Universal Credit

Subject: Universal Credit.

One of the disadvantages of reality television is that it's depressing, it's depressing to see how people are forced to live in quite acute stress, often through circumstance outside their control. It also reveals how financially inept people are unable to budget, unable to limit their expenditure on non essentials, unable to curb the desire to blow what ever money comes their way and let the future take care of itself.
For a whole set of reasons (including indigestion) I switched on the television  quite late at a time when usually I'm sleeping and enjoying the good life of my dreams. BBC 2 were showing a program which attempted to tell one side of the story of Universal Credit, how moving onto a single monthly benefit payment has effected the claimants used to living on a weekly paid benefit.
The issue of why people use and depend on benefits plagues this country. A system of low wages and now, the gig economy, in which employers offer employment dependent on the business need with no contractual responsibility towards their employees, has made the workplace at the bottom end of the job spectrum extremely precarious. Rent is the largest expenditure, the rest, food, clothing and transport plus entertainment, the television, a packet of fags, beer and drugs and that's your lot in this pared down analysis of what it takes to live on in 2020.
Clearly many of these people are not particularly bright and have few opportunities to improve themselves. They are the children born of claimants to Welfare a state who were themselves claimants two generations ago. They live a life (sic) in a state within a state where the sheer impossibility to live a normal life is denied them partly  through an educational system which ill-equips them to find proper contractually secure work. It's a subculture where the responsibilities we imbibed from our own parents which we take for granted is missing. It doesn't make them bad people, just financially incoherent, unable to budget because their income is so variable in an infamous zero hours contact system, a never ending Helter Skelter having to adjust their financial spend from month to month because the safety net which welfare payments are supposed to provide, now takes a month to five weeks to adjust and bring into line the income fluctuations when set against the minimum income calculated when they went on Universal Credit.
Of course it's easy to disparage this under class, especially when the real dropouts often the husbands are seen in the shadows hovering up the scraps. Perhaps for them two years national service wouldn't go amiss, especially if they were trained into some sort of useful trade for when they return to civilian life. The women, usually mothers, often with quite large families have a different profile and given it's apparently their human right to fall pregnant and have kids, maybe a financial incentive to limit the family might work.
What ever the cause it is pretty soul destroying watching these people buffeted this way and that as they try to make ends meet. It's all a far cry from "Angela's Ashes" the horrific story of growing up in a tenement in Ireland but never the less it faces us with a view of life which is so mentally disturbing, removed as it is from the one we know and yet maybe living only a few doors away.
The act of providing a social catch-net was what was envisaged by Attlee's Socialist government in 1947. Temporary financial assistance to tie one over whilst you found another job or recovered from sickness. It has these days become a lifestyle for many at an enormous cost to the taxpayer (as much spent  as on education) and a worrying fiscal drag in an economy which struggles to find its role in modern economics.
It's another one of those moments when you think how lucky to have been born in a different era.