The benefits class

Perhaps the term "working class" can be consigned to the dustbin, to be replaced by a new group, the benefits class.

Six million Britons are living in households where nobody works - costing the taxpayer almost £13 billion a year in benefits alone, a spending watchdog report reveals today.

An astonishing one in six households across the country are officially classified as 'workless' - having adults of working age but none with a job - and almost 1.8 million children are now growing up in these homes.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=469369&in_page_id=1770&ito=1490

No surprise what paper the article is in.

Matthew Elliott sounds like a right tit.

I fit into this class, but I still pay taxes, NI and my own mortgage. Not everyone without a job is a scrounger you know- some of us were clever enough to insure our incomes before we got ill.

I fit into this class, but I still pay taxes, NI and my own mortgage. Not everyone without a job is a scrounger you know- some of us were clever enough to insure our incomes before we got ill.

If you read the article it shows it is targeting the hardcore of "scroungers"

The estimated £12.7 billion-a-year benefits bill for workless households does not include Housing Benefit or Council Tax Benefit, the report states.

If you can work, then you should work.

We shouldn't give benefits to those who are more than capable of working.

The working class, are just that ''working'' ... its the underclass, which I think you are referring too. Its a term coined in America, in the early 1970s by a Charles Murray and it refers to those people dependent upon benefits ... i.e.the long term unemployed for example.

Yes it is the 'underclass' you seem to be referring to.

I work but I am also entitled to benefits.

I work but I am also entitled to benefits.

Millions of people do.

You could count Family Credit (or tax credits or whatever it is now) as a benefit, lots of working people get that.

I dont refer to it as an underclass, it is a group of people who appear to take pride from the fact that they are benefits class, the benefits system is a safety net, not a career, yet there are obviously many for whom it is a career, the working family tax credits is a good example of a scheme designed to help (although from reading another thread, some have had problems), my gripe is with what i class as the benefits class, not those to whom the benefits system is, and is likely to remain, their only realistic means of income.

Murray's thesis was developed in the U.S.A. but he applied his thinking to the U.K.

http://www.le.ac.uk/education/resources/SocSci/underclass.html

Murray sees it as a cultural phenomenon. He take census data, and in Britain, see concentrations of unemployed, single-parenthood, high crime etc, and makes causal connections. But his critics argue that it would be the other way round - Joan Brown argues that the labelling of "dump estates" can cause the problem.

Charles Murray: The Emerging British Underclass (Choice in Welfare) (Paperback) 1990. ISBN: 0255362633