Where do you go if you're on benefits and living in 'social housing'
The scrap heap
According to my housing association, if you have 2 children under 16, and they don't share a room, and you are working but receive any, I'll repeat that ANY housing benefit, you will lose it. Make them share. Who do they think they are? Little under priveliged kids who's parents were too stupid to have children when their incomes were not higher than the poverty line.
Housing benefit, even if its a minimal amount is an indicator that either your rent is too high, or your income is too low. It means that the children of these parents can get them a meal at school, help with uniforms.
Quite basic help.
But invaluable.
It's also about 15% into the proposed cuts that are to come. It won't affect me because of Joshuas DLA, until they find a way to squash that, but on behalf of the people it will affect, it makes me mad.
If you're on income support or JSA, as the Universal Credit will become, you will also lose that benefit, but as we're all scroungers anyway, surely thats what we deserve?
Because the only people worth caring about are those that took advantage of the free university courses (soap dodging scroungers) or Mum and Dads money, and have lovely, un benefitted lives and keep out of the way of everyone else.
See, in life, noone cares where you've come from or where you're going. They just see the worst you've done, or statistics of the things you did.
Well, we can't all be graduates. If we could have been, it would be compulsory for everyone to obtain a degree at high school level and therefore be worthless.
We can't all keep awesome jobs, because some of us have children with conditions that mean fortnightly or monthly meetings at schools or with case workers and development workers and employers are surprisingly resistant at having to deal with X who's had her lunch at X.XX every day for the last 10 years and now is having a BITCH fit at being asked to shift that around for me so I can have the extra hour.
We don't enforce maintenance and childcare on errant fathers enough, it's still seen as very much the girls fault if she can't provide for her children without some sort of benefit, but noone apart from Jeremy Kyle seems to ask and where is the father when the child needs picking up from school or meetings?
Well, my ex, the father of his children hasn't paid a penny maintenance since 2004. He pretends to be an employee of his girlfriend, so his assets as a successful business owner aren't compromised. He is also an ex soldier, and quite often berates anything smacking remotely of liberalism, to the point of borderline facism. He laughs at the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, the out of the ordinary, because thats what the army taught him to do. Believe me, his mother, God rest her soul, brought him up better than that.
We pay from being 17 into national insurance and taxes, and should the worst come to the worst and we need to draw on those resources ourselves, we go from dutiful citizen to 3rd class scrounger over night.
We are told, this is how the world looks at you
We know in our heads and hearts this is a temporary set back, that we will rise again soon and be back to spending, gas guzzling, credit debt acquirin good ole girls and guys.
But you xxx who called us scroungers, and wanted us to justify every life choice since before conception, and sit in the dark and just stop making the place look messy, I will never forget.
Every funny meme shared on Facebook, every snide remark about what time you
think I wake up, what size tv you
think I have, what I eat and feed my son,
whether we have a holiday, all this adds up and makes us view the world differently. You think the children going through these times of distress don't see their families ridiculed and cast out of society in this way?
Do you think you could manage all this on your own, look great, get that job, deal with the housing associations and the council tax and the bailiffs and the kids having no internet to look up the time of the buses so they can get the hell out of these social housing hell holes and meet their friends, and the dented tins in Tesco, or the slugs eating the pitiful tomatoes you try to grow?
Could you xxx, my friend.
So how about you go your way, I'll go mine, and when things are back to normal and I hear you spouting about shit life choices and chav scrounging layabouts or see these shitty facebook memes and some random respectable looking woman walks over and slaps you one, thats me love.
Because you might need help one day.
But it won't be there.
You'll probably blog about a yesteryear when there was a system where our tax and NI helped those between jobs and houses and status and even though it was hard, there was help available.
As you're carted off to the McWorkHouses and your assets are stripped and sold off and your own children aren't allowed to speak to you because you have no income. You'll never admit you were too busy pointing the finger and shoving the shopping list at people on that system to notice what the men in power were really up to.
Which is just how they want it.
Or didn't they tell you that on facebook?
