Whoa this thread has veered completely off course. The War on Poverty is not the same thing here as in the US. For many years the UK has led the way in trying to alleviate poverty in other countries and only recently begun to address the issue at home. Tony Blair was an insincere cheesy grinned Scottish charlatan masquerading as a genuine Labour party leader who ended up both running and ruining large parts of this country, but even he, or more accurately some bright sparks below him, managed to implement some polices that have gone on to improve the lot of working people in the UK.

The minimum wage and working tax credits have enabled many unemployed people to leave what the Americans call welfare, and we call the dole, and start working to support themselves and their families. I would like to call BULLSHIT on the idea that "welfare" is responsible for damaging the traditional family unit and that somehow the same is true over here in the UK. What the hell is "the Black community" ? Here in the UK where we have never had segregation and like most of the world mixed marriages have continued to erase the comfortable lines that are the last refuge of separatists and those with an agenda, I hope I am right in assuming that black and white people are not so unique that a government policy would affect them differently.


Liberalism is spat out across the pond by many like a dirty word, but here in the UK the connotations are vastly different. Even traditional boundaries of left and right wing politics are not the same.
The Opening Post


One of my American friends got off the train in London. A 3 guys jumped high and stole his laptop. He said crime was really high there. I was there in 1982 and had no problems at all. It seemed like a really nice place. What happen?
The first reply

Crime is against the law in England.... situations like you described shouldn't happen


Crime is not SO HIGH in England. It is in fact falling. The fear of crime is rising. I am finding it hard to believe the idea that London is so dangerous that you in any more likely to be in grave danger of being jumped and robbed as soon as you get off the train, than any other major capital city in the world. I go regularly with my disabled Mrs and the opposite has usually been true with people offering to help with luggage etc.


the reply


Crime is everywhere and nobody has tried to argue that it does not exist in England, but Gun Crime is much, much , much lower than somewhere like the US. It is an inarguable fact.

Most people would rather work than claim benefits. There are a lot of myths around benefits


The idea of families where generations have never worked

In households with two or more generations of working age, there were only 0.3 per cent where neither generation had ever worked. In a third of these, the member of the younger generation had been out of work for less than a year.


Couples are not better off splitting up

Research in 2009 for the Department for Work and Pensions looked at whether different benefit systems had any impact on people’s decisions about whether to stay together or not. They concluded that ‘on balance, the reviewed literature shows that there is no consistent and robust evidence to support claims that the welfare system has a significant impact upon family structure’.


Benefit fraud is high and going up

The claim that benefit fraud is increasing is similarly false. Because there have been changes in how fraud has been calculated over time, we have to look at combined fraud and ‘customer error’ for JSA and income support. This declined from 9.4 per cent to 4.8 per cent of spending from 1997/98 to 2004/05, and has since stayed roughly flat