Universal Basic Income vs the current welfare system

In this article I'm going to set out the case that a Universal Basic Income based welfare system would be a massive improvement on the current punitive welfare bureaucracy in the UK.

What is Universal Basic Income?

[Main article] 

I've already written a fairly comprehensive article explaining Universal Basic Income, so for the sake of brevity I'm not going to go into masses of detail about it again here, other than to say that it is a form of unconditional welfare payment to which all citizens are entitled.

Ideally the UBI payment should be set at a rate which covers the basic costs of living (housing, water, energy, food) meaning that nobody would be forced to live in abject poverty in 21st Century Britain. Those wanting anything more than a frugal and very basic standard of living (stuff like foreign holidays, expensive furniture, new cars, fashionable clothes ...) would have a strong incentive to work in order to pay for their luxuries.

One of the main benefits of a universal, unconditional welfare payment would be the removal of virtually all of the costly means testing bureaucracy from the welfare system. Another benefit would be the near complete elimination of welfare fraud, which would free up teams of fraud investigators to go after much bigger fish such as tax-dodgers and organised crime networks.
                   

What is wrong with the current welfare system?

There are so many flaws in the current welfare system that it would be literally impossible to list them all in a blog post. It was in bad enough shape when New Labour left office in 2010 but after four long years of Iain Duncan Smith's hopeless mismanagement, it is now a humanitarian disaster of bad planning, poor implementation and dehumanising bureaucracy. For the sake of brevity I'll limit myself to detailing just four of the worst aspects of the current welfare system, and how the introduction of UBI would represent a significant improvement.

1. The disincentive to work

One of the biggest problems with the current welfare system is the way in which it creates strong disincentives to work through the removal of benefits. In many cases benefits are removed at such a rate that people find themselves even worse off if they decide to work. 

Many hundreds of thousands of people have found themselves receiving desultory increases in income (often less than £1 per hour worked) because of the way that benefits are removed almost as fast as additional income is earned, or have even found themselves economically worse off for having found a job.

At best, the additional income through finding work is desultory, at worst finding a job actually costs people a share of the pittance they were surviving on. Few would argue that these factors are not strong disincentives to work.

Iain Duncan Smith's catastrophically botched Universal Credit scheme was supposedly designed to eliminate these appalling disincentive to work, but research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that it actually does no such thing. Should Universal Credit even survive Iain Duncan Smith's incompetent management, many people would still be financially worse off should they decide to increase the number of hours they work under the Universal Credit system.

Even though Iain Duncan Smith and the DWP relentlessly talk up their Universal Credit scheme as the biggest welfare reform in decades, it's absolutely clear that it is actually nothing more than hugely expensive tinkering with an already dysfunctional system.

The introduction of a system based on Universal Basic Income would neatly resolve the disincentive to work problem because if the public are always entitled to their basic unconditional income, paid work would always result in a notable increase in individual income, since the individual would be earning their salary, on top of their unconditional basic income payment.

2. Sanctions

The problem that the disincentive to work problem presents to the establishment order is that it is extremely difficult to tackle long-term unemployment when work doesn't pay, or results in nothing more than a desultory increase in overall income.

The fact that people can't be positively encouraged into work with the "carrot" of increased income means that the only motivational tool left for the state to use is the "stick" of rendering people absolutely destitute through arbitrarily applied sanctions if they won't comply with DWP demands.

Nearly a million people were left destitute by DWP benefits sanctions in 2013. The widespread use of benefits sanctions is a humanitarian catastrophe, and I'm not exaggerating with hyperbolic language either. Very many people have died during their benefits sanction period (most often the mentally disabled and severely ill). In many cases people were still fighting appeals against arbitrary DWP sanctions until the day they died from their illnesses, in many other cases people committed suicide or even starved to death.

Iain Duncan Smith and the DWP have repeatedly lied that there are no such things as sanctions targets and sanctions league tables, however sanctions targets and the official DWP sanctions league tables were both leaked to the press in 2013.

Sanctions targets and league tables are particularly vile things because it is blatantly much easier for DWP staff under enormous pressure to meet their monthly sanctions quotas by tricking the mentally disabled and uneducated into violating DWP rules, than it is to expend a great deal of effort in catching out the minority of committed benefits "scroungers", who often understand the DWP rules better than the staff themselves.

Under Universal Basic Income this kind of deliberate impoverishment by the state simply couldn't happen because everyone would be entitled to an unconditional subsistance income. This would mean that the pressure on DWP staff to trick vulnerable people into making mistakes in order to fulfill their sanctions quotas would be completely eliminated.

The power of the state to use absolute destitution as a social weapon against the public would be completely removed by virtue of the fact that the public would have an unconditional right to their subsistence income.

3. Means Testing

There are two main problems with the idea that all welfare payments must be means tested.

The first is the costly burden of bureaucracy that this approach loads onto the system. The current welfare system employs tens of thousands of people to means test welfare payments, welfare recipients are made to waste countless hours filling out forms with the same personal information and collecting supporting evidence over and again, and the whole system costs countless £billions to administer.

The second problem with means tested benefits is the way in which they are perceived by the public. When a benefit is universal, very few people strongly oppose it because everyone is entitled to it. Take the provision of universal healthcare through the NHS as an example. The NHS has very strong public support, with just 7% of the public favouring NHS privatisation (not that this remarkable level of public support has stopped the Tories from carving up the NHS and giving it away to their donors).
   
If the state decided to bring in new rules to means test health provision (lets say anyone earning over £20,000 per year would have to pay compulsory medical insurance and/or pay for their medical services) there would almost certainly be a large decline in the level of public support for the NHS. It's much easier to convince people that welfare provision is a very good thing if they are entitled to a share of it. If they get the idea that they are paying for it, but that they are barred from receiving any of the benefit, it's easy to understand how strong feelings of resentment would arise.

The introduction of Universal Basic Income would resolve both of these problems.

The bureaucratic costs of administering the system would be massively reduced if the vast majority of people received a standard UBI payment. Of course administrative costs cannot be completely eliminated from any system, however, the lower the cost of administration, the higher the share of the budget that actually ends up where it should be - with welfare recipients. UBI would ensure that a much higher proportion of the welfare budget actually gets paid out to the public, rather than being wasted on the administrative costs of endless means testing.

The introduction of UBI would also assuage public resentment at the cost of the welfare system. The fact that everyone would be entitled to UBI would mean that nobody would be left thinking "why should I have to pay for this when I get no direct benefit from it".

4. Corporate parasitism

In recent years there has been an ever accelerating drive to bring in private outsourcing companies (A4e, Atos, Serco, Capita, G4S, Pertemps, Seetec ...) to carry out the administrative functions of the welfare system. This process was not started by the Tories (New Labour were the ones who introduced the discriminatory Atos WCA assessment regime for the disabled for example), however, under Iain Duncan Smith's "leadership" the DWP has brought in ever more private outsourcing companies into the welfare system on vast £multi-million contracts. Some of the most shocking examples include, the expansion of the notoriously inaccurate Atos WCA regime, the hopelessly underperforming Work Programme and their "Help to Work" forced labour scheme.

Many of these parasitical outsourcing companies make near enough 100% of their revenues from government contracts, and the contracts are so badly written and one-sided that it really doesn't matter how badly these outsourcing company perform, they suffer no financial penalties, they still get paid and they still get awarded even more government contracts despite their appalling track records of failure.

The problem is so serious that even companies like G4S that have carried out vast frauds against the taxpayer still end up being handed more £multi-million contracts, even though they were supposedly barred from bidding for government contracts during the tendering process.

Another example of a corporate outsourcing parasite that has been caught out defrauding the taxpayer is A4e. This is a company which made 100% of its revenues from government contracts at the time its director Emma Harrison decided to award herself an £8.6 million dividend. Given that all of the companies revenues are generated through the taxpayer funded "welfare to work" system, it's easy to see how this vast dividend represents nothing more than skimming off a percentage of the welfare budget to fund the lifestyle of a very wealthy individual.

The introduction of a system based on Universal Basic Income would eliminate the possibility of corporate outsourcing parasites skimming the welfare budget and diverting money that should be helping the most vulnerable people in society into their corporate accounts.

With the massively reduced bureaucracy, and the end of sanctions backed forced labour schemes that UBI would bring about, the scope for corporate parasitism of the welfare system would be severely reduced.

Of course there would still be a role for private companies looking to profit from helping people into work, but they'd have to help people train for and find the kind of work they want, rather than just hoovering up government subsidies in return for forcing them onto unpaid forced labour schemes under the threat of absolute destitution via benefits sanctions.


Conclusion

The current system was bad enough before the Tories even came to power, but after four long years of Iain Duncan Smith's maniacal blundering it's in the most appalling shape it's ever been in (and many would argue deliberately so). Iain Duncan Smith's tenure at the DWP has been little but a dreadfully prolonged systemic failure.                   
I'm not trying to say that Universal Basic Income is some kind of wonderful panacea. It wouldn't cure all of the problems in society in one simple step. There are no such things as magic bullets. What I have tried to demonstrate is that the principle of UBI could make the foundations of a much better welfare system than the current shambles.

I believe that a person would have to be delusional to argue the case that the current welfare system is well designed, well managed and efficient, therefore most sensible people would accept that there are grounds for improvement.

In my view you can either support the near identical prescriptions of the Westminster establishment parties (tinkering with the broken system) or you can support a completely new approach, be it based on Universal Basic Income, or some other fundamental reform to the system.

I suppose it comes down to this. If you are naturally a right-wing authoritarian who believes that the state has a right/duty to use the threat of absolute destitution as a social weapon against the public to force them into paid or unpaid work, you're probably quite happy with the way things are done right now.
             
If however you believe that the state has no right to force people, including tens of thousands of children, into absolute poverty simply because a family member committed "welfare crimes" such as being five minutes late to an appointment, selling remembrance poppies, attending a job interview or even suffering a heart attack during an interview, then Universal Basic Income represents an elegant solution to the problem. If every citizen has a right to an unconditional subsistence income, then the state would no longer have the ability to use the threat of poverty/hunger/cold/homelessness as a social weapon.
   

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Mark Hoban's totalitarian tendencies

As anyone that is familiar with my work will know, I'm not the kind of writer that chucks around accusations of fascism lightly. Having said that, I'm beginning to have serious concerns about the totalitarian tendencies of the Tory MP Mark Hoban, who is the current Minister of State for Employment in the Coalition government.

In January 2013 I became aware of the fact that Mark Hoban (or one of his lackeys) was routinely censoring his Facebook page to remove any signs of criticism. It didn't matter how politely written the message, if it criticised or questioned Hoban or Tory policy in any way it would be routinely deleted. I pointed out this censorship strategy to the followers of the Another Angry Voice Facebook page, who then gleefully "Facebombed" Hoban's page with polite criticism and questions about his attitude towards censorship. Other Facebook groups such as the excellent Atos Miracles directed their followers in a similar manner. After several days of mass censorship, Hoban took the step of deleting his Facebook page entirely to silence the debate once and for all (if only Hoban could be deleted from the Houses of Parliament as easily as he was from Facebook!).

I don't see the removal of Mark's Facebook page as any kind of victory, the intention wasn't to chase him off social media, he has as much right to be there as anyone. The idea was to test his censorship policy by posting polite questions and criticism. The fact that he mass deleted all of those comments then deleted his page rather than respond to people's legitimate and (in the main part) politely worded concerns is a sad indictment of his attitude: If you can't win the debate, then simply delete it; censor it out of existence.

Just a couple of weeks later Hoban was thrust into the spotlight when one of the Tory flagship unemployment policies (forcing the unemployed to work for no pay, often for months at a stretch for profit making corporations) was declared unlawful by the Court of Appeals. In response to this, Hoban came out with one of the most absurd political statements I've ever seen. Here's what he said:

"The court has backed our right to require people to take part in programmes which will help them get into work"

Lets just gloss over the fact that Hoban is trying to paint a catastrophic defeat of Tory Workfare (Corporate Welfare Scrounging) schemes at the Court of Appeals as some kind of victory and his absurd misuse of the word "help" to describe the process of stripping people of their labour rights and deliberately undermining the statutory minimum wage, to move straight on to his fascistic use of the concept of "rights".

Hoban's statement clearly demonstrates that he believes that it is his right, as a member of the government, to force people to work for no wages on his Corporate Welfare Scrounging schemes (in breach of their right to earn the statutory minimum wage for their labour). This is a clear cut demonstration that he believes that any rights that the public have are secondary to his rights as a government minister; that ministerial rights supersede human rights. Essentially he is expressing the fascist sentiment that:

The public has a duty to serve the government, not that the government has a duty to serve the public

Lets also consider the nature of the schemes he spends so much of his time defending; Workfare, the Work Programme, the Atos WCA disability regime. They all have one thing in common, which is that they are government policies enforced by private sector companies. The use of outsourcing companies such as A4e (that made 100% of their 2011 turnover of £180 million from lucrative government contracts) to administer the functions of the state is a classic example of corporatisation. The parallels with fascist Italy are easy to draw. The Fascist leader Benito Mussolini was an adherent of the corporatist ideology and is often quoted as having said "fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power".

There is another parallel with Fascist Italy: In the mid 1920s Mussolini dismantled virtually all constitutional and conventional restraints on his power. The February 2013 Workfare Court of Appeals ruling found that the Tories had "exceeded their powers because any such mandatory work schemes must first be "authorised by Parliament". The schemes Hoban spends his time defending are quite clearly unlawful for this reason, but instead of giving up on them, Hoban and the Tories have stated their intention to simply redraw the rules and bypass the judgement. Like Mussolini, the Tories running the DWP have absolutely no intention of allowing themselves to be restrained by the rule of law.

As I said in the introduction, I refuse to bandy the word fascist around as an insult. Using it as a "bad word" to hurl at someone with whom we disagree is firstly a pitiful debating technique, but also a huge insult to all those that suffered and died as a consequence of 20th Century fascism. However, in this case I don't believe I'm doing that, I'm presenting Hoban's words and actions as evidence that if he isn't consciously a fascist sympathiser, he is at least displaying an awful lot of fascistic tendencies.

Just to recap:

• Hoban clearly has contempt for the concept of open debate, demonstrating a totalitarian attitude towards dissent on his Facebook page. Instead of engaging in debate and political discourse, he simply censored out of existence all signs of criticism (never a good strategy on social media) until the page became untenable. Then he deleted it completely to silence public debate over government policy
• Hoban effort to paint the catastrophic Court of Appeals defeat as a victory and a vindication of unlawful Tory policies demonstrates that he is not averse to using the black art of propaganda
• Hoban statement on government rights displays the fascistic sentiment that government right to dictate supersedes public rights such as the right to earn the statutory minimum wage in return for labour.
• Hoban's work at the DWP involves implementing and defending the corporatisation of the state.
• Hoban's statements that the government will simply redraw the rules to allow these unlawful schemes to continue is a clear demonstration of his determination to dismantle or bypass all restraints on his power.

Given all of this one is left wondering what the much admired opponent of fascism and Tory Prime Minister Winston Churchill would make of Mark Hoban and the current state of the Tory party. Not only that the Tory party would welcome such an individual, but that they would actually make him a government minister. I believe Churchill would have been appalled. Churchill was famously sharp-witted and eloquent, and just about the nicest thing I've heard anyone say of Hoban's performance after the Court of Appeals ruling was "you know when you have a friend who knows fuck all apart from what hes been told? Hoban was just like that".

In the mid 1930s Churchill was actually an outspoken figure within the Tory party as an overt critic of fascism. At the time huge numbers of Tory MPs and Lords were joining revolting Fascist organisations like the Anglo-German Link (which fostered links between the Tories and the Nazi government in Germany) and the vile anti-semitic Right Club (dedicated to ridding the Tory party of Jewish influence). Churchill was a marginalised and outspoken figure in the Tory party because of his calls for re-armament and an end to appeasement of Nazi Germany. One can be fairly certain that had Hoban been around in the mid-1930 he wouldn't have been standing at Churchill's side as a critic at the margins of a Tory party which had become dangerously fixated on the allure of fascism and anti-semitism.

One would have thought that given the shocking history of fascism within the Tory party, they would be very keen to weed out those that demonstrate anything resembling fascist sentiments, but this has clearly not been the case with Hoban.

Even if Hoban isn't actually an overt fascist sympathiser, he certainly has many of the attributes the are necessary in order for fascism to thrive; a lack of intellect, a totalitarian contempt for debate, an fervent belief in the corporatisation of the state, a tendency to resort to propaganda and an ideological stance that relies on the idea that "the rights of the government supersede the rights of the public".

Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the PayPal donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

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The Workfare slavery debate.

A lot has been written about the Tory obsession with making the unemployed "work for their benefits" under Workfare schemes. There are many valid criticisms of Workfare, here are 10 of the best.

• Many of these workfare placements described by the Tories as "valuable work-experience" involve nothing more than months of menial tasks like shelf stacking and floor sweeping with no real training at all.
• Many unemployed people have been forced to give up education, training or skilled work in the voluntary sector in order to stack shelves at places like Poundland on Workfare schemes.
• Future employers are hardly going to be more impressed by a period of mandatory unpaid menial labour at Poundland or Argos than by the use of initiative to undertake training or find skilled work in the voluntary sector.
• Early evidence shows that very few workfare trainees get taken on full time at the end of their mandatory period of unpaid work, often to be replaced by another mandatory Workfare placement.
• The provision of an unlimited supply of workfare labourers actually gives companies the incentive to sack their paid low-skilled employees, thus exacerbating the unemployment situation.
• The main beneficiaries of these workfare schemes are certainly not the unemployed, they are the corporations provided with free rightless labour at the taxpayers' expense.
• The other main beneficiaries are corporations like A4E, G4S, Serco and Atos who have landed lucrative government contracts to administer these schemes. Some of whom have engaged in fraud in order to soak up even more taxpayers' cash.
• Apprenticeships are already a proven system for providing "work experience", the £millions that have been poured into parasitic companies like A4E to administer workfare schemes would surely have been better spent funding apprenticeships with small and medium enterprises, with a view to providing long-term employment opportunities for skillful and dedicated youngsters.
• If the work is worth doing, then surely it is worth paying someone to do it.
• Mandatory unpaid labour schemes like Workfare can be seen as a deliberate attempt to undermine employment law and the minimum wage. Hardly surprising given the Tory contempt for the value of labour.

The problem is that many of these criticisms are completely overshadowed by allegations that Workfare is a form of slavery. The main problem with the allegation that Workfare is a form of slavery is that it gives Workfare apologists a point of attack. They can take the upper hand in the debate by feigning moral outrage that such "work for your benefits" schemes are nowhere near as harsh as the traditional forms of slavery; American cotton plantations, Japanese prisoner of war camps, Soviet Gulags or modern day sex-workers trafficked into Britain from Eastern Europe.

My position is that it is fair to compare Workfare schemes with slavery, after all "mandatory, unpaid labour" would seem to be a fitting description for both mandatory Workfare schemes and of the previous examples that are unquestionably considered to be slavery. The difference of course is in severity, Workfare victims are not treated as the legal property of the slave owners, as in the US cotton plantations. They are not provided starvation rations, viciously beaten and eventually worked to death as in the Soviet Gulags and Japanese prisoner of war camps and they are not held captive like modern day slaves working in the UK sex trade.

If we use sexual assault as an analogy, there are many grades of sexual assault, from drunkenly groping a co-worker at the office Christmas party to appalling sexual abuse inflicted upon very young children in the production of child-pornography films. The argument that Workfare is not a form of slavery because it demeans the victims of "real slavery" is akin to the argument that getting groped by your boss shouldn't be referred to as sexual assault because it demeans the victims of "real sexual assault".

Obviously the argument that getting groped by your boss is not sexual assault because it isn't severe enough is absurd and wrong. I've been drunk many hundreds of times and have always kept my hands to myself so other people, especially people with big responsibilities should be able to control themselves too. The argument that unwanted sexual contact is not sexual assault because it wasn't as severe as others have suffered is unsustainable, therefore the argument that mandatory unpaid labour is not a form of slavery because it isn't as severe as others have suffered is also invalid.

My view is that describing mandatory Workfare placements as slavery is not wrong, since mandatory unpaid labour would seem to be an almost perfect description of slavery. However it is an unhelpful tactic because it gives Workfare apologists the opportunity to create an argument based on the appeal to emotion strategy, which is a very persuasive argument to people that are not versed in analytical thought.

The typical workfare apologist has to resort to appeal to emotion tactics because when it comes to evidence and socio-economic arguments, they don't have a leg to stand on. Take Tory Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith who stated that "those who oppose this process are opposed to hard work". This is a clear example of the appeal to emotion strategy. He disparages opponents to his schemes as lazy, workshy parasites, rather than people with legitimate concerns about the state forcing people to work for free, with no labour rights in order to boost corporate profits.

Giving Workfare fans the opportunity to raise a strong appeal to emotion argument by invoking comparisons to slavery allows them to completely sidestep more rigorous criticisms (as listed above) and put up a smokescreen of moral outrage.

My advice to those that wish to voice their opposition to Tory mandatory unpaid labour schemes is to avoid comparisons to slavery and to stick to facts and analysis. This way the Workfare apologist is left with fewer options; they can try to counter the facts and analysis (extremely difficult given the growing weight of evidence), they can simply remain silent or they can try to raise their own independent appeal to emotion by castigating "the unemployed" as feckless workshy scroungers. If they resort to name calling and generalisations about the unemployed out them as unthinking reactionaries using using obvious appeal to emotion tactics and counter their ignorant assertions with facts.

A famous quote says "Do not argue with idiots, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience" however if you feel as strongly as I do that these Workfare schemes are a combination of blatant attacks on labour rights and taxpayer funded corporate handouts, then it is important that our voices are heard and that the argument is won. Therefore we need to avoid getting bogged down in emotional arguments and attempts to define "slavery" and stay focused on the facts and rigorous analysis.

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Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

A letter to fans of Workfare

Introduction: Workfare is a UK government scheme designed to force unemployed people to work for their benefits on unpaid "work experience" schemes at corporations such as Poundland, Superdrug, Argos, Primark, Tesco and WHSmith.

Dear Workfare supporter,

To be blunt, you are an economically illiterate moron. Your vindictive attitudes against the unemployed make you think that forcing them to work for their benefits is fair, but it is not. If the job is worth doing it is worth paying somebody to do. 

It doesn't matter how much reactionary rhetoric you spew about the unemployed, how often you call them "scrounger" or complain that they are getting "handouts", your bile doesn't make Workfare any less wrong or any more economically literate. You boast that the "lazy scroungers" will get "valuable work experience" from these schemes, however many people that have been forced onto Workfare schemes were made to quit their education, training or voluntary sector work in order to do menial tasks for no pay at places like Poundland, thus reducing their employablity and taking menial work that the company should have been PAYING SOMEBODY ELSE TO DO.

Would any sane employer really consider six months mandatory unpaid menial labour sweeping floors, opening boxes and finding things on shelves at Argos to be better qualifications than the same time spent in the voluntary sector learning new skills or in education or training? Who are the employers that would rather have an employee that was forced to do unskilled work for six months ahead of someone that showed the initiative to find skilled work in the voluntary sector or to improve their skills base with training or education? 

It seems that the only employers likely to value experience of shelf stacking and floor sweeping above skills and qualifications are exactly the same companies that the government are providing with an unlimited supply of free labour to do such menial tasks, all paid for at the taxpayers' expense.

Upon closer inspection Workfare isn't a scheme to stop lazy unemployed people from getting handouts at all. It is a scheme to give handouts to the corporate sector in the form of free labour without employment rights. Anyone with a low-mid skilled job should be very concerned about the Tory government's plans to expand Workfare. After all it would be against their employers' financial interests to keep a pool of paid employees with labour rights when they could just lay them off and replace them with a stream of workfare slaves, who don't need to be paid and can be sacked at will.

Even the name Workfare is deceptive. When spoken it is an Orwellian construct that sounds like "work-fair", extremely misleading when in reality it is a massively unfair scheme. Is there any better word to describe forced, unpaid labour than slavery? It took the working classes centuries of class-struggle to negotiate decent pay and labour rights, yet these hard won rights are being unfairly undermined by schemes like Workfare, supported by a crowd of cheering reactionaries like you. The Tories and their financial backers rely on the support of unthinking reactionaries in order to continue their divide and rule class warfare against ordinary working people like you. 

Your tendency to vilify the unemployed is a classic example of the "blame the victim fallacy". The real people to blame for the scale of unemployment are the politicians that believe the neoliberal theory that competitvity can be achieved through deliberately creating and maintaining a vast pool of unemployed people in order to increase job competition and drive down labour costs. The whole idea is as pathetic and as economically illiterate as Workfare. Maintaining a standing army of unemployed people may reduce wages and create private sector profits, but these profits are eclipsed at the national scale by the increased cost of welfare for this vast pool of unemployed labour (which has to be recouped through taxation) and from the stunningly obvious fact that national productivity is reduced if millions of workers have no jobs. If you must get angry at the unemployment situation, perhaps getting angry at the people that have been deliberately mismanaging the economy over the last three decades in order to create a surplus of labour might be a tad more rational.

As it is now there are millions of unemployed people chasing hundreds of thousands of jobs, in many areas there are hundreds of applicants for every menial low paid job. Once you recognise this, you must recognise that it is the system, not the unemployed that are to blame for high levels of unemployment. It will only be when the public put pressure on the state to abandon the defunct neoliberal pseudo-economic theory of the necessary unemployed, that full employment will return. If this ever happens then feel free to return to getting angry at the people that still choose to be unemployed when there are plenty of jobs to go around, until then, use your brain and direct your anger at the real culprits.

Think of it this way: The vast majority of unemployed people are just ordinary working people without jobs. They are not getting "handouts" because they paid for their benefits through National Insurance contributions when they did have jobs. Yes there are some feckless "scroungers", but they are massively outnumbered by the unemployed that have worked and would rather return to work for a decent wage rather than live on the pittance that the state provides for those without work. These people will not benefit from several months of unpaid "work experience" stacking shelves at Superdrug. They would almost certainly benefit from retraining, help with their CV, advice on good interview technique or help identifying the transferable skills they posses much more than being treated like feckless workshy scroungers to be exploited as a free source of labour for cost-cutting corporations.

The only beneficiaries from Workfare are the corporations that want to cut costs by replacing paid labour with free labour and companies like A4E, Atos, Serco and G4S that have landed lucrative government contracts to organise such schemes. It doesn't matter that you resent the fact that someone you know doesn't have a job, because you work hard and they don't. If they are forced to work for their benefits at Primark, the work is simply being denied to someone that would have happily done the same work for minimum wage. Thus there is another unemployed person somewhere else for some other reactionary halfwit to get wound up about.

Let me reiterate; if a job is worth doing, it is worth paying someone to do. For every unemployed person that gets forced into one of these corporate welfare schemes, there is one less low-paid, low-skilled job in the economy, thus one more unemployed person elsewhere.

If we allow the government to carry on undermining labour rights and the minimum wage like this in order to give "handouts" to the corporate sector, eventually millions will be forced out of their jobs to be replaced by Workfare slaves. Vindictive people like you, that support these schemes are actually supporting the creation of unemployment. Thus the people to blame for unemployment are not the "lazy scroungers" that are unemployed, it is the lazy thinkers and reactionaries that buy into the Tory blame the victim fallacy and support this kind of barmy, economically illiterate scheme without thinking through the obvious consequences.

Yours Faithfully

AAV

Next time you see someone supporting Workfare and mouthing off about "scroungers" feel free to link to this article instead of typing out a long comment trying to explain what an economically illiterate reactionary they are being.

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