If you need urgent support, call 999 or go to your nearest A&E. To contact our Crisis Messenger (open 24/7) text THEMIX to 85258.
Options
Take a look around and enjoy reading the discussions. If you'd like to join in, it's really easy to register and then you'll be able to post. If you'd like to learn what this place is all about, head here.
Comments
UKIP doesn't just stand for leaving the EU. It has many policies but I don't know about them because they are his views, not mine. But it's common that everyone seems to think they are right wing Asian hating white people (not saying you think that, just most people I've spoken to think that this is what UKIP is about).
If I'm being honest here, a lot of their policy has been chucked together when they realised they were getting serious levels of support. I still laugh at a defence policy they produce in 2011 that demanded scrapping trident submarines, for British subs with american missiles. There is no such thing as a trident sub, they were always british anyway. Trident is also an American system anyway. Little things like that worry me with the UKIP.
I find the way in which the whole debate plays out rather tiring. The issues regarding the welfare state are complex and every reduction or change of policy needs to be examined carefully - the lazy rhetoric from both sides of the argument is tedious and detrimental to productive discourse.
It is a form of bullying, I completely agree. And I wish they'd stop it. However, the Bullshit Buzzer goes off for me just as often when a liberal is speaking on the topic as when a conservative is. The right-wingers are looking to apply an egregiously oversimplified "scrounger" root cause and the Left are doing an excellent re-enactment of a dog who's doing everything in its power not to look at the shit it took while you were out now that you're back.
As someone who identifies as a liberal, it makes me so frustrated to watch liberals squirm, obfuscate and misdirect when the topic of benefit fraud comes up. And I know why they do it: they think jumping to the other extreme of trying to avoid talking about it or grabbing for clearly suspect statistics will somehow offset the ridiculous over emphasis the Tory's place on in when they're engaged in their welfare demagoguery. It's the same with immigration or rape or trade unions - it's almost impossible to have a reasoned conversation about it.
I want to know the facts of the welfare situation. I don't want to shy away from talking about benefit fraud or from discussing how essential DLA is to people's quality of life and wellbeing. I don't want to get bogged down in the superficial political point scoring and moral smugness. There are facts to be known but I sometimes feel they're too far out of reach due to political tribalism.
The trouble with these "reforms" is that the honest people- the ones who have a disability but try to put a brave face on it- will be screwed right into the ground. The fraudsters, the ones who know the system inside out and know just how to play it, will be absolutely fine. Just as they pretended to be immobile before they'll do so again. It's the ones who gamely try and walk 50 feet because they're honest and think the ATOS doctor will be fair are the ones who will suffer.
My biggest gripe with the rhetoric from Parliament, though, is that they are proven to be fraudsters yet their solution for their fraud is to give themselves bigger pay rises. You have the likes of Iain Duncan-Smith, a man so without morals that he'll claim for a £39 breakfast on expenses whilst earning £150k a year, lecturing the poor on how they should have to work for their money. Though in fairness I don't necessarily blame the Tories: when their chairman is so dishonest he can't even remember what name he uses, it's no wonder they expect that everyone is at it. Because every Tory is at it, troughing away everything they can get, and the Labour lot are just as blue and just as troughing as the Tories. The problem is that some of us are actually more honest than a Tory, and they're the ones who are going to starve.
I find this very odd given that it was the senior banking executives who caused the mess in the first place. Look at HBOS, which would have sunk without trace even without the credit crisis because of their dodgy loan deals. And look at HSBC, chaired at the time by a Tory called Stephen Green, who were happily washing the Mexican drug cartels' billions for them.
And yet the rich need a carrot to go to work whilst the poor need a stick? Hadaway and shite.