You haven't actually been in much social housing, have you? Where in God's name does this fantasy of luxury at the taxpayers expense come from? Outside the lurid pages of the Daily Mail, the only people who believe in such things are 15 year old girls whose sole ambition is to have a bay-bee and score a nice flat on Housing Benefit so they can watch Jeremy Kyle all day.Most people in social housing are paying rents which successive governments have pushed to match private sector rents, and they are paying out of wages if they have jobs. If they earned more, most would buy somewhere to live in a heartbeat. Social housing tends to be cramped and not terribly peaceful thanks to a minority of disruptive ASBO collecting skmu. It may seem unreasonable to not simply shoot them in the head, but until we get a more enlightened and less indulgent government along Chinese lines, someone has to put up with living alongside antisocial a*holes. Luxury it is not.Housing benefit is another matter. It may seem regrettable but there is this quaint idea, a socialist hangover perhaps, that families should not be booted onto the streets for not working. Hell, even people with mortgages get their mortgages paid if they lose their jobs. You're in luck with the current government, though, whose caps on HB are resulting in a forced diaspora to obscure cheaper bits of Blighty where nobody actually wants to live and the indigent and their children can rot at less expense.I suspect what you are complaining about is the existence of unemployables among us. Both Labour and Conservative have done a great deal to perpetuate an underclass, who are now into their 3rd generation of un-educated petty-criminal substance-abusing feral vagabonds with no living memory of anyone who worked. This was a strategic political choice of the 1970's, that the price of post-industrialism was to just shovel the surplus humanity into sink estates and forget about them whilst the yuppies et seq made UK filthy rich. Didn't quite work out like that tho'.
Tony Sleep ● 4997d