Comments by "Banana" (@439bananas) on "BBCPanorama" channel.

  1. Big thank you to the BBC for this programme, revealing the ongoing UC scandal and also for upholding free speech by allowing comments on this site.
    105
  2. They probably realize that certain sectors of the population do not vote for them ie the poor. So if you force those people into homelessness, they will not be on the electoral roll and therefore they cannot vote you out of power.
    53
  3. @nobcheesy Yes, Labour bought out a system that was too generous and open to abuse, but the answer is not to try to starve people to death. Well done incidentally for volunteering at a CAB. The current system of Universal Credit is costing more but is leaving people worse off, how is that value for money for the taxpayer? If you force people into poverty then they either suffer ill health and become a burden on the NHS or they commit acquisitive crimes out of need and cost the criminal justice system. At the moment I can foresee the sort of situation where homeless people will live in overcrowded squats and drug-resistant TB will become rampant amongst them and quickly spread to the general population. Desperate people do desperate things. Many will turn to prostitution, soon man or woman you will not be able to walk down the street without being asked if you are looking for business. Not to mention the inevitable upswing in sexually transmitted diseases that will accompany the resultant depression of prices that will be part and parcel of an increased market supply of these services. The human misery that all this has the potential to cause far outweighs the monetary savings. The current situation was caused, not by the poor, but by the banks' poor investments in the subprime market and the subsequent taxpayer bailout. You can bet your bottom dollar that no banker is paying to nowhere near the degree that any poor person will pay. It is just too convenient to portray the poor as villains of the piece, let's face it the tories are probably very aware that the poor do not vote for them so what better way to subvert democracy than to make the homeless and get them off the electoral roll so that they cannot vote you out of power.
    44
  4.  @wutang6020  Yes, it would be interesting to see an undercover programme on DWP sanction targets and on how the government have misused non-disclosure orders to gag charities that receive government money (nay, more like taxpayer's money), preventing recipients from exposing the true level of poverty that they have caused and stymying free speech.
    15
  5. So sorry. Have you seen the case of Emily Lydon, she is 19 has BSE and is not able to walk or talk is doubly incontinent and is fed through a hole in her stomach. She has been moved onto Universal credit and is receiving £58 per week, she has lost £520 per week.
    14
  6.  @brucebiggy3593  Indeed he does, but sadly not everyone is that clued up or assertive or even eloquent.
    12
  7. Amazing that it cost so much to set up UC and it costs more than the old legacy benefits and yet most people seem to be worse off on it.
    11
  8.  @brucebiggy3593  It is reckoned that the advisers have sanctioning targets. Something very wrong with a system that imposes loses of money that are greater than criminal fines.
    11
  9. I think that the people making negative comments on here have no idea how hard it can be to be unemployed.
    9
  10.  @turriffterror3881  Thank you for adding this post. I think it exposes the greed and corruption that is going on.
    9
  11.  @timofarrelly9380  Hey matio, only used a non-defamatory turn of phrase. I think we all know the governments game. Face it, they must be aware that the poorer members of society do not vote for them, so if they are driven to homelessness and therefore off the electoral roll, ergo they won't be voting for the opposition.
    7
  12.  Deepbone4u  Just seen an item about a 19-year-old BSE suffer, who cannot walk or talk, is doubly incontinent and is fed through a hole in her stomach. Her Universal Credit award is just £58 per week, a loss of £520 per week compared to legacy benefits. Not sure how this is supposed to help her or her carer. I have a friend who has a son who is similarly affected by severe global mental delay, his mother has to drag him for a fit note every 3 months, even though there is no hope of improvement. Some idiot even suggested that as he likes music perhaps he could be a DJ, not too many DJs out there that wear a nappy and cannot even operate the equipment me thinks
    5
  13.  @brianjohnston4929  But when there is a change in benefits, the appropriate department is immediately informed, resulting in loss of housing benefit, unless the claimant contacts housing themselves.
    4
  14. Sorry to hear this. The levels of desperation are criminal.
    4
  15. Because prayer is all you'll have if you claim UC!
    4
  16. Some of these payments are being made to top up people's wages and while there will always be people with no intention to work there are also people in difficult positions. I have a disabled child and care for him the last time I was asked to investigate work in 2012 would have been £10:30 per hour. A job would have meant paying out £40 per school day in care fees and £100 per day in the school holidays. The working tax credit system is only set up to pay for the care of non-disabled children. When the state deems my caring role to be at an end, I will have not worked for many years, but I will be treated just the same as people that lost their job yesterday and have an excellent chance of work. As for £500 per month it costs around £2,000 per year to keep a car on the road, my house insurance on becoming unemployed will skyrocket to £1,000 per year, gas & electric are around £1,000 per year. It is one thing not making people's lives on the dole a luxury, it is another when they can not afford the essentials. The person who is smelly, unclean and dressed in rags is unlikely to get the job, no matter how much they need the income. Just the other month my drainage pipes from the bathroom blocked from 50 years worth of limescale, plunging and putting down drain clearing chemicals did nothing, had to pay a drainage guy £244 to clear it. For anyone on a limited budget this sort of unexpected expense would break them.
    3
  17. My son suffers from autism and Deficits in: Attention; Motor co-ordination and Perception with Pragmatic Disorder. I am divorced, ex does not want to know and I do not work. I am terrified what will happen when he is deemed an adult or if there is a change to our benefits. Do the politicians not think that we have enough to cope with. I am disgusted that having had a son with complex disabilities himself, David Cameron started the ball rolling on these detrimental reforms.
    3
  18. Most people forget that people have bought their televisions etc when times were good
    3
  19. People pay taxes and National INSURANCE, which is supposed to act as a safety net, why would you think that people would not use it? When people pay taxes etc why should they live in a tent?
    3
  20.  @Pathofplenty  Nice one! But on the bright side if they get sacked from there, they still have to go in next day to sign on LOL
    3
  21. We should be more careful about letting the rich get away with using tax loopholes and tax havens. When they make profits here, they should be paying tax on those profits here.
    3
  22. Go to the press and tell your story
    2
  23. Not forgetting the zero hour contracts where you might just be filling in for staff absences or a production surge.
    2
  24.  @NoNoNoMeansNo  The problem is that it is difficult to differentiate between the deserving and undeserving poor. I worked for years before I had my son and own my own house, but it is in a small rural market town. My nearest jobcentre is 12 miles away with no bus route to it, the next nearest is 20 miles away, with a sketchy bus service. I have a car, at the moment it is at the garage as the slave cylinder on the clutch has gone and it needs extensive work. It is only because of my son's disability that we have an enhanced level of benefits that allows me the money to fix it. Without my car, I would be pretty trapped where I live and there is not a great deal of employment here. I am 50 years old so if I get dumped on UC the chances of getting a job are slim. The trouble is that most people are not very understanding as to how you got to be in the unemployed position. I worked as a research scientist, but if your experience is not current and you do not live near one of the tech hubs like Oxford or Cambridge, your opportunities are not so good. People just say go and work in a shop, but employers are not keen on taking on someone that they feel are overqualified for the job, because they might not stick around for long.
    2
  25. You'd need a darn sight more than that where I live. The nearest job centre is 12 miles away, with no bus service and the nearest with a bus service is 21 miles away and also takes forever to get to.
    2
  26. Lack of credible opposition and the liberal democrats were willing to throw their hat in with anyone and damaged their own reputation.
    2
  27.  @ObjectiveAnalysis  Completely agree that they are paying out much less, this is the reason that the unemployed are using what should be partially for rent on living. I am aware that the media can be skewed in what it reports, he who pays the piper calls the tune, but as far as I am aware, comments on youtube are not being censored; hence what I mean about free speech. Nevermind what the media says or does not say, I am sure we all have the evidence of our own eyes when it comes to the increase in poverty and desperation around us.
    2
  28. God knows how many times and hours that I have now listened to that piece of music
    2
  29. Better pray you don't get too ill to work or have an accident that puts you out of work, as the state will treat you as simply being lazy.
    2
  30. Problem with that is more children with disabilities are born to older parents, so more cost to the NHS
    2
  31. People have paid tax and National Insurance to be messed around and people are paid to administrate these benefits, so people have more than a right to complain.
    2
  32. Yes, it is annoying when you see people who are abusing the system. There is a woman where I live who has never worked. To be fair she does do a lot for charity, she rides a disability scooter, but she somehow manages to stand for hours on end at charity events. One day whilst I was waiting at the co-op tills I could see her loading heavy boxes into an estate car, there was no evidence whatsoever of mobility issues. You kind of know that, that person has had years and years when she could have, I even heard her complaining that her disability benefits had been stopped. It is not that I am unsympathetic. My own son has autism and deficits in attention motor co-ordination and perception with pragmatic disorder. But at least I worked until I was 34 and paid £75,000 in tax let alone National Insurance and the ex-husband is a higher rate taxpayer. The problem is that the people who take the biscuit, have ruined it for the genuine cases.
    2
  33. We all pay tax and National Insurance to cover us in times of need and those who are unable to work. There are some people who are simply scroungers, but many are in situations that are not of their own making and no one should be punished with poverty for that. During my working life, I paid £75,000 in tax. I was with my husband for over 8 years when I had our child and within 10 months he was off. I divorced him and was forced to pay him £80,000 and could no longer afford to live where my industry as a research scientist is based. It was then found that my son had a condition called Deficits in: Attention; Motor co ordination and Perception with Pragmatic Disorder, he went on to be diagnosed with autism. As you can imagine I now live in a cheaper area in the back of beyond. The Jobcentre has been on my case and have asked me to investigate work. It would be impossible to make work pay here. Care for my son would cost at least £10.30 an hour, as insurance for childcarers demands that disabled children are looked after on a 1:1 basis by a suitably qualified carer. He would require at least 4 hours a day care and that is just during term time, in the holidays it would be more like 10 hours a day. You can see that by adding in travel costs of 45 miles a day, that actually it would leave us with nothing to live on. It is way cheaper for the state to pay the benefits that it pays me then to pay for my child to be in care. If my benefits were stopped, I would have no choice but to put my child into the care system, as I would not be able to realistically work, for one thing I am too knackered! As a carer, I am a member of various groups that have bought me into contact with foster parents and social workers, many children in the care system have disabilities, some of them not as bad as my own son and with two parents to care for them. The basic pay for a foster carer is around £450 per week per child and that is for non-complex cases, carers of children with disabilities are paid even more. That is not too mention the costs of social workers and reports and care hearings in the courts. I can tell you that every time that I stepped foot in court during my divorce it cost me £3000-£4000. In care hearings, both the state and the parents are represented by legal teams that are funded from the public purse. Very expensive. Similarly, if you stop people's benefits and they become desperate they are apt to turn to crime, not from greed, but from need. Who wants prostitutes, drug dealers and muggings on their street and who wants to pick up the resultant policing, court and prison costs, not me or you I would bet given that these functions cost a lot more than simply paying a fair system of benefits. Do I feel guilty about claiming benefits? No, I do not. Not only did I pay indirectly into the system, but during the time that I worked I was involved in the development of one drug now on the market and I cloned a cell line that also produces a drug that is used for arthritis and Crohn's disease that is also on the market. Later in my career, whilst working with a group who were trying to develop an autologous blood device, I suggested an alternative development. Essentially, the other scientists were in the process of developing a novel aerosol. It worked like this: blood shed during surgery was collected and kept in the bottom of the aerosol where it was kept liquid by balls of agar with heparin attached to them. When surgery was finished and the patient sewn up, the wound would then be sprayed, the blood would pass through a second stage where it would mix with a proprietary coagulant and it would then form an immediate protective scab of the patients own blood over the wound site. My development was to suggest that if we could get the proprietary coagulant to stick irreversibly and stabily to agar, then we could make sheets of agar and attach the coagulant and use it as a dressing to stop bleeding. As far as I am aware, it is not licensed for general use as yet, but it has been used on the battlefield to good effect and apparently, a helicopter medic had some packs when he was called to an incident where a tree surgeon had accidentally cut his own throat and the dressing saved his life. Austerity was caused by the taxpayer bailout of the bankers that unwisely invested in the subprime market. I do not see any bankers paying for their mistakes in the way in which the poor of this country have paid. Not to mention the rich individuals and companies that do business here, but do not pay tax here. Maybe it is time that you did not swing your axe so broadly and took a surgical swing at the real cause of the problems. The Tory party and it's media mouthpieces are only too happy for the poor of this country to take the blame for their poor management whilst they and their cronies line their pockets at our expense. Too many sheeple buy the lies.
    2
  34.  @cedricworthingtonbroadaxe2287  Completely agree that there is shocking wastage. The NHS is a case in point, where there are too many expensive pen pushers at the expense of frontline staff, drugs and equipment. There is no joined up thinking. The drug that I helped to develop, that work was half funded by the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust. Part way through clinical trials Wellcome was taken over by Glaxo, who did not want to continue funding our project as they saw the product as being a competitor to drugs that they produced. They stopped funding us and the Medical Research Council would not pick up the other half of the bill. So all of our cell lines were sold off via the British Technology Group. Now, 1.2ml of this drug costs £7045 and the other drug whose cell line that I cloned costs £419 per 100mg, because they are sold by big pharma. I find it immoral that many people worked very hard to discover these drugs and we all worked way over a 37 hour week, for these drugs whose discoveries were funded by the British taxpayer are not available on the NHS. Why would you not have a parallel drug industry, where drugs discovered in MRC funded labs are produced free of charge for our own NHS and all the quantity that is produced in excess of our needs are sold to other countries with the profits being ploughed back into the NHS and further research? Could it possibly be that too many politicians have personal interests in big pharma? Two friends of mine are Cambridge graduates who have set up a charity for non-neurotypical individuals who are unemployed. The idea is that lots of autistic individuals are really good with computers and as they are unemployed they could be using that time productively by receiving some free training that would get them into a job. However, their efforts are being completely thwarted by the Jobcentre's completely beaurocratic and inflexible approach to 'conditionality'. Yet the crazy rules mean that people with degrees are being sent on basic numeracy and literacy courses that are a complete waste of taxpayer's money. Now whilst I wouldn't say that my writing or mathematics are perfect, they go way beyond the crap taught in these courses, you would have thought that they might have figured that if you have worked in a lab that you do not need to be taught how to do percentages. It is yet another example of the non joined up thinking and money wasting that goes on. Sense just does not come into it.
    2
  35.  @MrDAVIDGBJONES  I know what you mean, back in 1991, I covered a maternity leave in a school as a lab technician. The holidays, 13 weeks per year, were unpaid, but you were not able to claim benefits in those periods, as you had a job. The system needs to be much, much more flexible to accommodate employers needs and not leave the poor employee either badly off or filling in reems and reems of DWP forms.
    2
  36. Go get advice from the Disabled Information Advice Line, they're really good
    2
  37. Sadly, the I'm alright Jack attitude is alive and well in many. Some of these self-centred individuals must think themselves invulnerable to serious illnesses or accidents, or they would not say the stuff they do say.
    2
  38. Yes, but part of the problem is the 6-10 week wait for this benefit to start. Fine if you have just lost a well paid job, not so fine if you have left a minimum wage job or been transferred from legacy benefits. These people are then reliant upon hardship payments coming through in a timely fashion or they are left o the loan sharks and vast interest payments.
    1
  39.  @marklittle1651  Well I have no idea how he managed to get that amount in benefits. My husband walked out and our son is disabled and I receive nowhere near that figure.
    1
  40. It amazes me that the new universal credit is costing more than the old legacy benefits and yet people are getting less money, so a bit of dyscalculia there I think
    1
  41. More like the government's fault.
    1
  42.  @NoNoNoMeansNo  I had a planned pregnancy, within marriage. Pregnancy is not exactly compatible with that sort of work, we had, had a number of miscarriages at my workplace so I am assuming that they thought that it is easier to get rid of the employee. My husband walked out before our son was a year old. I hold a degree in biology and an HNC in engineering. They keep on about trying to get more girls doing science, what they forget to mention is that while it is interesting, you do not have a standard day. It is not a case of go in at 9am and leave at 5pm, it was more like arrive at work 7:30am and leave at 5:30-6:30pm. If your equipment went desperately wrong and you could not get it going again, you could go home at 4pm, but you would be stuck at work till 9-10pm the next day. On top of these hours, I used to be on call one week in every four. It was OK at first as we were allowed up to 12 flexi days a year that we could take as half days, but these were negotiated away in exchange for fewer redundancies. So originally if I got called in at say 2am then I would do what I had been called out to do and continue working until noon and then go home and go to bed. The problem was that they changed all that, so for instance if you got a call out at 3:30 am and got to work at 4am and the work took about an hour then you were expected to go home and come back in for 7:30am again and do a full days work, exhausting. The working time directive does not apply to a lot of these workplaces. A few years after I left they changed the working patterns to shift work, they have been fined by health and safety for a number of breaches, so this together with staff retention problems probably prompted the changes. Unfotunately, these sorts of working patterns are not family friendly.
    1
  43.  @NoNoNoMeansNo  Yeah, I have had a few science based jobs, all have been longish hours, some bosses are OK, some not so. A tangible store is a great idea, because it is difficult to buy clothes on line as you have no idea of the quality of the fabric, workmanship, fit or drape. I enjoy being a mother, even though my son has autism, he certainly his own skill set.
    1
  44. People have paid for their benefits with their NI payments
    1
  45. Didn't know that one, so thanks for putting it on here.
    1
  46. It is entirely wrong
    1
  47. Good point, it is rather expensive these days.
    1
  48.  @ObjectiveAnalysis  That's the best bit, free speech thrives here.
    1
  49. All the people who keep agreeing with these cuts do not realise that cuts do not create jobs or jobs in the right places in Britain. All that happens is that the cuts cause problems elsewhere and cause much more expense to the criminal justice system, NHS and care system
    1
  50.  @wendyjane6634  Try Disabled Information Advice Line, they are very good.
    1