Class(room) war: Bedroom tax stress and hunger harms poor children’s life chances
A Conservative government will do nothing to relieve the effects found in this report because the Bedroom Tax has done exactly what the Tories wanted.
Not only is it achieving the primary motive – clearing the poor out of attractive areas of real estate and freeing them up for development and occupation by the rich – but it is also ensuring the proles remain too distracted to mount any effective opposition to Tory dominion.
Parents are cutting back on the necessities of life, simply to keep a roof over their heads, while their hungry children are increasingly less able to achieve and more likely to react to their situation with violence – meaning they won’t be any competition for rich children in the world of work and are more likely to populate prisons than boardrooms.
It’s class(room) war.
Education experts are calling on the government to review its bedroom tax after early research indicated it was having an adverse impact on learning because affected children were stressed and hungry at school.
Researchers from Manchester University found that children were showing signs of emotional distress because they were seeing their parents under pressure and were experiencing material hardship as a result of the benefit cut.
Parents were having to cut back on food, shopping for fewer and cheaper provisions, and hungry children were finding it harder to concentrate in lessons, sometimes leading to classroom unrest and aggressive behaviour, the report said.
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It’s not only the bedroom tax but the council tax is just as bad. The first of paying it where I live in Hull, it was £58. The year later it was £138, this year it went to £149, and that is with the single person discount. How would a jobseeker on £57 a week cope with that?
Where I live their weekly budget would be like this:
Electric and gas: £20
Food and household goods (cleaning) £15
Council tax £15
bus fares daily ticket £3.10
Clothes £5
———-
Total £58.10
This is without the required phone that a person would need.
I showed this to a person who is really proud of becoming an NLP practitioner after a 2 day course, and who seems to think the job seekers have got it easy, this person keeps badgering me to get a job even though I am on ESA in the support group, I can’t take my anti-depressants because they make me throw up, as a result I am nearing the end of my rope. I am incredibly lucky, but should I actually be feeling so? Xmas is always horrible for me!
What’s an NLP please and how can some one become a practitioner after 2 days of training?
When I read ‘NLP’ I thought ‘Neuro-Linguistic Programming’, which I tend to associate with brainwashing.
Sorry I forgot Water which is about £10 per week and TV license which about £3 per week. Which brings the total to
£71.10 per week.
“ensuring the proles remain too distracted to mount any effective opposition to Tory dominion”
but we have mounted an effective opposition and its called the Labour Party
“react to their situation with violence”
yet again many are not
the idea that we are all distracted and there noting we can do is a lie and plays into the Torys plan more then anything
This is a strategy that looks to the future; you’re only seeing the current position.
How will Labour seem to you if there are no members from poor backgrounds who are qualified or able to argue a case – because of the issues outlined in this article – and its front bench is flooded with right-wingers from well-to-do homes and ‘good’ universities, who have prospered under the conditions we’ve had since Thatcher came into office? I’m suggesting these conditions could lead to a resurgence of the Blairites in the future because nobody who has actually suffered under the Tories will have the wherewithal to mount any opposition – IN THE FUTURE.
Are you looking forward to that?
well we have Jeremy Corbyn who making sure members from poor backgrounds not only join but can be able to go up in life no matter if there qualified or not, we already seen many join Labour since he won and a resurgence in Blairites? don’t see that happen with Jeremy anytime soon (Blairites are dying out anyway that why they been attacking Jeremy)
Your points are irrelevant to the article, I’m sorry to say.
The Tories’ aim is to ensure that people from poor backgrounds can’t achieve because they won’t have the education or ability to do so – they’ll have been held back. Labour, presented with a choice between having ineffectual representatives who can’t argue a case because they never learned how, and people who can argue but might not argue for the poor, may be dealt a fait accompli.
Read the article again and think about consequences going forward several years into the future.
These Tory bullies are a bunch of nasty cowardly thugs.
Joanna I fully sympathise. I have now been put into the support group after a 6 year fight. I have had my money stopped 4 times and had to have my mother ( a pensioner !) help me out. I’m surviving on an overdraft.
Iain Duncan Smith should be hung.
By the balls with razor wire and a red hot poker up the jacksy.
just one last thing then, people always find away to be educated just look to the past and you will see, the Torys are fighting a losing battle
I certainly hope you’re right – although you should also accept that it is very hard to concentrate on learning anything when you are very tired and very hungry.
They want to drive us all into the ground and into an early grave, they are trying to exterminate us, plain and simple!