The Political Thread

[Frank]

Is this simply a picture created by the media (my mother reads the Mail) ... The laughable exceptions to this rule are anyone she has ever actually met, all of whom are presented as miraculous individual exceptions 

Ditto. Folk are just desperate to have the comforting picture of the world familiar from their youth reified, despite all available evidence. That explains the contradictory editorial stance of The Mail and its olde worlde typography and design.

[JamesC]

People are afraid of difference because they're afraid of change. They think that the different people will change them and they'll have to take on the scary new ways!
It's the same reason the Liliputians fought a Boiled Egg War and everyone was afraid of pod-people in the '50s.

I'd suggest that in some ways the media actually makes people more accepting of cultural change. If you'd have told a 10 year old me that pensioners would be eating things like Pizza or Thai Green Curry (aka 'foreign muck') and using computers I doubt I'd have believed you.

[Recrewt]

Over a family lunch, discussion of Ramadan with my son (7) included the fact that three kids in his class (in one of the relatively few non-religious schools in the country) are Muslims, or have at least one Muslim parent. Instantly my mother comes out with: "I hate the way these Muslims are taking over everything". 

Is this simply a picture created by the media (my mother reads the Mail and listens to talk radio), or do the media just cater to an existing perception?  How do you tackle this barbarians-at-the-gates mentality?

The Daily Mail really does have to be seen to be believed - the amount of bile and hatred on those pages is astounding.  My own Dear Mum reads the Express, which is not much better.  I normally tackle such situations by calling them out for the absolute b*ll*x that they are.  Not in a horrible way but just by pointing out how untrue it is. 

Christmas is coming, so you could always buy her a book on the Ottoman Empire!

[Frank]

I normally tackle such situations by calling them out for the absolute b*ll*x that they are.  Not in a horrible way but just by pointing out how untrue it is. 

A recent conversation with my 64 year old Mum and my seventy year old uncle, in which both parroted their chosen papers' lambasting of all these unemployed scroungers who were pushing up the benefits bill, ended in stony silence when some cold hard stats were produced:



I felt like a nob, because they've both worked long and hard enough to deserve every penny they have coming to them over the next twenty years of doing whatever they please, but facts is facts.

[von Boom]

I normally tackle such situations by calling them out for the absolute b*ll*x that they are.  Not in a horrible way but just by pointing out how untrue it is. 

I felt like a nob, because they've both worked long and hard enough to deserve every penny they have coming to them over the next twenty years of doing whatever they please, but facts is facts.

Nobody likes a person who uses facts to sway and argument.

[Hawkmumbler]

I normally tackle such situations by calling them out for the absolute b*ll*x that they are.  Not in a horrible way but just by pointing out how untrue it is. 

I felt like a nob, because they've both worked long and hard enough to deserve every penny they have coming to them over the next twenty years of doing whatever they please, but facts is facts.

Nobody likes a person who is right.

FIFY

[JOE SOAP]

I felt like a nob, because they've both worked long and hard enough to deserve every penny they have coming to them over the next twenty years of doing whatever they please, but facts is facts.

Take comfort in the fact you're unlikely to receive the same benefits when your time to clock-out arrives.

[Recrewt]

I felt like a nob, because they've both worked long and hard enough to deserve every penny they have coming to them over the next twenty years of doing whatever they please, but facts is facts.

Yeah, exactly - you don't have to be horrible about it with them but you can't just let it pass as if its the truth. 

[Frank]

Take comfort in the fact you're unlikely to receive the same benefits when your time to clock-out arrives.

Joke's on you, sucker. I'm a Scottish, working class male on a low income - I won't live long enough to worry about being fiddled out of my pension.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-11878212

[JamesC]

I normally tackle such situations by calling them out for the absolute b*ll*x that they are.  Not in a horrible way but just by pointing out how untrue it is. 

A recent conversation with my 64 year old Mum and my seventy year old uncle, in which both parroted their chosen papers' lambasting of all these unemployed scroungers who were pushing up the benefits bill, ended in stony silence when some cold hard stats were produced:



I felt like a nob, because they've both worked long and hard enough to deserve every penny they have coming to them over the next twenty years of doing whatever they please, but facts is facts.

I think the fact that they deserve it is relevant though.
The politics around benefits are very emotive and the way politicians and the media deal with them are very frustrating.
Every time a politician announces a plan to cut benefit fraud relating to disability allowances Jeremy Vine has a phone-in which amounts to lots of people phoning in telling you how immobile they are. IF YOU REALLY ARE DISABLED YOU'RE NOT COMMITING FRAUD SO GET OFF THE FUCKING LINE.
The other thing that frustrates me is that I've yet to hear a main party politician admitting to the fact that there are people out there that choose being on the dole as a lifestyle and they live their entire life without doing a days work. It's depressing but true - and I know this because members of my own family are doing it right now. They deny their existence because they can then lambast anyone who mentions it as an elitist nutter who is anti working class.

[Jim_Campbell]

It's depressing but true - and I know this because members of my own family are doing it right now. They deny their existence because they can then lambast anyone who mentions it as an elitist nutter who is anti working class.

Anecdote ≠ data

The fact is: fraud is a minuscule part of the total benefit bill. The government is throwing hundreds of millions of pounds at ATOS to harass and humiliate disabled people because it fits with their narrative and chimes with the prejudiced streak of things the general public 'know is true'.

At the same time, they're cutting staffing levels at HMRC to the bone, to the point where the Revenue can't even make sure tax that they know is legitimately owed is collected, never mind go after the billions of pounds that are siphoned out of the UK economy by the wealthy and corporations through evasion and accounting fast practise. The returns to the UK Treasury from shutting ATOS down and giving the exact same amount of money to HMRC to spend on enforcement and collection would be orders of magnitude higher than they're extracting from the benefit fraud 'clampdown'.

Cheers

Jim

[Frank]

I think the fact that they deserve it is relevant though.

Aye, but - in the context of a conversation about the impact fraudulent unemployment benefit claimants have on public spending - the point would be that robbing every pensioner in the land of one pound per week of their state benefit would produce almost as great a saving as reducing Jobseeker's Allowance to zero.

[JamesC]

I'm afraid I have no hard data but I'd like to think that people will take my anecdotal evidence as truth.

I can see that there are many more pressing concerns to the economy and that benefits, pensions etc are something of a minefield.
My only point is that denying the existence of a class group, however small, helps no one. If a child grows up in a house where, not only does no one work but no one intends to work then it seems to me the problem will only increase over the generations.

I was going to write another anecdote here but I really don't want to start typing out stories about family members on the internet.
I'm losing the point of what I'm trying say here but I think it's something along the lines of - if you ignore (or deny the existence) of the small problems, they're likely to turn into big problems.

[Professor Bear]

We already have big problems, most notably that we're seemingly happy being ground underfoot.  If some working class tosser doesn't need 38 pounds a week, a multi-millionaire doesn't need 40 000 pounds a week on top of paid room and board, travel costs and expenses.  It's the fuckers at the top that need looking at, not bottom-feeders, but like the obedient chattel we are we'd sooner fight amongst ourselves than be free of our slavemasters.

[NapalmKev]

We already have big problems, most notably that we're seemingly happy being ground underfoot.  If some working class tosser doesn't need 38 pounds a week, a multi-millionaire doesn't need 40 000 pounds a week on top of paid room and board, travel costs and expenses.  It's the fuckers at the top that need looking at, not bottom-feeders, but like the obedient chattel we are we'd sooner fight amongst ourselves than be free of our slavemasters.

Exactly right!

Cheers