There’s like 15 people in this country who could be looking for work and aren’t. How does inflicting revenge pain on them raise any sort of money for the rest of us?

They’re either lying, or utterly incompetent when it comes to understanding who’s in the welfare system.

Or both I guess.

15 people? Are you that sheltered from reality? Try a million.

Mate I work a minimum wage warehouse job and my partner works part time in a supermarket. We rent a 2 bed terrace house that hasn’t had any work done to it in 20 years and can barely afford to keep the lights on. Middle class I ain’t.

Well stop acting as though it’s an insignificant number of people who abuse the system. I’m not talking about immigrants either. There are millions who could be in work but aren’t.

But in the grand scheme of things it’s a relatively small percentage of people. And If they were serious about saving the tax payers money they wouldn’t have written off a few billion in COVID loans a few years back.

They couldn’t give two shits if some bloke is down the job center claiming a few hundred quid to sit on his arse, and tbh neither should we. There’s significantly bigger fish to fry.

It’s not just some bloke is it? It’s an entire demographic. Our schools are failing people from the very start and they aren’t interested in social mobility or education.

We spent £230bn on welfare last year alone. Granted a percentage of that chunk is fixed, but to act as though there is no headroom and people aren’t gaming the system ever is just insanity.

Yes the rich need taxing, but this isn’t a mutually exclusive kind of situation. We shouldn’t just tax the rich and spend stupidly elsewhere.

When did I say people aren’t playing the system? I said it’s massively overestimated given the numbers of people that aren’t playing the system.

And welfare spending also includes Pensions. It’s also by far and away the largest portion of that pie. Maybe we could take the state pension away from people who already have a nice cushty private pension and distribute that percentage back to people who aren’t in a position to retire at all?

When you said like 15 people are abusing the system. There are millions out there and you know it.

Yes scrap the triple lock as well, it’s a load of bollocks too.

There are millions out there and you know it.

I don’t know it. Can you show any kind of proof?

For the record, it seems like ~10 million people aren’t working who are of working age in the UK. If it’s millions, it would mean that at least 1 in 5 people not working abuses the system. Do you really think it’s that high?

It depends how many people claiming sick you think are actually unable to work. It benefits both the claimants and government to fudge the statistics to make it seem like the long term unemployed are receiving sickness benefits.

You claimed that it’s millions. Can you show any evidence? I mean, you even claimed the other commenter knows you are right with that.

Here you go. www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52660591

Like I said before it really depends how many of the people claiming to be sick actually are unable to work. If you truly believe all of them it doesn’t look like many,but from experience I know there are plenty of people claiming sick who are able to work.

Your link doesn’t say anything about millions of people abusing the system. Did you even read it yourself?

Like I said, if you truly believe every single one of those people are actually so sick they are unable to hold down any kind of work there is literally nothing I can do or say to change your mind.

You are always free to show me evidence that they aren’t!

The threshold for claiming disability/sickness benefits is very low in the UK. My dad has been claiming disability for over a decade now, but there are plenty of jobs he could’ve done in that time and I wouldn’t cnsider him disabled. He’s just been out of work so long that he’s become a social pariah. Once you’re out of work long enough they basically write you off and class you as being long term sick rather than a job seeker.

Compared to comparable countries the UK is very bad for this. The reason they keep it up is because it makes the government better if there are only 100,000 people who should be in work (According to Jeremy Hunt) rather than millions which is the true figure.

ft.com/…/74d34caa-e540-4ab8-ab11-be42d152abfc

The funny thing is that in pretty much every country there are people saying exactly what you are saying (“our country is worse in this compared to others”). And none I’ve ever talked to have shown evidence for their claims, they always say “we all know it’s true”.

But this discussion has run its course. As always, there is no evidence, no facts, no data - only feelings and beliefs.