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?
) 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?
Oh yeah, I reckon I'm working class. With a middle class lifestyle, I guess.