathways that bring it to us, how it works, who benefits and why those interests have brought them to us as and when they have.

Some would say ‘Oh it’s obvious!’

But is it really? And has it ever been?

Magic only works on us, when we don’t understand whatever is happening

Sadly, many of us are all too happy to accept the premise that what we don’t know can’t hurt us.

We accept that names, memes, keywords, industry terms and abbreviations mean that whoever is using them knows things that we do not. Usually making those people more knowledgeable and therefore powerful than we are, with a somewhat strange accompanying surrender to the misplaced idea that we should simply shut up.

Exploding the very dangerous myth about people who are considered to be experts and specialists, often in ways that are taken to mean they have universal understanding of everything, when they most often have been doing just one job; have studied more about the subject than us, and have been given a qualification by someone else who is actually just like them, is now becoming essential.

Not just to stop ourselves from being played like complete fools. But because the idiocy and self-aggrandisement that blankets so many of the people in positions of power, influence, control and that we therefore revere, are hiding behind the façade of terms we don’t understand, just to benefit themselves whilst all the time creating a very unhappy and unhealthy world that for us, that is never really going to work in our favour for as long as people like this have influence and control.

Dishonesty is regrettably rampant throughout everything that the establishment now does. Not necessarily because everyone within the establishment is dishonest. But because the way that normal people like you and I are being exploited, manipulated and used, so that those doing these things can benefit in some way, is simply now accepted as being the ‘normal’ way things work and therefore as being the done thing, for everyone.

Using and abusing others at any level is not ok. And as we find ourselves transiting a tumultuous period of inevitable change, one of the things that we should all be striving for to experience in whatever new world awaits us on the other side, is that lying, manipulation and the abuse of any person for any reason by another, just so that the abuser can become advantaged in some way, should be outlawed and treated as the horrible crime that it really is.