Election 2021: Who did you vote for?

Moggy wrote:The trouble with the "benefits as a lifestyle choice" argument is it will hurt people like your mum. The more people are convinced that benefits are plaguing society, the more people like your mum will be demonised and the more their benefits will be cut, which will REALLY hurt people.

Exactly. If people cheating the system is the cost of protecting those that need it, I'd far rather make sure the vulnerable are protected.

Instead, in our society a famous footballer has to ensure the Government feed starving children.

I'm surprised the Tories don't make more of a song and dance about the increase there has been to the personal allowance over the last decade or so. Although I guess the majority of it was during the coalition and I believe it was driven primarily by the Lib Dems?

It's still not high enough, as I wrote earlier, but I actually have no idea how it compares with other countries.

Tomous wrote:

SillySprout wrote:The Tory approach of making work pay better whilst making it harder to claim will help push some into employment and help them better themselves, but it will also hurt some]

How is the Tory approach to make work pay better? Their minimum wage increases over the last decade have been woefully inadequate and in the 2019 election, Labour's manifesto pledged bigger increases overall across age categories.

Reminder the Tories also rebranded the Minimum Wage as the Living Wage to cause confusion with comparisons against the actual living wage, because the gap was so big.

Exactly this. Also imposing public sector pay freezes whilst raising their own. Work has continued to pay less and less

Sorry to add to the dog pile here, (I may go off tangent a bit and I'm sorry for the long post) but as someone who is reliant on benefits due to disability, has seen others to struggle to survive without benefits topping their paycheck, and has seen others having to use them as they've struggled between jobs, I don't understand the logic of voting for tories who freeze the benefit system, make people jump through hoops to get money and put in the universal credit system, which has made people lose money from their benefits.

That extra £20 could be just what someone needs to make sure they have enough food on the table to feed their family. I agree with the points everyone else has made here about them. Making the quality of life better for those on benefits would make things better as there would be more opportunities open to those having to rely on them to get by.

Why should food banks exist? They shouldn't imo, people should be able to afford to put food on their tables, without worry or the need of food banks. As the graph showed, under the tories the use of them has jumped up massively. It shouldn't be happening at all. It shows a failure of care by our government.

Also I am a massive supporter of the NHS. And I've seen it go downhill with the tories. I've seen 2 teams of workers get disbanded due to lack of funding, one of those being a diabetes team that had a lot of patients on their books. I have no idea what happened to the nurses there, or their patients, but i do know they were keeping a lot of people alive around Birmingham. I've had to rely on the NHS since I was 15 and if the team that helps me were cut, I would be stuck with no help, especially if I get a flare up and end up in hospital again.

Birmingham Council are poor. Very poor. The fact they're still going is a miracle. Tories refuse to give them more money to help the city. What will happen when the money runs out? The media don't help matters. They just blame the council instead of where the money comes from. If they don't have the money for the resources, what can they do?

I just can't understand why anyone working class would even think about voting tory. They take from the poor, destroy services that are needed, and would happily see people on the streets, as long as it meant more money in their pockets.

I don't think there will be very many people at all who use benefits as a lifestyle. I think the issue is more people trapped in the system, due to poverty from a young age meaning they lack the skills or opportunity to get out from it. Everything I have seen in life tells me hardly anyone wants to be living off of benefits. My wife is disabled and is allowed a certain amount of universal credit now, and it absolutely does not cover the extra cost she has if she wants to try and live with a decent degree of independence.

For example, if she wants to drive she needs to pay £2k extra to adapt any car. And this is a dead cost, she has to pay it again if she ever needs to replace her car. Using public transport is difficult, she can't safely stand on a train and there are no disabled provisions to satisfy everyone that needs them, nor can she even access them on absolutely packed buses and trains. So that means she has to have a car, otherwise she can't do anything if she is required to carry shopping etc.

Then you drop down to people with even more significant disabilities, that may require drop-in carers, that basically limits people to their homes and makes a normal working life impossible.

So we have a government that despises the welfare system and is set to most likely axe a lot of provision, when people are already struggling to keep their head above water.

Edit: Another personal example, our house has steps to get into the front door. Not a problem for my wife until we had a baby and she was unable to get the pram up or down the steps. The cost to modify it would have been outside of affordability for us at the time and DSS wouldn't front the cost. So we had to have a cheaper ramp installed by the local authorities at the rear of our house. So to leave the house my wife would have to go out of the back, and around the houses to get to the front to go anywhere (we are mid terrace).

It sounds mundane, but when people on benefits have a constant series of minor issues that cause constant struggle, people have no idea how degrading it is in the long run.

Hexx wrote:an example of one type of typical Tory. You don’t care if 10 families end up destitute, as long as 1 family isn’t getting benefits it shouldn’t. (Change numbers/ratio to suit).

Called it.

Nasty hateful viewpoint.

SillySprout wrote:Unfortunately our political parties are idealism based and all sides fail to support people in the middle.

The only idealism of the current Conservative government is the idea of making as much money as they can for themselves and their friends. That's why we have seen a huge amount of corruption in things like PPE contracts, and have a prime minister who decided to support brexit as a personal career move.

The government is very pragmatic when it comes to self-enrichment.

SillySprout wrote:Benefits through lifestyle choice, which does still exist today, will always leave you in poverty, no matter what government is in charge as the benefits come out of the wages of the working.

This is not true. One of the largest taxes in this country is VAT which is applied to the vast majority of consumer goods, which everybody pays, including people entitled to benefit payments.

As an aside, there are plenty of in work benefits, including tax credits. There are benefits that are totally non income contingent including personal independence payment which is for genuinely disabled people to pay for practical support and for example mobility expenses to put them on an equal footing or at least some degree of dignity. Adult social care is another benefit which has nothing whatsoever to do with whether they work, or not. I do work 30 hours a week minimum and I claim all of these.

I also voluntarily collect and pay directly to the treasury 20% on top of every single thing I sell. Yes, I literally give the government money from sales I win for them rather than passively being taxed on my income.

This means that as much as 20% (depending on what is and isn't vatable) of what benefit claimants receive is paid directly back to the treasury. It amazes me how few people seem to understand how this massive tax works.

The only way I can think that the current "benefits" system holds people back is that it's an all or nothing thing from the people I know who rely on it. As soon as you start working the net is pulled away from under you and you lose financial support and other services you may be lucky enough to access.

It's not useful for people who want to get their life back, especially for those mentally and physically unwell who wouldn't be able to guarantee that they will be able to work a full shift the next day. Taking on a job means losing that sliver of support and if you have a panic attack, or feel faint or whatever it may be, you are strawberry floated.

I don't think the system is perfect, but that doesn't mean it can't be reworked instead of removed.

Cuttooth wrote:

Employment alone is insufficient
26. The Government says work is the solution to poverty and points to record employment rates as evidence that the country is going in the right direction. But the fact that a fifth of the population of the United Kingdom lives in poverty, despite record employment levels, makes clear that employment alone does not keep people out of poverty.
27. Four million workers live in poverty, an increase of more than half a million in the last five years. In-work poverty is rising faster than employment and is higher than any time in the last 20 years, driven by rising poverty among working parents. Half of working-age people in poverty are working, and one in six people referred to Trussell Trust food banks is working.
28. Almost 60 per cent of those in poverty in the United Kingdom are in families where someone works, and a shocking 2.8 million people are in poverty in families where all adults work full-time. According to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, 10 per cent of workers over 16 are in insecure employment. And 10 years after the 2008 financial crisis, employees’ median real earnings are, remarkably, still below pre-crisis levels.

The report from the UN's rapporteur on extreme poverty, also from 2019, who accused the Tories of “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”.

https://undocs.org/A/HRC/41/39/Add.1

I'm libertarian left or anti authoritarian capitalist or something like that and even I'm surprised by how damning those statistics are.

Oh but then again I am one of those people so I'm biased and my opinion is most likely nullified.

I think "trapped" may be a bit inaccurate. If you have someone who has been out of work for a long time, for whatever reason, the barrier to get back into work, in a decently paid job is absolutely horrendous. Not to mention the mental factor of having been out of work for a prolonged time and then suddenly being faced with a huge lifestyle change for 5 days a week.

People need support in terms of actual decent retraining, assistance to commute, and being eased back into the work force. This is just for able bodied workers too. People with disabilities have a whole host of other problems to get back into the workforce.

Too much of the system is:

"get here for 9am to meet an advisor or we stop your credit"

"get to an interview for 1pm 10 miles away for a minimum wage (sorry "living" wage) or we stop your credit"

"take that minimum wage (sorry "living" wage) job at full time hours or we stop your credit"

"got kids, tough, take the job or survive on child benefit"

We need to get out of that into an actually supportive system that helps people.

Red Dog, can your wife not apply for PIP to get a mobility car? The adaptations are free…well, some of them.

SillySprout wrote:

Jenuall wrote:"I'd love to see some stats..."


*stats provided that disagree with the position*


*tumble weed*

I really want to come back to everyone, but there's a lot of comments to reply to and I'm supposed to be working at the moment! I'll try pop on tonight. I love stats and will try get some too and share them, regardless of whether they support the case I have argued or not. How has minimum wage changed since Labour were replaced in government? What has the impact been of raising the tax free allowance? Are higher education opportunities greater or worse, and if possible, what percentage of these go to poorer students? It's been pointed out here that in work poverty is a problem - are this government improving that, or is it getting worse? It's easy to fall into the trap of spin of 'record cases' (both left and right wing papers do this all the time & I highly recommend reading papers on both sides of the spectrum as it really highlights media bias), but population growth means you're often seeing records. What I want to understand is percentages of the population. Obviously those answers are not quick and easy to find. It would be amazing if this topic was full of stats when I come back, but I'm happy to look too, it will just take some time.

What I do want to say at the moment is that I've read a couple of comments about personal situations and I want to make it clear I do not have the stance that everyone on benefits is lazy, or anything else along those lines and I apologise if anything I have said has been taken that way and offended anyone. That absolutely is not the case. My Mum was carer for my stepdad in his final years and she did an absolutely amazing job and deserved more than every penny of support she received. I absolutely, 100% believe that more should be done to support those in need, though in some cases, that is not simply more cash. My Mum could have benefited from somebody coming around the house and help with some of the heavy lifting, for example. The Tory approach of making work pay better whilst making it harder to claim will help push some into employment and help them better themselves, but it will also hurt some. I'm simply asking the question of overall, have more people found themselves better off due to this approach? Of course, as things get better for some, it gets worse for others. Unfortunately our political parties are idealism based and all sides fail to support people in the middle.

What you're describing at the end there is Adult Social Care. Do you know what that is? It's a means tested benefit to pay for carers to come and do exactly what you're describing and mine was here today to help me put together lunch and essentially wake up and plan my day and week.

The Care Act 2014 under the coalition government improved some of this but it is funded my local councils that are paid by the government. the Conservative government has consistency cut funding to local councils over many years and so it is very hard to get this help. My first request for ASC was denied and completely inaccurate. My second claim years later was approved but only with the support of an independent advocate provided by a charity. Such requests are systemically turned down in the first instance owing to the pressure on councils not to fund care for vulnerable people. This isn't just money, it is paid directly to the carers in most instances.

My first PIP assessment was revolting.

I never claimed despite always being eligible until 10 years after I moved out of family and that is how I was treated. I spared the government 10 years of eligible benefits to try and "go it alone" and it was needlessly painful to make a claim and get the right amount of support. My story with the NHS is the same, in fact, it's worse.

I'm on the learning disability register and I have autism, I have problems with gross motor coordination, severe depression episodes and travelling is psychologically painful owing to sensory overload.
That I survived as I did for 10 years alone is strawberry floating incredible not merely an achievement.

But sure 1-3% of people or whatever just make this gooseberry fool up. The tory policy is precisely to demonise everyone " on benefits" (as if it were a drug they can't get rid of because... Well.. They're ill).

Buffalo wrote:Red Dog, can your wife not apply for PIP to get a mobility car? The adaptations are free…well, some of them.

She tried, but the level of disability you need now is insane. She basically has cerebral palsy which means she can only used her left side. So she needs the pedals flipped and a control pad for lights and indicators next to a ball on the wheel. But when she applied the threshold for help would be equivalent to having no use of both legs or both arms. To hit that threshold you would have already gone through such a struggle already I'm guessing most people would give up out of frustration.

The weird thing is, she qualifies for the second highest level of PIP and gets a disabled blue badge. They just won't qualify her for a mobility car or even provide any assistance for adaptions.

captain red dog wrote:

Buffalo wrote:Red Dog, can your wife not apply for PIP to get a mobility car? The adaptations are free…well, some of them.

She tried, but the level of disability you need now is insane. She basically has cerebral palsy which means she can only used her left side. So she needs the pedals flipped and a control using next to a ball on the wheel. But when she applied the threshold for help would be equivalent to having no use of both legs or both arms. To hit that threshold you would have already gone through such a struggle already I'm guessing most people would give up out of frustration.

The weird thing is, she qualifies for the second highest level of PIP and gets a disabled blue badge. They just won't qualify her for a mobility car or even provide any assistance for adaptions.

That is absolutely insane, sorry to hear that. This bloody Government man

Buffalo wrote:

captain red dog wrote:

Buffalo wrote:Red Dog, can your wife not apply for PIP to get a mobility car? The adaptations are free…well, some of them.

She tried, but the level of disability you need now is insane. She basically has cerebral palsy which means she can only used her left side. So she needs the pedals flipped and a control using next to a ball on the wheel. But when she applied the threshold for help would be equivalent to having no use of both legs or both arms. To hit that threshold you would have already gone through such a struggle already I'm guessing most people would give up out of frustration.

The weird thing is, she qualifies for the second highest level of PIP and gets a disabled blue badge. They just won't qualify her for a mobility car or even provide any assistance for adaptions.

That is absolutely insane, sorry to hear that. This bloody Government man

We had a similar experience. My Mum couldn't get support for my step dad because he could effectively shuffle to the front gate and back. Meanwhile a friend of mine with MS had to go for PIP assessments regularly (don't quote me but I think it was yearly). A progressive disease isn't going to get better sadly, so stop wasting his time.

A Labour government would, you would assume, provide more support to people like that and I of course fully support that. It is the right thing to do to support those who need it. These people deserve the support they need to live a quality of life. Tories do not get this part of the policy right. I absolutely do not subscribe to the far right beliefs on benefits and am focusing on just a small section of society, I hope everyone can understand the distinction.

However, this Tory government appears to have been more successful than Labour in getting more people off benefits and into work. Here are some stats, with links below.

End of Labour Government in 2010 to current rates
Minimum wage (21+) £5.80 > £8.72 today
Income tax personal allowance (single person) £6,475 > £12,500
Unemployment 7.9% > 4.9% today (was 4% pre covid)

So minimum wage is up significantly, the tax free allowance has nearly doubled and unemployment has nearly halved. Not stats that I read on The Guardian. These steps have no doubt removed many people from beneath the poverty line, so maybe you can see why I have moved towards the right on the issue (note, not a full supporter of any party policy). According to Google, there are 41,459,643 people in the UK of working age, so a 3% reduction in unemployment is 1.25 million people.

That's 1.25 million people, effectively taken out of the benefit system and hopefully providing more opportunity for their families.

My original argument that perhaps the Tory policy has helped more people than it has hurt stands, though of course it does not mean that it has helped everyone, for some it has clearly had the reverse impact. IF the drop in unemployment is purely due to Tory policy, then they have positively impacted the lives of 1.25 million people who would have been unemployed IF Labour's stats had continued. Meanwhile, it would appear that many on low incomes have seen a significant shift up on earnings, whilst having tax removed from a significant chunk of those earnings.

https://www.nibusinessinfo.co.uk/conten ... ious-rates
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistic ... nd-reliefs
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlab ... s/mgsx/lms

A few points on the data you've picked:

You understand raising minimum wage isn't exclusively a Tory policy? And Labour would have done the same, and by a higher rate according to their manifesto pledges.

The personal tax allowance raises was initiated by the Lib Dems as part of the coalition, and by the way, the Tories hated it and tried to resist it. Its great that its continued but a) it needs to be considered in line with inflation and b) again this isn't an exclusive Tory policy that Labour weren't pledging.

Finally, unemployment figures are massively distorted by the rise in zero hour contracts over the last decade which really do not help people out of poverty.

You are giving the Tories way too much credit for doing the bare minimum and other parties wanted to go further on the things you are praising them for.

The minimum wage is much lower than the required living wage (£9.50 nationally), the raise in income tax allowance was a Lib Dem policy, and employment rates do not measure the lack of security and low hours that plague many people on low earning jobs.

Finally, there is no chance that 1.25 million people have been "effectively taken out of the benefit system" when most benefits are paid to households with working adults. At best they have probably stopped receiving money for JSA (or whatever it is now called under UC) while still having to receive some money from the state to survive.

EDIT - Yeah, that’s a good point Tomous. SS look at what the opposition parties were saying for these policies in the 2015, 2017, 2019 elections before you make a conclusion on whether the Tories are doing an especially good job at helping people.

Or could it be that more people who should be on benefits are stuck having to work because they can't provide otherwise, making themselves more ill in the process? And don't get me started on 0 hour contracts which fiddle the figures constantly. Also don't forget people getting denied the benefits they need because one person during a benefit interview saw that you were having a better day and decided that you can't be on that benefit anymore. That just forces people into having to look for work. It's a very unfair cycle.

I was told I was well enough to work by one of the ESA assessors, and was made to look for a job for years with my disabilities till one guy in the job centre finally realised I was far too unfit for work. Then I had to go through the entire process whilst having extremely high anxiety to see if they'll decide I was still well enough by their own standards. It depends on the person that assesses you too. You can be forced into work because otherwise you aren't going to get any money at all.

From 1997 to 2010, under Labour, the tax free allowance increased from £4,045 to £6,475
Raised to £10,000 by Libdem / Tory by 2015
Raised to £12,500 today.

Source in my previous comment.