As I was saying about Deprivation and the vote...

[The Bishop]

There are a few constituencies missing, I can only see 1 of the 3 Newcastle seats for instance.

[East Anglian Lefty]

The other problem is that the 2016 and 2017 electorates weren't identical. I would suspect that people who voted in 2017 but not 2016 are disproportionately likely to have backed Labour this year and to be ambivalent or slightly in favour of remain. Amongst those who voted in 2016 but not 2017, it'll be more mixed: some will be persistent non-voters in general elections; there'll be Tory supporters who backed remain then sat this year out in protest (but that's probably more common in London and the south-east than in the north); there will be elderly leave supporters who planned to back May but were driven to abstension by the campaign; and there'll be just a few usual Labour supporters, of either referendum persuasion, who couldn't bring themselves to back for a Corbyn-led Labour Party, but couldn't bring themselves to vote for anybody else either.

[hullenedge]

It's a flawed exercise...we'll never know the true number of Northern constituencies where Labour Leave outnumbered Labour Remain...somewhere between 30-80? There aren't enough Tory/UKIP etc supporters voting Leave to reach the figures recorded by Leave in many constituencies. Streets and streets of Labour supporters must have voted Leave in Halifax, Batley, Wakefield, Bradford South etc.

[carlton43]

DEPRIVATION.

Well, what richness of phrase. What a touchstone of guilt. The 'deprived Ones'! Don't you just love them? The pathos of being deprived. Those big eyes. Those sunken cheeks. Those all too visible ribs. The bare feet and the threadbare clothing.

Now I feel the word means those from whom things have been taken away, as in 'deprived of' something from them. So that really means me. All my life I have struggled to make things, acquire things and earn money. At every stage of every enterprise and of every action I have been 'deprived' by the state by income taxes, VAT, stamp duty, insurance taxes, profits taxes, property taxes. Naked and wholesale and continual deprivation. One tries to do the right thing by self, family and nation, but at every moment and every opportunity there is the malicious mendacious State with a sneer on its face and an iron hand to wreck damage and deprive the honest and the hardworking.

Why does it do that? Well! To help the " 'DEPRIVED' " of course. The 'real' deprived. You know? Those fat useless bastards that do nothing at all ever and that we import foreigners to do their work for them. Yes. That's right THEM. The only people the state actually likes and respects.

I mean, it is only the totally useless arseholes who have a house built for them and the rent paid for them and an income paid to them and a shop with free food set up for them. The real scandal is that they have to shift off their fat arses and go all the way to the shop to collect the free food. A decent society would send taxis or have it delivered. These people must be the absolute paradigm of what a government expects as so much is showered on them for NOTHING with smiles and actual hand-wringing for not doing more.

The active and the productive are obviously doing it all wrong as they are chased from pillar to post and taxed, abused reviled, disparaged and accused of trying to resist paying these taxes because they are nasty and evil. Evil to be in work, evil to be better off than fat useless arseholes, evil to only paying away some of what they make instead of 'sharing' all of it with 'The DEPRIVED'.

I love the 'Welfare State'. I could sit and stare at it for hours until angry enough to kick it into very, very, very small pieces of utter shit.

[Deleted]

Dec 27, 2017 15:07:54 GMT carlton43 said:

DEPRIVATION.

Well, what richness of phrase. What a touchstone of guilt. The 'deprived Ones'! Don't you just love them? The pathos of being deprived. Those big eyes. Those sunken cheeks. Those all too visible ribs. The bare feet and the threadbare clothing.

Now I feel the word means those from whom things have been taken away, as in 'deprived of' something from them. So that really means me. All my life I have struggled to make things, acquire things and earn money. At every stage of every enterprise and of every action I have been 'deprived' by the state by income taxes, VAT, stamp duty, insurance taxes, profits taxes, property taxes. Naked and wholesale and continual deprivation. One tries to do the right thing by self, family and nation, but at every moment and every opportunity there is the malicious mendacious State with a sneer on its face and an iron hand to wreck damage and deprive the honest and the hardworking.

Why does it do that? Well! To help the " 'DEPRIVED' " of course. The 'real' deprived. You know? Those fat useless bastards that do nothing at all ever and that we import foreigners to do their work for them. Yes. That's right THEM. The only people the state actually likes and respects.

I mean, it is only the totally useless arseholes who have a house built for them and the rent paid for them and an income paid to them and a shop with free food set up for them. The real scandal is that they have to shift off their fat arses and go all the way to the shop to collect the free food. A decent society would send taxis or have it delivered. These people must be the absolute paradigm of what a government expects as so much is showered on them for NOTHING with smiles and actual hand-wringing for not doing more.

The active and the productive are obviously doing it all wrong as they are chased from pillar to post and taxed, abused reviled, disparaged and accused of trying to resist paying these taxes because they are nasty and evil. Evil to be in work, evil to be better off than fat useless arseholes, evil to only paying away some of what they make instead of 'sharing' all of it with 'The DEPRIVED'.

I love the 'Welfare State'. I could sit and stare at it for hours until angry enough to kick it into very, very, very small pieces of utter shit.

I hate the phrase “deprived” too.

It suggests society owes you - it doesn’t.

Also “privilege”.

[ccoleman]

I think carlton should consider moving to the US, and become a member of the GOP - they don't believe in welfare either. 

Fortunately, not even the Conservative Party is totally opposed to the existence of a welfare state. Heck, I remember seeing a YouGov poll showing Tory voters are just as left-wing as Democrat voters when it comes to attitudes towards taxation. Voters of the Republican Party are, unsurprisingly, significantly more right-wing - which really puts into perspective just how batshit crazy they are.

I just hope that extreme libertarians continue to have no influence in our society. 

[Deleted]

Dec 27, 2017 16:29:14 GMT ccoleman said:

I think carlton should consider moving to the US, and become a member of the GOP - they don't believe in welfare either, and rather enjoy sneering at the very same people they are so eager to win over.

Fortunately, not even the Conservative Party is totally opposed to the existence of a welfare state. Heck, I remember seeing a YouGov poll showing Tory voters are just as left-wing as Democrat voters when it comes to attitudes towards taxation. The Republican Party is, unsurprisingly, significantly more right-wing. 

I just hope that extreme libertarians continue to have no influence. They're a scary bunch.

I believe in welfare but the system is broken.

My family lived on benefits for 3 years and I can tell you from first-hand experience that welfare in this country does not incentivise industry on the part of recipients.

Even now, despite my father having worked for 3 and a half years and been promoted, we were still better off on welfare.

Just because you’re critical of a bloated, overinflated welfare state that IS for many a lucrative lifestyle choice does not mean you are an out-of-touch heartless bastard, despite what many lefties at my university tell me.

Most of them of course have zilch experience of the very system they champion, the flaws of which they are wilfully blind to because it suits their hypocritical ideological bent.

[ccoleman]

Dec 27, 2017 16:42:25 GMT @conservativeestimate said:

Dec 27, 2017 16:29:14 GMT ccoleman said:

I think carlton should consider moving to the US, and become a member of the GOP - they don't believe in welfare either, and rather enjoy sneering at the very same people they are so eager to win over.

Fortunately, not even the Conservative Party is totally opposed to the existence of a welfare state. Heck, I remember seeing a YouGov poll showing Tory voters are just as left-wing as Democrat voters when it comes to attitudes towards taxation. The Republican Party is, unsurprisingly, significantly more right-wing. 

I just hope that extreme libertarians continue to have no influence. They're a scary bunch.

I believe in welfare but the system is broken.

My family lived in benefits for 3 years and I can tell you from first-hand experience that welfare in this country does not incentivise industry on the part of recipients.

Even now, despite my father having worked for 3 and a half years and been promoted, we were still better off on welfare.

Just because you’re critical of a bloated, overinflated welfare state that IS for many a lucrative lifestyle choice does not mean you are an out-of-touch heartless bastard, despite what many lefties at my university tell me.

Most of them of course have zilch experience of the very system they champion, the flaws of which they are wilfully blind to because it suits their hypocritical ideological bent.

My family used to live on benefits as well - I was raised in a single-parent household, and my mother became unemployed for a while after being made redundant. You are absolutely right - sometimes, welfare pays more than working. The solution to that isn't necessarily to cut welfare but to make sure that employment pays better. There was a study recently that came to the conclusion that having a bad job is worse for your mental health than being unemployed - hardly surprising really.

Another thing that people usually overlook when discussions like this arise, is that most people in the UK are net beneficiaries of welfare spending, and most people will go through life without ever having been net contributors to the state. Most welfare spending goes towards people who are already in employment i.e the working poor. It's not just something for 'scroungers' to abuse.

Nevertheless, the UK has more-or-less full employment. We have one of the highest employment rates in the world. The number of people who never work and happily live on welfare for their entire life must be vanishingly small in the grand scheme of things. Welfare in the UK isn't even that generous in comparison to many countries - and unemployment benefits certainly aren't.

No, I hardly believe that welfare abuse is a pressing issue in the UK. I doubt it ever has been. That's not to say that it doesn't happen, because it does, but I'm not sure cutting welfare is the answer to that, not when you consider the large number of working families who would be impacted as well, and they don't deserve to suffer because others abuse the system.

[Deleted]

Dec 27, 2017 16:49:04 GMT ccoleman said:

Dec 27, 2017 16:42:25 GMT @conservativeestimate said:

I believe in welfare but the system is broken.

My family lived in benefits for 3 years and I can tell you from first-hand experience that welfare in this country does not incentivise industry on the part of recipients.

Even now, despite my father having worked for 3 and a half years and been promoted, we were still better off on welfare.

Just because you’re critical of a bloated, overinflated welfare state that IS for many a lucrative lifestyle choice does not mean you are an out-of-touch heartless bastard, despite what many lefties at my university tell me.

Most of them of course have zilch experience of the very system they champion, the flaws of which they are wilfully blind to because it suits their hypocritical ideological bent.

My family used to live on benefits as well - I was raised in a single-parent household, and my mother became unemployed for a while after being made redundant. You are absolutely right - sometimes, welfare pays more than working. The solution to that isn't necessarily to cut welfare but to make sure that employment pays better. There was a study recently that came to the conclusion that having a bad job is worse for your mental health than being unemployed - hardly surprising really.

Another thing that people usually overlook when discussions like this arise, is that most people in the UK are net beneficiaries of welfare spending, and most people will go through life without ever having been net contributors to the state. Most welfare spending goes towards people who are already in employment i.e the working poor. It's not just something for 'scroungers' to abuse.

Nevertheless, the UK has more-or-less full employment. We have one of the highest employment rates in the world. The number of people who never work and happily live on welfare for their entire life must be vanishingly small in the grand scheme of things. Welfare in the UK isn't even that generous in comparison to many countries.

No, I hardly believe that welfare abuse is a pressing issue in the UK. I doubt it ever has been. 

Although of course if you cut welfare you increase the economic benefits of having a job in real terms.

In Canada of course they have a 6 month limit for jobseekers type benefits. We should too.

[carlton43]

Dec 27, 2017 16:29:14 GMT ccoleman said:

I think carlton should consider moving to the US, and become a member of the GOP - they don't believe in welfare either. 

Fortunately, not even the Conservative Party is totally opposed to the existence of a welfare state. Heck, I remember seeing a YouGov poll showing Tory voters are just as left-wing as Democrat voters when it comes to attitudes towards taxation. Voters of the Republican Party are, unsurprisingly, significantly more right-wing - which really puts into perspective just how batshit crazy they are.

I just hope that extreme libertarians continue to have no influence in our society. 

I very nearly did......And then Maggie won in '79.  I had been for my consultations.

I am not a liberal nor a libertarian and don't like much of their influence either.

The 'Conservative Party' is not very conservative at all about anything at all. The rot set in with Macmillan, got worse with Heath, and worse again with Cameron.

[Sibboleth]

Dec 27, 2017 11:27:45 GMT hullenedge said:

It's a flawed exercise...we'll never know the true number of Northern constituencies where Labour Leave outnumbered Labour Remain...somewhere between 30-80? There aren't enough Tory/UKIP etc supporters voting Leave to reach the figures recorded by Leave in many constituencies. Streets and streets of Labour supporters must have voted Leave in Halifax, Batley, Wakefield, Bradford South etc.

Certainty about details is impossible, but what is clear from the information we have is that a) the electorates of the two big parties were split by the referendum and that b) these splits were not geographically uniform. Making some things at the moment that show some very interesting patterns relating to this.

[Ghyl Tarvoke]

Dec 27, 2017 17:26:47 GMT Sibboleth said:

Dec 27, 2017 11:27:45 GMT hullenedge said:

It's a flawed exercise...we'll never know the true number of Northern constituencies where Labour Leave outnumbered Labour Remain...somewhere between 30-80? There aren't enough Tory/UKIP etc supporters voting Leave to reach the figures recorded by Leave in many constituencies. Streets and streets of Labour supporters must have voted Leave in Halifax, Batley, Wakefield, Bradford South etc.

Certainty about details is impossible, but what is clear from the information we have is that a) the electorates of the two big parties were split by the referendum and that b) these splits were not geographically uniform. Making some things at the moment that show some very interesting patterns relating to this.

Some good much deeper stronger data for this is the ward breakdown for Birmingham City Council here

Two random observations:
1) In the YOOL 2017 the most Remain (Moseley and Kings Heath) and most Leave (Shard End) ward are both strong Labour wards - albeit (tellingly) the former with a Lib Dem history and the latter with a significant UKIP/BNP one.
2) The Labour vote in Birmingham Hodge Hill in the GE was almost as high as the entire Turnout in the referendum.

[East Anglian Lefty]

Dec 27, 2017 15:07:54 GMT carlton43 said:

DEPRIVATION.

Well, what richness of phrase. What a touchstone of guilt. The 'deprived Ones'! Don't you just love them? The pathos of being deprived. Those big eyes. Those sunken cheeks. Those all too visible ribs. The bare feet and the threadbare clothing.

Now I feel the word means those from whom things have been taken away, as in 'deprived of' something from them. So that really means me. All my life I have struggled to make things, acquire things and earn money. At every stage of every enterprise and of every action I have been 'deprived' by the state by income taxes, VAT, stamp duty, insurance taxes, profits taxes, property taxes. Naked and wholesale and continual deprivation. One tries to do the right thing by self, family and nation, but at every moment and every opportunity there is the malicious mendacious State with a sneer on its face and an iron hand to wreck damage and deprive the honest and the hardworking.

Why does it do that? Well! To help the " 'DEPRIVED' " of course. The 'real' deprived. You know? Those fat useless bastards that do nothing at all ever and that we import foreigners to do their work for them. Yes. That's right THEM. The only people the state actually likes and respects.

I mean, it is only the totally useless arseholes who have a house built for them and the rent paid for them and an income paid to them and a shop with free food set up for them. The real scandal is that they have to shift off their fat arses and go all the way to the shop to collect the free food. A decent society would send taxis or have it delivered. These people must be the absolute paradigm of what a government expects as so much is showered on them for NOTHING with smiles and actual hand-wringing for not doing more.

The active and the productive are obviously doing it all wrong as they are chased from pillar to post and taxed, abused reviled, disparaged and accused of trying to resist paying these taxes because they are nasty and evil. Evil to be in work, evil to be better off than fat useless arseholes, evil to only paying away some of what they make instead of 'sharing' all of it with 'The DEPRIVED'.

I love the 'Welfare State'. I could sit and stare at it for hours until angry enough to kick it into very, very, very small pieces of utter shit.

Dear Christ, but you're a whiny shitebag. Get a grip. You aren't even in work, and I don't think I know anybody employed who whines nearly so much as you do.

[IceAgeComing]

Dec 27, 2017 17:01:26 GMT @conservativeestimate said:

In Canada of course they have a 6 month limit for jobseekers type benefits. We should too.

This would be a very bad policy for a fair few reasons. The main one is: what do you expect someone to do who can't find a job during that six month period? From a human perspective you can't start cutting people off from the Welfare system at that point since those people are still people with key needs, and eliminating any income that they have would only increase homelessness and malnutrition and probably lead to much more expensive issues that the State would still have to deal with. Also since people still need to meet their needs you'll likely at best see a rise in food banks and similar charity, at worst a rise in petty crime like shoplifting in order for people to meet their needs. This is especially the case when you're talking about families with dependents involved, since this sort of policies would start impacting on entirely innocent people who've done nothing wrong.

From an alternative perspective: paying unemployment benefit is actually very good for local economies, and often very important for the economy of depressed areas. That money tends to be spent in businesses local to the claimant since naturally people recieving unemployment benefit often won't travel long distances to do their shopping since its not like its a lot of money and you need to be pretty austere to last the month on it. If you start taking away unemployment benefits from the long term unemployed that could have a catastrophic impact of the economies of deprived areas since they tend to have much higher levels of unemployed people. The knock on effect could lead to businesses needing to start cutting back on staff or closing entirely, leading to even more unemployment and so the cycle continues. Add the above problems to this and all that would happen would be a significant worsening of deprived areas; the closing of local businesses, increased unemployment and rising homelessness, crime and possibly malnutrition. Basically: not a good policy.

The benefit trap is an issue but its one that governments of all stripes have struggled to solve. This is mostly because the welfare budget is often the first thing that governments will cut if they feel the need to do something populist and often its in work benefits that are the first to go and without them the system doesn't work as well. An example of that is with universal credit: the policy is a mess but the core principle seems sound: the idea is that by having one payment should make it easier to solve the Benefit trap. The problem was that in one of the post-coalition budgets the government elected to raid welfare spending again and changed the implementation of universal credit to attack in-work benefits which means that rather than fixing the core problem they've actually ended up making it worse. Cutting benefits is the wrong way to go around doing things - they're hardly that generous as it is and the costs of living aren't going to fall if you start slashing welfare spending - and the easy ways to fix the problem therefore has to be increasing the amount of money that people in work have: may that be through in-work benefits or through increasing wages that people are paid by their employers. Funnily enough this is a place where a UBI might actually help - since that's universal by definition there'd be a clear advantage in work since you'd only gain from working.

[The Bishop]

And there remains the incontrovertible fact that the number of people who live their whole lives on benefits, with no intention of ever working, is actually tiny.

This remains the case however often they feature in tabloid newspapers, or in anecdotes of the "my mate in the pub said he knows someone who knows someone" variety.

[J.G.Harston]

Dec 28, 2017 3:27:47 GMT IceAgeComing said:

Dec 27, 2017 17:01:26 GMT @conservativeestimate said:

In Canada of course they have a 6 month limit for jobseekers type benefits. We should too.

This would be a very bad policy for a fair few reasons. The main one is: what do you expect someone to do who can't find a job during that six month period?...

It would require a huge huge HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE change in the culture of employers. At the moment an employer can say "no, we'll not employ him, it doesn't matter, he won't starve as he can sign on". You would end with both people starving because employers refuse to employ them *AND* employers screaming blue murder that they can't find anybody to employ.

[thetop]

If we're doing away with welfare - pensioners will be hardest hit. Why thank you turkeys, let's have that Christmas.

[IceAgeComing]

Wouldn't just be pensioners; it would especially be awful for people near pension age.

I'll give you an example: my Dad is about three years away from pension age and has been offered a pretty decent package to retire early in February that he'll most likely take. But say that he'd been working for a different company that did things a different way and they just cut him loose at that point. What would my Dad be expected to do? He's three years away from retirement so no one is going to offer him a job in his current field especially with the fact that he's getting older and so site work isn't for him anymore. He can't retrain because again only three years from retirement; and I don't see what basic entry-level jobs would hire him: there are plenty of people who're much younger and have a lot more experience in that field. What that policy would do would be to punish people like my Dad for losing their job whilst being an older man - which is usually not thr fault of the individual at that age - and effectively that's a frightfully ageist policy. It's almost like it's a policy that no one who's actually thought about its effect on people would actually support and the only people who do are those that haven't thought about it or those that have and don't care about these people.

It is interesting that the cries for welfare cuts seem to have heavily decreased in recent years. Perhaps it's because lots of people have suddenly realised that you can't really cut the welfare budget anymore and still protect old folk and attacking the state pension or the winter fuel allowance would be incredibly unpopular amongst every group of voters...

[Ghyl Tarvoke]

Graphed out the Multiple Deprivation Index and the Remain vote, as I did in the first post. Lines indicating 50% for Remain and 48.11% for Remain (the national result).

[middyman]

Dec 28, 2017 13:50:02 GMT thetop said:

If we're doing away with welfare - pensioners will be hardest hit. Why thank you turkeys, let's have that Christmas.

Pensions are not welfare - they have been paid for during a lifetime of working.