Poverty Documentaries

Poverty Porn Show Benefits Street, Benefits Too Fat to Work, On Benefits & Proud Immigration Street and Skint and Life and Times of Josie Cunningham Are they programs designed for prejudice and scapegoat people . How about a Show Called Benefits Bankers Tax-Dodging Toffs Financiers Fiddlers on the Roof Even the Royal Family "My Arse" not That Family the Other one are on the Social.

Actually it is completely the opposite, channel 4 tend to be leftwing in their politics, benefits street was a sympathetic look at life on benefits but it was very popular so the other networks just jumped on the bandwagon. The rightwing press are the ones who have stirred up all the trouble by running stories about real scroungers while forgetting to mention the people who are really suffering.

Yeah the BBC are the worst offenders in my books nearly every weekday they have benefits fraud programs on.

these benefit shows on ch4 and channel 5 always seem to pick the worse people possible for the shows. was one a few weeks back who wanted to move house because the house was supposidly haunted and it was causing her stress.

I work in the area of legal advice in one of the towns concerned. People can make there own minds up about the benefit claimants portrayed in these programmes as being representative dependent upon how much of a social conscience they may have...all I will say is that Channel 4 approached us to see if we had any 'suitable' clients willing to be filmed.
Their one requirement was that they must not be ordinary benefit clients. They only wanted the dodgier clients. The reason? They make better tv viewing.
Don't believe all that you see on tv. Yes there are certainly scroungers out there but the majority of people on benefit are law abiding people facing deprivation and hardship, who if circumstances were better would not have to rely on the state for their survival. For the record we declined to assist Channel 4

(23-01-2015 03:49 )dazza101 Wrote:  Poverty Porn Show Benefits Street, Benefits Too Fat to Work, On Benefits & Proud Immigration Street and Skint and Life and Times of Josie Cunningham Are they programs designed for prejudice and scapegoat people . How about a Show Called Benefits Bankers Tax-Dodging Toffs Financiers Fiddlers on the Roof Even the Royal Family "My Arse" not That Family the Other one are on the Social.

Totally agree..... you wanna try reading the Daily Mail sometime... scary Apparently poor people cause Cancer.......or was that immigrants

Reading a book about the 1940s and early 1950s and it is striking the contrasts and comparisons with today.
A bankrupt nation setting up a welfare state during austerity conditions as a reaction to a titantic struggle in World War Two and memories of 1920s and 1930s plagued by economic depression & mass unemployment.
Were all the decisions correct ? Were all the outcomes as intended/for the better ? Simplistic to say 100% yes or no.
What there did seem to be though was a reasonably general level of consensus in society that a system that provided some kind of safety net - and particularly medical care - was for the benefit of society as a whole.
And surely at least one of the reasons has to be because a fair proportion of the MP's coming into Parliament had seen and lived through the conditions of their constituents at first hand, had seen their own parents and relatives struggling in poverty to make a living wage out of genuine back-breaking industrial jobs; and - not least ? - had served with and fought alongside all manner of different people in the armed forces and discovered/confirmed that class prejudices were just that - prejudices.
And society TALKED about what and how they should try and improve things. On the radio. And in newspapers. And in cinema newsreels and public information (propaganda ?)
Now the very word "welfare" is used a political beating stick, in the same way that "liberal" has become a dirty word; and it is completely acceptable in a "politically correct" age to have comedy and documentary programmes laughing and sneering at "chavs" in the way that 1970s sitcoms did about Asian and Afro Carribean communities. And what passes for discussion is just knee-jerk bear-baiting and electioneering with no solutions other than simplistic "cut more" or "spend more".
Where is the genuine constructive discussion today about how to tackle gross inequality ?
The legacy of the 1940s and 1950s was the creation of a welfare state - tellingly though in those days commonly referred to as "Insurance" - to recognise that the elderly, the sick, the struggling poor, and even all classes in jobs at the mercy of market forces might sometimes need help at some stage in their lives.
The legacy of the 1980s and 1990s is the creation and continuing tolerance of a welfare "underclass" with no opportunity, stake in society or hope; and the genuine "waste" of generation after generation of families written off as "scroungers".

While the wealthy laugh all the way to their banks in off-shore tax havens, the squeezed middle classes recoil in horror at paying tax and as a response to straining, underfunded and oversubscribed public services, seek on the one hand to try to take advantage of these services while they still can, while at the same time desperately straining up the ladder to afford a better mortgage for the "right house" in the "right catchment" for the "good school"; or even better enough salary to "go private".

( And the current generation of elected representatives kick away the last of the ladders of opportunity that helped their parents' generation get them into the social position from which these self-serving MPs have had their start in life; get their policies written and endorsed by the private vested interests seeking juicy government contracts , PFI deals, and a general dismemberment of what remains of public services; all so that these vested interests can provide worse versions of these services at a profit to themselves but somehow called "more efficiently for the tax payer", and still get bailed out if they fail; and the MPs line up their well-paid directorships with same-said companies for when they're finally kicked out of office.
Cos no job is for life. )

^^^

Thank You Great Reply That is What was in my Mind but I am not a Good orature This Reminds me of FDR Famous speech I welcome Their Hatred.

Thank You Everyone for Your Feedback on This Subject Does not Help When we have Chinless Wonders Cameron and Osborne When I hear them Speak about this Subject I am Hearing Ignorance And Privilege.

This is a pretty depressing and certainly a divisive topic, definitely not one for a first date! But a couple of points sprang to mind reading this.
The contrast of present-day self-serving politicos vs the Roosevelt speech reminded me that the 'benefit scrounger' issue (as sensationalised in the mass media) does indeed serve to distract us from what the MPs get up to, but what we often forget entirely is that we should hardly expect more from the current generation of young to middle-age career politicians. These men (and women), who have followed a carefully-plotted path from youth to be MPs, did so not out of any special love of country, political ideology or sense of civic responsibility. Instead, they trained to go to Westminster so that they could play the game of (don't say thrones, don't say thrones) power. Men of FDR's generation and earlier (Teddy R, David Lloyd George, Gladstone & co) at least lived a little before becoming politicians; they knew of what poverty was and how class & wealth created problems which they saw first-hand; they felt the urge to do something constructive with their lives, whether they succeeded was a different matter. But our young MPs often lack that background and impulse, so is it any wonder that they then succumb to greed when faced with the possibilities for self-aggrandisement? Hardly. It doesn't make it any less disappointing or reprehensible.
Also, I wondered about leakage IRO taxation and public spending. For example, I pay taxes. So do we all (mostly). We don't always like it but we do it and we understand that it's necessary so that we can have the public services, infrastructure and welfare which make our society so enviable on the whole. But why do our tax pounds not provide enough money for everything which we deem essential? Is it the leakage of benefit scrounging? Or is it the leakage of inefficient bureaucracy? OR, is one factor the leakage of wasteful expenditure of valuable police resources on what, as Russell Brand says, is the "lost" war on drugs? He was right in his recent documentary to highlight what a shocking state of poverty and ill-health they leave people in, but also in my own opinion right to highlight how much of a waste it is to throw money into criminalising victims whilst simultaneously failing to eradicate the 'problem' - supply. Prohibition didn't work in FDR's day; it doesn't work any better now. Simply by controlling and taxing the supply of something for which there is clearly a demand (and particularly amongst people who have very little but always make enough money available for ciggies, booze or blow), and redirecting police resources more constructively, perhaps we could stop worrying about benefits as some kind of money pit and have enough left over to actually do something about improving society. Then maybe we wouldn't even be watching shows like Benefits Street?
Wow, still an optimist after all.

Missing key events. Talking bollocks. Making stuff up.
~~~SAVE THE KRILL!~~~

The problems today is we have the wrong type of capitialism and wrong type of politics . in the victorian times the actual owners of wealth used to live in the communities and as a result used to spend a lot of money building houses for workers and other projects if you look at the big northern cities like manchester they were built using money from the cotton mills and cities like glasgow in scotland like glasgow all were built using private cash. but today the big firms are american like google, amazon, starbucks who couldnt give a fuck about this country as its a cash cow and they dont have to live here in our communitys

Wrong type of politics its now a party political system where the needs of the party outweighs the needs of the constiuents of who they represent.

feel sorry for the tories because they always have to follow labour goverments who spend way to much money and then the tories have to come in an balance the books. ok i dont always like the way the tories go about balancing the books

anyone who thinks that the labour party represents the workers nowadays is totally wrong. its in labour's interests to keep people out of work and claiming benefits as they will keep voting labour where as if they got sucessfull then they are more likely to vote tory

have to say i hate UKIP because they blame the EU and immigration for all the problems we have now is down to shit leadership in this country by white english men and women not europeans or immigrants

one way would be make it compulosry to vote but with a non of the above option on ballot if it had happened so that in may this would happen then None of the Above would win and we would get a complete change in politics overnight.