I've not seen any country that gets the balance right, to the point where the population don't moan about it (except, perhaps, some of the Gulf states)
It's easy to get it right when you are so awash with bounty relative to your native population that there is more than enough for all. Those same countries do not have a good record of a fair and reasonable attitude to migrant workers !
If only the scapegoats weren't so featureless, this blame game would be a whole lot easier to play. As it is, just about anyone, black, white, ginger, blond, tall or short, fat or thin could become a scapegoat at the drop of a redundancy notice. Scary...
Most people are well under 12 months away from being homeless in the event of losing their jobs.
As someone who spent almost 3 year unemployed not that long ago through no fault of my own (made redundant and despite applying for at least 10 jobs a week took that long to get another job) I must say I feel this is a far to simplistic view. Yes there are spongers using the system but there are far more who would love to and just cant get a job (and yes I was prepapred to work for minimum wage but as soon as a employer saw my CV they would not even interview me as they knew even if they employed me as soon as I could find better I would leave). I would love to know how these people get £26000 a year as according to my calculations I recieved in total less than £6000 and also saw pretty much all my savings dissapear. For those advocating cutting people of after 12 months just pray it never happens to you as my chance of early retirement has gone up in smoke and I dread the thought of ever being made redundant again as I dont know how i would manage.
I could tell you ar more about how the system sucks (The back to work program is a joke for starters) but it woudl just be a waste of time as there are far to many business's making money out of it for it to change.
GaRRy, your story is one I definitely believe and have seen 1st hand on many occasions. The more experienced you are often the more difficult it is to get back into work if you lose your job or have to take time out (which I have in the past to go back abroad to deal with family issues).
Stepping off the escalator whether voluntarily or involuntarily can bring about the same challenges ... and if you elect to on account of your family and circumstances there is little but distain and mistrust of your "sense of priorities" in the British workplace and absolutely no safety net from the State.
Submitting a CV based on a dumbed down skill set is probably your best bet of getting work ! I followed another path - and decided that a job brought me a false sense of security anyway with none of the upside potential... I set up on my own instead. Despite some real successes there have also been some abject and devastating failures .. but I've never been happier and have no desire to go back to bark to an employer's tune. Through all the ups and downs, I've never had a penny off the British government for the hundreds of thousands of pounds I've been made to contribute over the years to the system - when I really needed help and came back having given up my home here (no choice), there was no category of box I could tick on a welfare application form to help me back into work. Thankfully, I have family here with an old fashioned value system and a good relationship with them all. What went around came around and for my rallying to support family, family in turn picked me up and put me back on my feet. It turned out to be a far more valuable safety net for me than any State.
although poor, it seems that they can all afford tattoos and piercings as well as cigarettes. Nearly all the girls seem to end up pregnant.
The thing is there is a huge black economy in the UK and a great deal of cash changes hands in it. If you ever go out and witness first hand the sums of money which get blown abroad by youngsters on an annual basis buying vodka cokes at 28Euros a go in places like Ibiza, you soon realize a fair chunk of it is not (cannot !) be legitimately earned.
The right to vote without discrimination is a fundamental right of a democracy. Disenfranchising sections of society will likely turn people to revolution, and the ballot box will be replaced with the AK47.
Having lived under both democracy and autocracy, I can definitively say that democracy is not all it's cracked up to be ....
It also prepares one for later in life (even much later
) in the art of how to learn and
using an index, lol.
... but surely one only needs to know how to use a "search function" nowadays
? Seriously though, I do wonder what people would do if communications infrastructure collapsed as a result of a natural disaster. The sheer lack of basic survival skills in many quarters beggars belief !
