We don't care. Init !!!

Subject: We don't care. Init !!!

How do we balance our national budget with an under performing business community and low tax receipts which we so desperately need to provide essential services.
The clamour we hear from the media regarding the lack of services the community receive from the municipality, services such as homes to house the mentally ill, the old, and even ordinary families starting up in life, needing affordably priced accommodation within reasonable distance to their place of work.
Balancing the books has been the mantra of the Tory party for the last 10 years. This was interpreted by George Osbourne as an opportunity to slim down many aspects of our social services, especially the Benefit culture which had steadily grown up over the years into a complicated monster of needs and rights. Listening to claimants one is overcome with the shrill sound of demand, it's our human right to be housed, it's our right to be treated when sick, it's recumbent on the Government to provide.
One of the milestones in our history was the creation of a bottom line in offering assistance to people who had fallen on hard times. Genuine hardship through injury or medical disability was deemed to be out of the control of the individual and therefore some assistance from the state was offered. The Dole was likewise a short temporary expedient to help the worker who had lost his or her job, to pay the rent and provide food for the table. It was assumed that a job would be found and the dole payments short term.
As with all things, human beings come in all shapes and sizes. Some people struggle into work when they are really ill and should be at home. Some people would never apply for dole and would see it as the ultimate failing, not to be able to find a job, any job just to pay the bills. And then there are the "others". The "exploiters".
They too come in all shapes and sizes. Some drive expensive motor cars, some are content to sit around in a dilapidated house drinking Strongbow at 8am.

The altruistic ideas behind the Labour Parties founding of the NHS and providing homes and employment rights was not done out of some sort of soft headed benefiction but out of the knowledge and experience the country had suffered in the years preceding the Second World War where men and their families had been impoverished by the ravages of the Great Depression.  

Clement Attlee and his government were determined to create a society where those in work and receiving wages would through taxation contribute to a fund which assisted those 'less favourable'.
The growth in the number of claimants through the change in the need and type of employment, the sell off of our industrial past.  The sale off of much of the municipal housing stock without any plan to reinstate the housing stock, (a political decision with far reaching consequences) has created a ghetto mentality in parts of the country where the changes were greatest.
A generation of claimants, a generation of legalised expectation, has produced the monster of an assumption that a life on Benefit was acceptable. An assumption which has led to a culture of despondency where self esteem is so low that it doesn't matter what society thinks "we don't care". Init !!!