Instead of moaning about Universal Credit amounts surely the people who gets this benefit should be thanking people like me for paying tax so this benefit can be paid.
That's the problem, it's not being paid for weeks leaving families with nothing.
[/size]Some Traveller, some. Its a specific mindset that thinks entitlements outweigh responsibilities. I met quite a few who behaved like that in my job, but on the other hand I met the people with chronic health conditions trying to get by; the young mothers who (perhaps foolishly) believed their child's father wouldn't disappear; the sixty year olds who'd had to give up a long term manual occupation.
I'd hope, if I were as well off as Brian appears to be, I'd be a bit more generous of spirit and try to remember no matter hard some people have tried, life hasn't worked out as they hoped.
But surely, it is not Brian's fault that some people expect welfare without responsibility, nor for that matter that some people have been dealt a bad hand in life.
The problem occurs when the feckless present with the same set of problems as those who've been dealt a bad hand in life - how do you distinquish? Health professionals have difficulty enough identifying a genuine bad back from a bad back that isn't genuine. The only sensible approach is to be more thorough assessing conditions.
The issue that appears to have been deliberately overlooked is that Universal Credit is an attempt by the government to identify the malingerer from the genuine (through rigorous health assessment) and to force through changes of habit in claimants so they are more fitted to getting back into the workforce.
So three things are necessary:
1) make welfare less generous so that there are advantages to going out to work;
2) change behavours so that once in work, people budget rationally around a monthly pay packet and monthly welfare;
3) more rigourous health and wellbeing assessment, so that the genuine claimant are identified whilst the feckless are thrown off welfare.
If you don't try and achieve these things, all you get is spiralling dependency and higher welfare costs that Brian has to fund out of his savings.
What Brian's wealth has got to do with the price of fish, I've no idea. But if Brian's aim is to put the idle and feckless to work, there'll be less dependency on Brian and more to go around for the Genuine Claimant. Brian is a Saint, if you look at it from that perspective.
It is Tough Love that gets change, not limp-wristed whinging and envy against those that made provision for themselves.