People who are awesome, beneficial to society products of the UK welfare state; list them all here

JK Rowling for a start.

JK Rowling is a decent writer but can hardly be described as "awesome" and I would strongly question whether Harry Potter has been remotely beneficial to society.

Oh, Marcellopaws. ;-)

Kathy Burke. Further props for *handing back* her council flat to Islington for the next person in housing need, once she was able to buy a place of her own.

Whether or not you critically rate JK Rowling's prose, she's done an astonishing amount for childhood literacy in this country, contributed massively to the economy, proudly and vocally pays her taxes, etc etc.

She's kind of like Iain Banks for beginners.

Kathy Burke, I remember her from the nineties with her routines about welfare wasters wanting brown babies. No thank you.

Does listing 'exceptions to the rule' not play into the Mail's hands, however well intentioned?

me, my gf, loads of people i know personally

How have they been beneficial to society?

yeah, sharivari otm. This shouldnt be about defending the attack. We just need to sat we disagree with the entire premise, and the principle of provding welfare *no questions asked* in a country that is fuckoff rich is one we hold to.

*say we disagree

Is that addressed to me Marcello?

xps re exceptions to the rule, if we're slightly undiscriminating and egotistical (so I too can say me and p much all of my highly productive academic friends) then we can get this list into the millions. but yeah, it's a bit of a workers + shirkers thing.

Does listing 'exceptions to the rule' not play into the Mail's hands, however well intentioned?

How does it play into the Mail's hands? At the moment it seems as if no one, literally no one, is giving any kind of emotive, identifiable argument as to why the welfare state is a GOOD thing; people wave statistics, but, as pointed out elsewhere, statistics are not inspiring and people given to kneejerk emotional reactions recoil from them. This kind of hesitant "what if we say the wrong thing" POV just lets the hateful nutters voice their opinions louder and louder. Saying 'we disagree' isn't enough; we have to show why they should agree with us.

I appreciate the case for making the emotional argument but it's a bit like saying "decent Muslims, list 'em all here". We're starting from the POV that people on benefits need to justify their existence and highlighting the value of people who have come off benefits and made stacks of cash doesn't really do much to help raise the status of people who are still there.

Please don't do the "we" thing, it's inaccurate and unhelpful.

Clearly it's inaccurate in your case, yeah

Paddy Ashdown

How many people aren't "products of the UK welfare state"?

People who are on benefits need to justify why they should get benefits, rather than their existence as such. That's the point of having a benefits system.

They justify it before they're awarded the benefit. It's called "means testing". Problem of course is that people who previously passed the test are now no longer eligible because of goalpost moving.

xp Because if they don't have benefits they can't eat? Because there aren't enough jobs to go round? Because some people have problems that mean they can't actively participate in a market economy? Those are the arguments.

Suggesting that benefits are valuable because they can act as a stepping stone to people utilising marketable skills in the future is true but it's not the reason we have a benefits system and shouldn't really be the focus of the discussion.

Although i don't really think that the hostility of the press is necessarily going to be shared by the public. The economy is so poor, there'll come a point when almost everyone knows a 'nice, hard-working person' who has been made redundant and has to claim income support. It'll come back and bite them.

ShariVari OTM. The whole premise of this thread is wrong.

What the left should be doing is pointing out what happens in countries where there isn't a welfare state, and in the vast majority of cases they aren't utopias where low taxes and low spending means everyone lives is glorious prosperity. They're places where babies sleep on the streets.

Anyone who was born in an NHS hospital, or with the assistance of NHS employees, is a product of the UK welfare state.

The welfare state isn't just benefits. It's the whole edifice of social support provided by the state.

(xp) That won't work because most British voters don't give a toss about what happens in other countries, we're an island, yay Ukip, etc.

These are all fair points, but they've been made before, they're obvious, and they're not really working.

Public attitudes towards the NHS are very different to the benefits system, in fairness. It's why one is being dismantled by stealth and the other is being openly and proudly taken to pieces.

If the Left is going to reconnect with the British public they're going to have to stop using words like "stealth."

The Tories got a lot of mileage out of "stealth taxes", in fairness.

And now they're getting a lot of revenue out of them

1 jk rowling

2 Ian Duncan Smith

Top dole bludger. Took £1.5 million in income support by pretending to be a farmer. Sick fucking money!

3 zoe williams

4. One of my old Electrical Contractor bosses who used to pay himself and his wife minimum wage through the books to scam working tax credits despite being a millionaire with 3 houses.

lol

real england right there

did he ever get caught

No his company went into liquidation last year but he ringfenced himself by signing it over in name to a naive contract manager. He put the business premises into a holding company and rents it out. Now he has set up a smaller company in a small rented industrial unit and made another naive contract manager the fall guy while he lives in a house in Beverly surrounded by 40 acres of land, which he is doing the pretend farmer IDS thing with. I only know all this shit because the guy is my Uncle!

Think part of the problem is that right now, jobseeker's allowance isn't jobseeker's allowance anymore. In the sense that, rather than being a temporary benefit between jobs, it in fact is plugging the permanent gap left by the shortfall in jobs.

And I think some simple souls, down to earth types, see that it's called jobseeker's allowance ... then think, 'but hang on, people don't actually get jobs when they go on this! So in a way they're lying. So it must be their fault. So they must have their benefits cut.'

I can think of a few people to actually answer this thread's question but they would all be more or less instantly dismissed as 'awesome' or 'beneficial to society' by the people who want to cut the benefits

assumed this thread was a piss-take when i read the first post

also lol Beverley