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PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 10:18 am 
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Hawleytastic!

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Did anyone else see this? He's massively gone up in my estimation... is there a pill you can take for that? Really good programmes about what being working class means and whether we exist anymore. Great stuff. x


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PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 10:26 am 
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perhaps since he's quit drinking, we're seeing the better side of his nature.
he's said/done a few things I'll take my hat off to, i liked his take on that first show.

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PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 11:57 am 
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Thanks for mentioning this, Helen - I'd missed it, so was able to catch up on iPlayer. Some real lump in the throat stuff. The old chap who was on the Jarrow Crusade was an absolute star - sad to see at the end of the programme that he passed away last year.

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PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 3:19 pm 
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I enjoyed it too. He was a good commentator .


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PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 6:44 pm 
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Hawleytastic!

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I thought it was great – my dad drove a Routemaster and my mum was his clippie, so all the stuff about the buses really was true. I lived that life and it was real, the sense of community people had. And Reggie Yates went up in my estimation because he was a young person and he didn't buy this idea that there was no such thing as class and that working class communities were still there looking out for each other and not the Chavs and scum people make out. You lot read Owen Jone's book Chavs? It's all about this kind of stuff and it really cemented in my mind lots of things I thought already about life and identity and all of that. Anyway, great stuff from someone who gets it – and I had a lump in my throat too Nick. xxxx


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PostPosted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 8:06 pm 
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Loved it. A bit similar to the Robson Greene programme a few months back. I'm a sucker for dogs so I've enjoyed his Battersea series too. He comes across as genuine and from the heart.

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PostPosted: Sat Aug 24, 2013 4:13 pm 
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Loved the programme - but does it still exist - if it does I'm no longer a part of it - perhaps in my mind and my attitudes - but we have a fridge central heating and an inside toilet - and the bath no longer hangs from the back yard wall...


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PostPosted: Sun Aug 25, 2013 10:42 pm 
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If you still work for a wage and make profits for someone else it most definitely does exist. That's the bottom line.

Haven't seen the programme, and the iPlayer doesn't work for us in the former colonies, at least without a load of messing about. I'll try and have a look. O'Grady's come out with some righteous stuff over the last couple of years I recall.

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PostPosted: Mon Aug 26, 2013 11:36 am 
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Must watch this, he came across well in the Battersea programme. Class not only still exists but we are in danger of rolling back to the days of Barons and Serfs.

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PostPosted: Mon Aug 26, 2013 10:11 pm 
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I watched the first programme, it gave me a lot to think about. We would all be a lot better off if we stand together as working people instead of thinking we are not working class. So many of the jobs considered working class don't exist any more.

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PostPosted: Thu Aug 29, 2013 3:26 pm 
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Hawleytastic!

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Alan Noir wrote:
If you still work for a wage and make profits for someone else it most definitely does exist. That's the bottom line.


Very true, Al and Mr Shambles. Ask the people at Sports Direct whether it exists? Having to find out daily if they will get enough hours to feed their families. Wonder what the dockers who fought so hard to stop that kind of thing would think of our discussions about whether a big TV means you're no longer poor (don't get me started on Jamie Oliver). At least there are some people who don't turn into a c**t when they've got a bit of money in their pocket. x


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PostPosted: Thu Aug 29, 2013 6:14 pm 
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Caught both episodes on iPlayer. Really interesting but with all that talk of Birkenhead all I could think of was the gig Richard did at the Liverpool Philly.

After enquiring where the audience had travelled from there were shouts of various places, ending with a massive bellow from way up in the back of the balcony of BUUURKUNHEAAADDD :*:


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PostPosted: Thu Aug 29, 2013 6:40 pm 
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Aye I remember it well - classic ..>

Cheese-shire just doesn't have the gravitas - although I could risk a lynching and shout our Caldy at the next Liverpool gig...


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PostPosted: Mon Sep 09, 2013 12:20 pm 
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I've got a lot of time for Paul O'Grady, his radio show on Sundays is one of the few things I listen to, has me in stitches.

As far as class goes, it's an interesting one....I was brought up very working class, but if I'd known, even at 20, (what a difference 10 years makes, eh? :wink: ) that I'd be living in MY OWN HOUSE in a nice suburb with a PHONE and a FREEZER and a GARAGE and a massive fuck off TV I'd have thought that the present day me had most definitely 'made it' to the middle classes.

(I am of course employed full time. And prepared to turn up on time, work bloody hard and not abuse the pretty generous policies that my employer has in place. Also, I haven't had a pay rise of any description for 4 years, until this year, when my salary rose by £15 per month, presumably so that public sector employees can't whinge that they never get an increase!!!)

There's been such a shift.....I have my own views on the mis management of our collective finances, and I wonder if we are actually in as much bother as our 'leaders' would have us believe, but at a sociological level there's no doubt that an alternative class that has developed, whereby expectation of benefits, whether to replace or supplement work based income, has led to the poverty line being very much skewed from what it was twenty or thirty years ago.

For example, if my mother was skint, I knew about it - no chocolate biscuits and packed lunch to save school dinner money.

I don't see much of that around me these days. All the present benefits system has done is to encourage people to work less hours, if at all, in order to keep their benefits coming in in order to top any working income up and maintain a pretty good standard of living.

And what happens once the system is tightened up? The genuine, the vulnerable, plus the ones who are temporariliy disadvantaged but desperately trying to get into work, the ones that no one minds supporting because that's what the system was set up to do, are the ones that suffer.

The introduction of 'zero hours contracts' is yet another step back, with businesses maximising on the fact that people need to work, and it'll be the ones I've described above, the ones who don't want to live on benefits and won't (or in some instances can't!!) find a loophole to get out of going for these jobs who, again, suffer - not the people in the 'alternative class' that I've described - not yet, anyway, not until the screws are tightened even further.

Those who can work, should, and pernicious zero hour contracts should be abolished, as should the notion that it's ok to work no more than 24 hours a week because benefits will drop.

I'm not saying that everyone who works and claims supplementary benefits or who can't find work is a scrounger , but there is a definite element of manipulation around the benefit system which needs to be scrutinised more carefully so that people aren't working a three day week and being paid five days to cover the shortfall.

AND this is going to really set the cat among the pigeons, but I have a real problem with people who have been out of work for years and years, who have no disabilities - I refuse to believe the unavailability of jobs long term - it might not be what they've chosen to do, but there are still jobs out there, although as I've said the zero hours contract, which is a dangerous symptomatic reaction to everything I've talked about, needs to be stopped, now.

Otherwise even more of our taxes will be filtered into schemes to get the long term unemployed back into work. (Don't get me started on 'schemes!!!!!)

What was this thread about again?

:mrgreen:
Oh yeah, I reckon I'm working class. With a middle class lifestyle, I guess.


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PostPosted: Mon Sep 09, 2013 1:12 pm 
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There are two and a half million unemployed and there are about half a million available jobs....So how do we go about this if we don't split those jobs into fewer hours?

John Keynes, the only economist who's theories have ever been proven to work, predicted that with the growth of machinery replacing workers, people would need to work less and be paid more. This hasn't transpired because the company owners and shareholders are just creaming off more and more profit. You only need to look at steelworks to see how few people they need to employ now compared to earlier times. This is not going to get better.

The papers encourage people to say "I'm working hard for peanuts, so should you", that's just turning worker against worker rather than organizing skilled workers to get the pay to which they should be entitled.

Yes there are skivers, there always are, but we shouldn't punish the majority for the acts of a few.The idea that there are generations of families out there living of the state is a neoliberal fed myth. We need to look at the statistics rather than the anecdotes. It is just feeding bitterness and will lead to all manner of violence.

Anyone interested in the facts, check this site and not, definitely not the papers

http://fullfact.org

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