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The tragic scandal of welfare Britain
Via Freedom and Whisky:There's some big numbers here. DO THE poor really benefit from Labour? It's not such a daft question: welfare payment goes up, certainly, but is Scotland more socially cohesive as a result? Are people escaping sink estates, finding work and helping their children prosper? **SNIP** But dig below the data, step into the housing schemes, and you find that the generosity is breeding tragedy. Under Labour's welfare payments, 266,000 people in Scotland are now categorised as "incapacitated" - claiming dole and deemed unable to work. This figure is staggering. If they all lived together, they would occupy a city greater than Aberdeen or Dundee - yet such people do not show up on unemployment figures. Nor do they work. They are in the invisible zone of the labour market. There are 2.4 million of them across Britain - people who have been effectively decommissioned, and usually ushered into a life of housing schemes, sink schools and social failure. **SNIP** Yet the share of the UK workforce actually in employment remains well below its peak in 1989. Glasgow's unemployment may be 8 per cent, but a third of its adults have no job. The same is true for one in four Scots. Labour has, in part, fought unemployment by finding alternatives to work. One is studying: universities have proliferated, in varying qualities, offering a bewildering array of not always useful courses. Then comes the option of being categorised as permanently sick. Since 1993, the number of Britons considered "incapacitated" has doubled from 1.2 million - a rise not seen since troops returned from the Second World War. There has been no crippling, nationwide epidemic. But there has, instead, been a political disease - where the definition of welfare is entitlement, not empowerment. Where the aim is to write cheques, not to aid careers. **SNIP** Posted by: anonymous2u 2005-01-27 |
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