Lord Beveridge, the( Socialist) architect of the postwar welfare state, was no fool.
He saw the dangers, as well as the merits of a comprehensive welfare system.
Sadly a lot of fools, or worse, did not listen to all of what he said.
As he warned us, “The danger of providing benefits,(= welfare payments, sometimes benefits in kind, such as housing) which are both adequate in amount and indefinite in duration” is “that men as creatures who adapt to circumstances may settle down (=etablecerse o acomodarse)to them.”
He would be horrified at the extent of welfare dependency today.
It is not just, as he put it, “men becoming habituated to idleness”. There is a growing army of men and women, whether in or out of work, dependent on the state (that is the taxpayer) for their living. They are not all at the bottom of the stack of society.
An increasing number are in the £100,000 a year class, with pensions to match.
It seems to me that, as Beveridge instinctively understood, the most habit-forming, dependency-creating, narcotic substance known to man is the milk which flows from the collective breast of the taxpayers.
The number of addicts is rising every year.
Many are now hereditary welfare junkies, born of junkie parents into junkie families, trapped by the welfare pushers into the poverty trap.(Most welfare systems have a poverty trap, that loss of benefits usually means that at some point you are actually poorer if you work, or are married, or take responsability for yourself, etc)
They are offered no way out of the trap.
Work leaves them worse off, for that means they would be taxed to feed their own addiction.
The pushers, as in the trade of other narcotics, are mostly reliant on the taxpayers’ milk, too. Many of them are nice hand-wringing Guardianistas.(followers of the Guardian newspaper mentality))
They would like things to be other than they are, but they could not afford it to be so.
These are the upper class of those in dependency ( Dependant, dependancy etc are code words for addict and addiction )upon the taxpayer and they live a good life.
Some will be found at Regional Government Conferences in agreeable parts of Europe.
There those of high social standing as “executives” in local government (mostly reluctant to let the poor old milch cow know how much of its milk they imbibe).
Then there is the quangocracy. They are all part of the dependency culture, with priority in the queue to nuzzle into the (until now) ample bosom of the taxpayer.
They are not all worthless scroungers.
Many work very hard at jobs which need not be done.
Others do jobs which need to be done, carrying out the essential functions of the state, and it is those (like soldiers) who are most at risk of being shouldered aside in the great milk rush.
However, that milk is a dangerous substance.( substance is the owrd used to describe drugs in law"illegal substances " etc )
The destruction of the House of Commons owes much to its addictive and mind-bending nature. Last week Members of Parliament concluded that at this time of a soaring budget deficit and inevitable cuts in expenditure, the most important, the highest priority expenditure which must go ahead regardless of our straitened circumstances, was about half a million pounds for a Parliamentary creche.
If Members of the House of Commons think that this should have priority over body armour for troops, or care for the sick and vulnerable, then surely it is them themselves who should be in the creche.
Alas, I fear that over recent years so many of the middle classes have been seduced into public sector dependency and found it a secure, well paid and comfortable place.
I wonder if enough of those turkeys will vote for an early Christmas on May 6.
Thank you to (almost) all who post on this site. I usually learn something from your comments.
I think “dirlada” was right. Any one in any walk of life may make honest mistakes, even sensible mistakes, but in that recent incest case it was over 100 people from 28 different agencies, all making some pretty obvious mistakes which was the worry. And right again, “Bionic Raspberry”. What about the offenders and the extended family too?
Oh, “crownarmourer”, what a temptation! Me as Lord Protector.( The official title of Oliver Cromwell,Britain's last military Dictator, 350 years ago "Lord Protector of the Commonweath"-mike) No, I do not think so. I sussed out how power corrupted him when I was a 15-year-old history student.
Again, I must tell “incensed” that I simply am not Mr Tebbit. I lost that title. I don’t mind Tebbit, Norman or, as cabbies usually address me, “Norm” but I am not “Mr”. And I hope that you still might see the difference between the EU and the USSR. Millions of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and others who have experienced both can do so. Oh, and just a thought: were not the progenitors of the BNP ready to sell out to Hitler?
Spot on was James I. There should be no concessions for those immigrants who refuse to integrate. They are colonists.
And I am sorry, “djw2007” for wrongly attributing that communist jibe to you. I think that “Laveen Ladharem” is correct. The Conservative Party is right to modernise – but there is nothing modernising about going back to the 1960s-style lack of belief in anything except the “middle way”.
I was really concerned about poor David Dee. He still cannot understand that it was always open to Sinn Fein to win elections if they could persuade people to vote for them. But they could not do so, so they created the IRA to kill people who did not vote for them. Now the poor thing is upset because Sinn Fein cannot even win elections in the Republic. Never mind – he must be happy that “dissident republicans” are still busy killing people who do not agree with them.
He should try banging his head on the wall. It is better manners than the foul-mouthed abuse that springs from a fouled-up brain.
David Jay obviously has no memory of 1940-1941. France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia were defeated. America and Ireland were neutral and USSR and Germany were allies. That was pretty lonely. Thank goodness for the Empire.
To be fair, we had one great advantage. We were not a multicultural society in those days.
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