Dominic Cummings earned himself the moniker ‘Svengali’ by, as far as I can work out, talking to people in Wetherspoons and listening to what they had to say. Which was essentially that they didn’t like the EU. Wow. All the next political ‘Svengali’ needs to do if they want to sort out the worklessness problem in Britain is to… drum roll… talk to people in Morrisons cafés.
Peter Hitchens agreed recently with Aaron’s Bastani’s X post where he lamented the Establishment’s detachment from the rest of the country. Which MP or civil servant or charity/NGO boss, or indeed journalist, would consider having lunch at the Morrisons café in Totton, Southampton with the assorted bunch of unemployed, men in high vis, unskilled, upskilling and retired? None obviously. Well, they should; for there they will discover why certain people are working and others are not.
I usually haunt the sorts of cafés where post-yoga macchiatos cost £4.80 and the staff are better dressed than I am, but recent work has led me to spend time in a variety of supermarket and boarded-up shopping centre cafés. There I have discovered a way of life entirely removed from the Westminster elite. Like Wetherspoons, it is a world that is cheap and friendly to those who find life difficult and want a straightforward good time.
Fraser Nelson may highlight the fact that 5.6 million are on out of work benefits by running a series of graphs on the Spectator data hub, but he would be better off hiring a mini-bus and taking the Department for Work and Pensions for lunch in a supermarket café and talking to people.
I had cause to drive recently to a café in the deep recesses of a deprived coastal town. Like the naive moron that I am, I thought a farmers’ market must be on, so busy was the high street. It was only on parking up and walking to my destination (Costa Coffee in a precinct) that I realised all the street activity was from the hoards of workless enjoying the sunshine and taking their toasties outside. Women my age (45) with no teeth were laughing their heads off with men who were too young to have retired. Everyone was vaping.
My husband insists that MPs and the like have visited ‘cafés’ before. I am not so sure; not these sort. It is the timing that is important. Working folk are busy during the day. They might visit a ‘café’ in the morning to grab their long black and feel the buzz of being with other people ‘going to work’. The vibe at a daytime supermarket/shopping precinct café is an altogether different energy: the genuine camaraderie of those who understand they are a burden to others but are still deserving of good customer service.
I’ve become friendly with those whose paths I now regularly cross. They are just as annoyed at the state of the country as everybody else.
“Look at that,” said one chap wearing now redundant high vis, a memory of another life in work, “the council don’t give a shit about us”. He pointed to a pile of rubbish bags that blighted the entrance to the shopping precinct. I’ve had many conversations now with people who explain to me the fine tuning of their ‘payments’ and ‘credits’ and ‘rent’ and ‘benefits’ and how many hours they would have to work to make the same amount. “There just isn’t that sort of job for me,” said one woman with a 20-year-old son with no job (or qualifications) still living at home, “Not with my responsibilities,” she added. Later that day they were going to the food bank and then a jumble sale.
At the superb Morrisons Café in Totton, Southampton today I was greeted like an old friend. “Sit down there dearie, that’s it, we’ll bring your pie to you.” Most tables were full of various people in need, as well as others in hard hats. There was not one person on a laptop. The woman who ran the café with obvious pride knew the majority of customers by name and stood and laughed when handing over the all-day breakfast (the same price as a double macchiato). The atmosphere is invariably jolly with a strong sense of belonging.
And these decent folk want the same things as me and you: enough money to buy their chosen pleasure and their family to have a chance. If welfare provides sufficient funds, then they will not bother to leave this friendly café culture. If welfare doesn’t provide this, and work offers something better than a cheap hot drink and a laugh with a bunch of mates, then they will work.
Move over Cummings, for I am the Svengali now.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
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Not the plan I’m afraid, the elite want to feed ppl bugs, stick mnra jabs in arms, take cars away and rip us off with uselessly expensive energy. The swarm don’t want to communicate with the filth, IE ordinary ppl.
Yet there the filth are. Enjoying themselves!
I hear infinitely more sense from one mouth of a filth than from all the proper people put together!
Cheers!
“[Les rois] ne savent pas qu’ici en bas c’est nous les rois!”
Benefits are equivalent to £30k taxed income which is more than most people earn, so why would you bother to work?
Companies have to give equal pay so the laziest worker gets the same as the hardest worker, another reason not to work.
Finally the strain of 8hrs a day working in an atmosphere where one wrong pronoun would see you cancelled is the final straw for many.
So the question is why would anyone choose to work at all?
“Benefits are equivalent to £30k taxed income which is more than most people earn, so why would you bother to work?”
Even when I worked in the benefits system PAYE gross equivalent payments amounting to £50, 60k pa were not uncomment. Ten years ago. God knows what heights they have now scaled.
The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian one is a matter of time. (Ayn Rand) But we see that clock already ticking down pretty fast. Net Zero, Vaccines, phony climate emergencies, Equality Gender and Race politics, Wokery, Political Correctness. Yes the totalitarian state is here it is just shrouded in flowery language like “Sustainabilty” “Diversity “Inclusion”
Benefits are equivalent to £30k taxed income which is more than most people earn, so why would you bother to work?
The amount of money people on benefits get per year is £4344. Private landlords housing them probably get more but that’s the landlords getting it, not the people themselves. Strangely, nobody ever accuses them of this.
I expect that’s because they are sensible enough to realise that the private landlords are paying most of that money on to plumbers, electricians, glaziers, painters and decorators, plasterers, the man doing a damp survey, EPC surveyors, letting agents, carpenters, scaffolders and general estate workers – to judge from my own experience, that is.
House owning is really such a misery that many an owner of a lot of houses has – at times – honestly contemplated working instead!
:->
Does housing benefit make any difference to who is housed. We spend about £34bn annually on housing benefit. You’re right, it all goes to landlords. But if no one got any housing benefit do you think:
A) we’d have 10 million empty homes?
Or;
B) rents would, collectively, be £34bn less & exactly the same homes would be occupied by much the same people?
That’s difficult to tell because prosperity has risen a lot in the last century but I think the most likely outcome would either be people living in slums in tents and other makeshift accomodations as they do in many parts of the world or how the situation used to be before the second world war. Eg, a lot of people living in very cramped and unhealthly accomodation in dubious buildings, something like a single room flat for a family plus (possibly) one or even two lodgers to make ends meet. Out of my head, I can’t name in English history book describing this in more detail but it should be possible to find one or even some in a well-stocked book store.
The freebies have to be added on : Council tax, free prescriptions, free eye tests and glasses, school meals, uniforms etc.
The benefits system is only a problem for single white males.
This doesn’t make sense because none of this is disposable income. Reality is that the UK welfare state is seriously niggardly and this in a country where the cost of everything is sky-high compared to pretty much anywhere else in Europe. Instead of giving the people enough money that they can really pay for their lives, they get all kinds of special-purpose exemptions for stuff the people who control the welfare state consider necessary and appropriate even for people on welfare. That’s not exactly being nice to them, rather the exact opposite. It’s about keeping them on a short leash.
NB: That’s for ordinary people, ie, not someone like Mick Philpott. But even in this case, he objectively didn’t exactly have a glorious life. Normal people are usually more ambitious and will thus prefer to work for money.
If somebody is gifted by the state exemptions from aspects of normal life items which would be payable by wage earning people then they are in effect being given a tax free benefit / payment. Furthermore the real value of that benefit has to be increased by approximately one third because working people pay their bills after tax deductions. The result of all this is that for many people the “back to or go to work” wage now has to hit around £30k pa or work becomes non-viable. The current minimum wage works out at £25k for a 40 hour week. However, from £25k must be deducted rent, council tax, travel costs, prescriptions.
When you do the sums and realise that every bill is paid from net ie taxed income it is a close run thing for many people in work. If somebody does the maths and realises that going to work means they are better off to the tune of £20 per day they may rightly conclude that work isn’t worth the effort.
Now I wonder why this should be so.
If somebody is gifted by the state exemptions from aspects of normal life items which would be payable by wage earning people then they are in effect being given a tax free benefit / payment.
No, they’re not. These people wouldn’t have any money beyond what they get the from state. Hence, if they were to pay all this themselves, they’d need to get a lot more money from the state. It’s basically, to use the most striking example, give them the money to pay council tax at a certain adminstrative cost. Immediately claw it back from them while incurring more administrative costs for that. That’s completely braindead as the outcome is exactly as without this charade but more expensive. The same is true for anything else you mention which is all payments people with money of their own have to make because the state decreed so.
On top of this comes a significant loss of personal autonomy. Again using council tax as example, if I want this, I can defer actual payment of this for at least a month¹, possibly more, and spend the money on something else. That’s a choice people on benefits don’t have.
Someone whose disposable income is about £13/ day can’t be better of to the tune of £20 per day than somebody who’s working as this would mean that people working in a minium wage job would end up with -£7 per day. This would mean working on minimum wage would lead to a debt of £2555 per year. As people do work for minimum wage, this obviously isn’t the case.
¹ Paid from my bank account via direct debit. I sometimes forget to transfer enough money from my savings account on time. The standard procedure for this that the council tries to deduct double the amount next month if I haven’t paid it until then.
“The amount of money people on benefits get per year is £4344.”
That’s pocket money – when your other expenses are covered by benefits, you don’t need more.
“ Private landlords housing them probably get more but that’s the landlords getting it, not the people themselves.”
Of course they are getting it! Have you never heard of ‘payment in kind’?
A company car is part of a wage package – a benefit in kind. The employee takes a lower wage because the value of a company car makes up for it.
I blame the schools.
I suspect the elites love this sort of thing. A new feudal system where everyone owns nothing, depends entirely on the state and is happy with their coffee and full english in their
ghettofifteen minute community.I always laugh when I see people coming out of the Food bank and hopping into the taxi.
Bit odd waiting outside a food bank watching the poor people..
Except you jumped to a conclusion to quick there mate. —-When I retired I drove taxi’s for a year part time. ——-Trips and back to the food bank were common, with a stop at the Spar shop on the way home top buy big bags of crisps, bottles of cola and 40 silk cut. ————That will be £12.50 for the taxi. Not so poor after all I guess.
JSA for people over 25 is £90.5 per week at the moment which is £362 per month (about ¾ of the rate in Germany where cost of living is a lot cheaper). I suggest that Ms Gray tries to live on that for a while to determine how enviable it really is.
I find it similarly enlightening talking to check-out staff (Morrisons and LIDL are my top choices). They are very happy to chat about their lives, I think they are pleased to be treated as a normal person.
I understand that the staff in Waitrose don’t get similar consideration from their customers, or are they called clients at Waitrose?
I always make a point of chatting to the check-out staff (in my case it’s usually Sainsbury or Lidl). The job is monotonous and – having briefly done it myself – the routine small talk becomes extremely tedious.
So I try to think of something different to talk about …. to make it a bit more interesting …. and the individual usually seems quite happy to respond, particularly those who are not native English speakers. They are human beings, doing a necessary but fairly boring job, and should be treated with respect and consideration.
I think Joanne Gray still doesn’t really get it.
The people she is encountering in the deprived seaside town and Morrison’s cafe are fully aware that they are expendable and are not wanted in the Brave New World the Establishment is creating.
They know they are (in the words of Hillary Clinton) considered to be deplorables. They know that every time they open their mouths to speak, the lefty so-called intelligentsia sneers at them and the politicians despise, insult and mock them.
Why on earth should they bust a gut to get up, travel to work, do a tedious low status job …. and at the end of it, bring home less than they can get on welfare? These people aren’t stupid ….. they have common-sense and are street-smart.
They won’t go back to work unless the CULTURE of the workplace changes and they are treated by the Establishment with something approaching respect.
If we were in the days of barter, if you didn’t produce something of value to others you had nothing to give in exchange, so you starved… or thieved, or started to produce.
A population where 40% plus do not produce anything living at the expense of those who do – wealth is transferred from producers to non-producers – will collapse. We are close. The next Labour Government and production-destroying Net Zero will bring it on.
Since we don’t have barter, the Government prints valueless money and acts as Middleman thief – so the non-producers don’t have to bother – and impoverishes producers.
Not surprisingly, producers increasingly realise the futility of producing and join the ranks of non-producers.
Universal suffrage, income tax, welfare statism has produced a population which believes it is entitled to have others provide for them what they don’t provide for themselves, and a Right to other people’s money to be used for their own purposes – aka greed. Elections are jostling contests to see which political gang can get the biggest share of the plunder extracted from others using the coercive powers of the State.
Non-producers, apart from the benefits crowd, include politicians, the national and local civil servants, the millions of skill-free immigrants, those in NGOs and other useless activities like ‘outreach’, equality, climate, diversity compliance duties, for example.
Perhaps a return to barter would fix it.