Tag: economy

Being on benefits isn’t a culture; for many it’s a living hell

As you read through the pages of this blog or read the eBooks that are available and recognise the story unfolding and the different parts that we can all see, you may be able to step back and observe the reality that those who ‘take from the state’ are the easiest for everyone else to blame.

No matter their background or reason for being dependent upon the State, Benefits Claimants have become scapegoats and little more than everyone else’s ‘guilty bastards.

Worst of all, they have now become a very easy target for those who are actually responsible for everything that is going wrong with the UK, to project their own guilt and fear upon.

For anyone receiving benefits when they could or would rather be ‘paying their own way’, being anywhere near the Benefits System, the many organisations that work within and around it, and being within the exploding sub-class of our society currently being gaslit by the financial benchmark of the National Minimum or Living Wage; life is a fearful, emotionally and practically challenging living hell.

In my recent research article and eBook ‘Is Poverty Invisible to those who don’t Experience it’, I discussed the realities that people using Foodbanks and in poverty face across the UK today.

Given the nature of the announcements due to be made as part of the Spring Statement this Wednesday and what we already know is on the way from the October ’24 Budget, I will expand here on 5 of the most important points of what being within or touched by the Benefits System means to many of those whose lives are touched by it:

1. It costs more to live than the Minimum or Living Wage allows

The elephant in the room that is the cost-of-living crisis, is this:

What we currently accept as being the National Minimum Wage or Living Wage, isn’t anywhere near enough for a single person without any parental, caring or partner responsibilities, to live independently without top-up benefits, help from charities (foodbanks), going into debt or raiding savings.

2. Working on the Minimum Wage means you still need help

People working in Minimum Wage jobs in the UK, cannot earn enough, working a 40-hour week, to pay their own way.

Those on Minimum Wage cannot live independently, without still having to jump through the hoops and requirements that come from being a benefit claimant; from ‘qualifying’ to get emergency food packages from Foodbanks; by going into debt using credit cards, loans or pay-day-credit type schemes; or by falling back on family or friends for handouts, just to make ends meet.

3. Being on benefits is no breeze: Welfare cuts are an act of increasing cruelty when many just want safe-to-climb ladder to escape

Being on benefits means being treated like you are someone else’s guilty bastard and like you are the one who is in the wrong.

The staff in jobcentres (understandably) often don’t really want to be there. They are regularly exposed to some of the UKs most unhappy people. When they themselves are at the cutting edge of a Benefits System that has ALREADY removed all sense of humanity from its heart and behaves like it already runs with the dehumanisation that we can expect from universal AI that is being  introduced for all the wrong reasons.

People who are not working or who have personal issues that have made them dependent upon benefits often feel vulnerable.

They suffer from the lowered levels of confidence that any form of unexpected or inescapable vulnerability brings. Even before they contact Jobcentres, the Benefits Office or any other organisations that provides the different services and offerings that provide income and support that comes from the public purse.

Some active claimants do use anger and exhibit loud forms of frustration. But this is often a self-protection mechanism and way to try and secure what they need from the System.

Sadly, these few are the stereotype upon which much of the prejudiced behaviour towards those on Benefits that reaches far beyond DWP staff is formed.

The profit-led private contractors who provide ‘back to work’ or ‘welfare to work’ services and ‘support’ are no better.

The tick-box culture that is applied universally towards anyone whose existence touches the welfare purse is one where claimants are considered capable of working if they tried, and therefore there because they choose to be.

Once through the turnstile of the benefits door, benefits claimants are considered worthless.

Nobody operating or administering the benefits system from within is prepared to look at anyone asking for help as being anything other than the same.

The Benefits system is inherently cynical and labels everyone who doesn’t work as being in the benefits queue as a lifestyle choice.

Unless benefits claimants possess a CV or situation which would be strong enough to indicate that they wouldn’t even be there in the first place, the experience of being just within the benefits system itself quickly takes its toll. Once inside, it is a downwards spiral for many where there is no genuine escape, even if you find a way to leave.

Politicians may indeed be openly questioning the number of unemployed who there because of mental health issues.

But beyond the torture of what it takes for growing numbers to keep up with a financial and money-centric culture that demands everyone keep up, the constant hits that come from being in ‘the system’ and treated like you are sub human by those who do and can work, makes for a progressively difficult challenge, that in the situation we all face today, has come down to little more than lucky breaks for the many who do want to escape.

4. Very few want to be on benefits – Living independently on a basic wage is key

I mentioned the angry and the frustrated above.

These are the people that hide behind a mask and fight the contact that they have with the Benefits System, because it’s what they believe they have to do, to survive.

Yes, many receiving benefits suggest openly and behave with a sense of entitlement. But this is the situation that decades of poor politicians – and therefore that we all have created, because of the responsibility that we all have, for appointing the politicians who have created, developed and maintained the mess that the UK is now in.

The stories of people who cannot step out of the benefits trap, because they cannot afford to do so, are also true.

There is something perverse about a situation where claimants will not take the risk of taking jobs and opportunities because of how they will be treated by the benefits system and what support they will lose immediately if and when they take those steps to get out.

Unless they cannot work because of other commitments or they find themselves genuinely unable to do so, there are few Benefits Claimants who have entered or remain within the Benefits System by choice.

5. A Minimum Wage that is guaranteed to be a Living Wage would change everything

Another truth that we have turned a blind eye to, is that many people who cannot do so currently, would be very happy to be working in Minimum Wage jobs IF they actually paid what its costs to live independently.

Many people would choose to work in Minimum Wage jobs, in receipt of a wage that they could live independently on. Because their only working responsibility or responsibility to others would then be to do what they are asked for the time that they are at work.

Many of us would be very happy just to work a working week and at the same time earn enough so that all of the bills and the essentials that it takes  to live an independent and self-sustaining life today are paid for. Just as long as we don’t then have to go looking for and making ourselves vulnerable to anyone or anything else, reaching out for help, just to make  ends meet.

The Basic Living Standard | Full Text
Is Poverty invisible to those who don’t experience it? | Full Text
The Way of Awakened Politics for Good Government | Full Text
Being on Benefits 24Mar25 PDF_Vers1_3Feb26Download

The welfare budget is out of control. But many claimants are there through no fault of their own and slashing payments won’t address the poverty problem or help out-of-their-depth politicians either

The coming weeks are likely to be a bleak time, not only for those on benefits who receive payments that could be cut. But also for growing numbers of the low paid, whose employment is likely to be at risk because of national insurance changes and yes – the April rise in the National Minimum Wage.

Appropriate credit should of course be given where it is due and the Labour Government certainly do appear to be digging themselves further and further into a hole with every policy decision that they make.

However, nothing is as straightforward as it looks in politics. And as I wrote in a blog in early December when I asked if Labour has been set up as ‘custodians of the collapse’, there is much to suggest that when it comes to the quality of politicians that we currently have in the UK today, the group filling the government benches are the unfortunate ones who have been left to carry the can.

I say this, as the collapse that there is very good reason to believe the collapse that is now underway, could, in theory have began at any time, since the decision to bail out the banks during the Great Financial Crisis of 2007/08.

The chances that a collapse would arrive sooner and more severely has grown significantly as a result of the Government response to the Covid Pandemic, the War in Ukraine, and basically everything that the politicians in power have been printing money to cover the cost of, ever since.

A collapse is and has always been inevitable. Because the financial, economic or monetary system that we have had since 1971 is to all intents and purposes little more than a massive game or perhaps what we might call man’s greatest confidence trick.

The financial, meonetary and economic system that we currently have was put together, successfully implemented (adopted) and pushed so that those ‘in the tent’ would become rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Meanwhile, control of the greater population has slowly but surely been passed to the same set of interests, using all manner of manipulation and incentives that mean people have effectively been surrendering their freedom – usually through financial means.

Hard as the reality may be to swallow, many people have been unaware of what has been happening to them; how their approach to life, relationships and everything has changed and in real terms, what a small set of very selfish and self-serving interests have so-far successfully done to everyone else, just so that they could become very rich.

The big flaw in ‘the game’ and with it the source of the greatest risk – which is the loss of control when that flaw inevitably becomes too obvious to hide, is the only way that money can be created or printed in the increasing amounts that it has been and still is, is for the value of the money that normal people possess or are able to earn to lessen much quicker than wage rises or the value of property they have the ability to own to rise and offset it. Let alone go beyond in the wealth creating sense that any does who is part of the clique who ‘rigged the game’.

By now, you are probably wondering what any of this has to do with welfare, benefits or the National Minimum Wage.

The National Minimum Wage, which was conveniently brought into being by the Blairite Labour Government on 1 April 1999, was of course sold to us all as a tool to ensure that everyone received a fair wage for every hour worked.

And as far as that story was sold, the people who the establishment needed to believe what was being suggested, almost certainly did and have done ever since, not least of all as the National Minimum Wage has increasingly become known as the National Living Wage too.

The problem is that even at the rate of £12.21 which will be the hourly rate of the National Minimum Wage from this coming April, it is and will continue to be nowhere near enough for any single person to live independently, self-sufficiently and without the help of benefits, charity (like Foodbanks), by going into debt or raiding savings – or falling back on them all.

The National Minimum Wage is certainly nowhere near enough for anyone to live on!

Done properly and with the intentions that should have underpinned its implementation, the National Minimum Wage could have performed and impacted lives very differently to the way that it has.

However, what it has actually done has been to serve as a wage suppressant. Keeping the wage ceiling deliberately low for significant numbers of people within a system that has been funnelling money in one direction only.

Let’s be clear. Not having the guarantee of taking home enough to ‘pay their own way’ makes it near impossible for people to feel in control of their own lives.

However, the legal requirement to pay the National Minimum Wage itself has the perverse consequence of ensuring that small businesses can no longer succeed. Because the margins that big global businesses are working to have made it impossible to keep paying the same number of people they could previously afford to.

Meanwhile, those big businesses themselves could actually afford to pay what it costs their lowest paid employees to live, but too often don’t. Instead choosing to move everything that they possibly can to countries where they can pay exactly what they want to, whilst everything we need is quickly becoming a luxury that more of us can no longer afford.

Guaranteeing that everyone on the minimum wage earns enough to live without help would solve problems that many simply wouldn’t believe

In my recent Paper ‘Is Poverty Invisible to those who don’t Experience it’, I talked about the experience of being on benefits today. What that actually means to those unfortunate enough to find themselves claiming them, and what it is like for normal, decent people to step through a door where only the most resilient could ever maintain the levels of confidence and self-surety needed to navigate a system where anyone who cannot fend for themselves financially is treated like a pariah, at each and every turn.

To put it bluntly, most people who find themselves within the benefits system today, without a career background or experience that makes them employable in a way that almost certainly guarantees they would never be there anyway, are damned. They are unable to escape, because the most basic of jobs that are readily available do not offer an income level that is genuinely realistic enough to provide anyone with the kind of independence and freedom that only a genuine wage that links directly to what it costs to live can afford them.

For those who need it to be spelled out; the number of people who are on benefits because they want to be there or because they cannot function in any way without benefits is very small and much smaller than any of the statistical evidence that is available would suggest.

However, working a ridiculous number of hours per week, to only then have to rely upon benefit top ups and the bewildering experience that goes with it; to struggle enough that you have to ‘qualify’ for an emergency food package from a Foodbank or to have to go into debt or use money that was put aside for living rather than to simply stay alive, holds no great incentive for anyone. Especially when the work itself usually attracts scorn and ridicule from others who see themselves as better and look down on those they see as beneath them or without the same value.

Solving the benefits problem should be as simple as government telling every employer that they have to pay everyone whatever it costs to live.

Yet we have long since passed the time when this would have been possible without collapsing the economy. Even if it would only have made a difference for a short period of time.

People are on benefits and living with less than what anyone needs to live, in this day and age, because for many of them it really is the lesser of the evils. Even though the evils that they are being subjected to still hurt and reach very deeply indeed.

The Government ‘view’

At the other end of the problem, the growing welfare bill is fast approaching a cost that simple mathematics has long since told us that the UK can no longer afford.

However, politicians have continued to do ‘find’ or create the money to keep covering the welfare bill (even though they talk up the mean actions that they do take), as the political fall out from exposing the truth, that there is a significant and growing underclass of people whose incomes are nowhere near what it actually costs to live and that businesses of ALL sizes are effectively having wages subsidised by the state, whilst vested interests are pretty much taking every bit of available wealth from everyone, would mean a confrontation and battle with the system itself that only a very rare breed of politician would be big enough to tackle.

The cost for everyone is the society and culture we were once proud of now crumbling around us, having its destruction accelerated by those in power who have become so desperate that they are turning everything to ash, just so that they can be seen to remain in control.

The reality is that politicians no longer have enough legitimate or morally workable options available to them to justify creating enough money out of thin air to save them now or to ensure their re-election, when the UK has for a long time already been technically broke.

What so few can or are prepared to either accept or to see, is that money doesn’t work for people in the system that we have and never did. Even though generations have regularly been conditioned to believe that getting wealthy or having everything would come quickly to all of us on the cheap. Just as long as we all went along with the lie.

The UK is now caught within a whirlwind of parallel death spirals. Where the poor and those with less can only become even poorer. Whilst the ability of government to do anything meaningful has been hollowed out.

The situation leaves the entire political class on the edge of a precipice where government is about to become unable to do anything. And all of this has been inflicted upon us so that a few could become wealthy and obtain power, always knowing that they would have to achieve oppressive levels of control over society, before anyone who would be brave enough to speak out and be believed by enough people had worked it all out.

Were Labour set up to be ‘Custodians of the Collapse’?
Is Poverty invisible to those who don’t experience it? | Full Text
Manifesto for a Good Dictator | Full Text
The Basic Living Standard | Full Text

The Basic Living Standard: A Pathway to Economic Equality and Fairness throughout Life

The coming weeks are likely to see increasing talk of benefits, unemployment and what it costs to live as the government makes budget cuts and then as the reality of the changes to National Insurance contributions really begin to bite in early April, alongside the rise in the Minimum Wage.

Whilst the current government is very much the focus of blame, the difficult truth that many still cannot see and politicians will not talk about – IF they actually understand, is that the Minimum Wage is the benchmark that is used by everyone as the ‘accepted’ level of what it costs someone to live.

However, although the Minimum Wage will rise to £12.21 in April, this level of pay – even for a 40 hour working week, is nowhere near enough for a single person, living alone to cover the cost of everything they need to pay for each week, without seeking benefits, help from charities such as Foodbanks, going into debt (or using savings), or a mixture of them all.

Regrettably, the way that our economic system works and has deliberately been developed and evolved over a period of more than 50 years means that money and everything related to it can only make some people fabulously wealthy in the way that they are now, by many others being financially left behind.

Although this unbalanced financial system has appeared to work for a very long time, and long enough that it means most of us cannot picture the world we live in working any other way, the reality is that it could only work for a period of time, because it has developed around the growth of what we all know as the wealth divide.

Money has been created in such volumes, especially since the Great Financial Crisis, the Covid Pandemic and the War in Ukraine, that the shelf-life or end-date is arriving even more quickly than those who understood and benefitted from the system imagined, and it is the reality that the impact and consequences of decades of having this system in place which are now proving very difficult for politicians to hide and why we are now experiencing so much that people in power are either avoiding or simply refusing to explain.

Money is the centre of everything. It’s the reference point for the value of all that we have, want, need and do, and its presence and influence has reached the point where the role that money now plays in our lives is dehumanising everything – and being helped to do so by those who are benefitting from what we believe about money (that isnt actually true), and what we will accept from them as a result.

However, the world could be very different. And to be very different, we need to put people, community and our locality and environment back at the heart of everything.

The Basic Living Standard is the radical proposal to change the way that economics and money works, so that everyone working a full working week would be guaranteed a level of pay that would ensure that they could be completely self-sufficient, and live independently, working in the lowest-paid employment, thereby giving EVERYONE the same benchmark for life and minimum human value in all and whatever they do.

The Basic Living Standard would require everything in business and across society to change, so that we all recognise the value of people and what living a good, healthy, happy, safe and secure life within a genuinely fair, balanced and just system, in every part of life and in everything that we do – as it should be – rather than the focus always being upon profit, greed and advancement, as it is right now.

Please follow the link below to read the Full Text of The Basic Living Standard, download the FREE PDF version or buy the Book for Kindle.

The Basic Living Standard | Full Text
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If the world is run and ruled with money that isn’t real, has the point been proven that we don’t need money to function or put people first?

“What do you mean – ‘Money isn’t real?’” I hear someone cry.

Well, if the financial and economic devices that government and the banks use such as deposit multipliers, quantitative easing and being able to call up new money on demand don’t tell us that money only has the value we say and believe it has, why not ask yourself the next question ‘How can the value of the money I earn and have in my account change when nothing else has?’

No, the paragraph above certainly isn’t enough to sow any seeds of doubt in the minds of those who are bought into the economic system that we have and believe that they gain or profit from doing so in some way.

But that doesn’t change the truth that underlies the way that money works. Not only in the UK, but in the US and right across what we recognise as the westernised world today.

A massive injustice has been and continues to be inflicted upon many innocent people by a System that has been purposefully designed, created, manipulated and extended, so that those who have control and money can use it to make themselves disproportionately rich through nothing less than the impoverishment of others.

The harm that the current monetary and economic system has created for people is so extensive and the consequences so harsh and far reaching, that the suggestion any person could do such things deliberately or otherwise to other human beings, and then sleep at night, does seem to be simply too hard to believe.

That disbelief is one of the reasons that so many of us still believe that money is real and that the way the economic system works is normal or just the way things are.

It also helps us to believe that the money banks lend us and use to finance our phones, cars, small businesses, houses, credit cards and everything else that we get on credit, is money that has been lent to the bank and was real before that whole process began.

Money, or more importantly, the money system that we have works. Because we believe that this is how money works.

The majority of us simply accept our understanding of money at the level of its transactional value. Rather than money itself being part of the very elaborate and deliberately complicated system that sits behind it.

The Money, Financial and Economic System we have requires much patience, understanding and open mindedness, before there is any chance of understanding how it all really works.

It was the ability to create money in the way that government and bankers simply print the stuff today, but make it look like something very different, which inherently made life something that increasing numbers of us can no longer afford.

‘Finance’, ‘leverage’, ‘venture capital’ and any one of a number of different ‘lending vehicles’ that now exist have enabled people who are favoured by The System to buy up property, the ownership and control of businesses and all sorts of different infrastructure that is essential to help with basic life. Just so that those same sources can charge interest and increase profit margins, making themselves and their businesses richer and richer, whilst they take ever more control of everything in life that counts.

Its not a question of legality. Not that legality itself can now be relied upon or trusted to make anything morally or ethically right.

The way The System has been constructed and developed has ensured that through actions such as deregulation and use of the civil and commercial courts, has meant that in terms of The Law itself, and the way that we have all historically paid deference to it, the whole process and everything that has happened to others so that some could become very rich has been legal and above board.

There is plenty of information available online if you would like to get an idea of what really happens behind the scenes and watching a film such as The Four Horsemen may be a good place to start.

However, the debate, discussion, argument or indeed truth about how money really works isn’t why I have written this blog.

I have written this blog because when you, I, anyone or everyone can accept the way money works today and the impact and influence it has on all parts of life, we must then also accept that money only works as it does and the few are only able to do the things they are doing to many others using money, because the way that their money works is what we believe money to be and what we consider to be normal about money.

The way we think about money isn’t normal. But it helps some to get very rich and very powerful for us to believe that it is.

Acceptance that money isn’t real and that the money system we believe in is the only way that anyone could have gained the wealth and control that they have, also brings with it a very different perspective on the role that money plays.

Because the recognition that money has no value means that every financial transaction that we engage in is based upon nothing more than belief.

If everything we ‘buy’ and therefore ‘exchange’ is based upon a transaction of belief, it means that unless there is some benefit to others by there being money or a recognisable currency of some kind made necessary for the completion of that transaction, we don’t actually need money of any kind to engage in the reasoned exchange or transaction of goods, services, employment or indeed anything else using money, at any level or in any way.

Money or the money system that we have has been created and used to exploit, enslave and cheat us all, as if life can be treated as if its just one giant Monopoly game.

We have a choice for the future: Money or People?

What will you choose?

Our Local Future PDF_vers_1_Dir_Jan25Download

The Contemporary Politicians Dilemma

You’ve just been elected as an MP and your political group or party holds the majority of Seats in Parliament.

Your group or party now has power over everything. Can change anything. Can be anything. Can do everything that you all promised the people who voted for you when you were successfully elected, just the other day.

In the briefings and within the advice that was never available to you and your political colleagues before the election took place, you are told very clearly, that everything the last government was actually doing, no matter what they were saying publicly, was the only way that they were able to keep government and the public sector running.

The alternative was that the economy, quickly followed by the government and then all public services would simply collapse.

As you catch your breath, you realise that all the things that have been hurting people, whether it was the cost-of-living crisis, inflation, house building, immigration, the benefits crisis or many other of the other social issues you have promised to tackle are all connected to the economy.

You now understand that everything in The System relates to money and specifically to ‘growth’ and the GDP that sits behind it in some way.

People of all kinds, all ages and all backgrounds are struggling.

You saw it only too well as you campaigned before the election was held. Pain and suffering was lurking in just about every direction that you looked.

You are told that you can keep the economy running. Just as long as you keep finding credible reasons to spend.

‘Credible’ reasons are what you need to build and maintain the narrative that justifies the reason to borrow and print money. So that ‘growth’ hides all of the problems, and the money you have created keeps flowing in all the directions that The System demands that it should.

However, there is a cost.

The cost of ‘keeping the economy going’ will be that you cannot step back or away from any policy that already exists, no matter how you sell it to the public.

This will mean there will need to be a growing number of people within the population and reasons to spend on all the goods and services that they will need, so that you can justify spending more and more of that created money, and that money can keep being passed between all the different parts of the economy that provide goods and services to meet the basic needs of people.

This is the way that the problem and more importantly the size of that problem, can continue to be hidden from view.

You know what you promised. You know what you said.

You were going to be ‘The difference’, ‘The change’ and you are now faced with making things worse instead.

The question you now ask yourself; ‘Is it better just to keep managing things, in a state of ongoing but ‘managed decline’, or do you do the right thing and deliver on your promises, knowing that the immediate after effect is likely to be a complete ‘System Collapse’, that is probably now inevitable, but could be delayed if you ‘keep the plates spinning’ instead?

What would you do, if this was you…?

The Contemporary Politicians Dilemma PDF_Vers1_5Sep25Download