The Ranting Room

prog-chick wrote: The easiest way not to be a teen PARENT is for boys to keep it zipped and girls to keep 'em closed. Stop making these girls the sole "bad guy" in the press.

Personally, so far as males are concerned, it's my beliefe that as soon as the hormone fairy arrives (which nowadays seems to be at about age 5 or 6...), either a cable tie or a jubilee clip should be judiciously applied until they can palpably demonstrate restraint (ie around 30 years later) - at one fell swoop you solve the problem of unwanted teenage pregnancy ( and also swell the ranks of male falsetto choirs).

I think this is a very interesting debate actually, especially in an area like the one I live in...

fandango wrote: well, here's the shock...many of them don't want to.  but, sticking around here means they will never have a job which taxes them mentally, or pays well...and they will never be able to get on to the property ladder, or even leave home.  unless they get pregnant early on...and there's a LOT of young, single mums around here...it almost seams to be an alternative career choice (right, you can put me back in my box, now)

Much as I'd love to be able to correct you, Jared, I can't - I strongly suspect you're 100% correct & the worrying thing is this cycle, which I suspect is now into its 2nd generation, is self perpetuating, leading to (continuing? ) the creation of a benefit dependant underclass generation.

What to do though?

Add:  I will say that if state benefits equal or exceed wages at available jobs...well, that's sort of a no brainer, isn't it.  

NaturalScience wrote: Jim Garten wrote: fandango wrote: well, here's the shock...many of them don't want to.  but, sticking around here means they will never have a job which taxes them mentally, or pays well...and they will never be able to get on to the property ladder, or even leave home.  unless they get pregnant early on...and there's a LOT of young, single mums around here...it almost seams to be an alternative career choice (right, you can put me back in my box, now) Much as I'd love to be able to correct you, Jared, I can't - I strongly suspect you're 100% correct & the worrying thing is this cycle, which I suspect is now into its 2nd generation, is self perpetuating, leading to (continuing? ) the creation of a benefit dependant underclass generation. What to do though? We had this problem throughout the 1980s, with basically families living generation after generation on welfare.  The solution was something that you folks may consider draconian, a major reform bill was passed in the mid 90s (and signed by Bill Clinton, mind you) that gave people five years to find some sort of work, and from then there's a mandatory 20 or 30 hours of work that these people have to do to receive benefits.  So far it hasn't been too drastic, unemployment, until very recently, was at near record lows and poverty rates has steadily declined, though that might have happened anyway.

In the UK we'd never do anything so pragmatic and straightforward as that. We favour tip toeing and tap dancing around the issue until it becomes completely unmanagable, at which point we just brush it under the carpet and try and ignore it. British style!

As you rightly say, of course, if a benefits package is a better deal than a job, then why bother working? In the shoes of a single parent, with no qualifications, I would do whatever I had to do to feed my child. If that means living off benefits then so be it. Generations of irresponsible economic management, and shutting down of our industrial base, by successive governments wouldn't have been my fault.

...my word, there's some jolly fine ranting going on this evening...have a clappy, everyone...

^^ I've overheard two rather interesting conversation recently.  Two female friends met in the local co-op; the first one says 'Oh I haven't seen you around much lately'.  The second tells her that she had taken a job in Hereford (20 miles) because it was paying £6.50 an hour instead of the £5.50 she was on locally.  The recent petrol hike however, has meant that she is worse off, because much of her meagre wage goes on fuel, and she's having to find something local again on £5.50 an hour, to make ends meet.

This has been touched upon previously, but Rachel's post highlights a serious problem in rural communities; villages are dying (literally) because any young people brought up in a small village cannot afford to stay, as overpaid city types are buying up everything from cottages to barns in order to have a country retreat - as a result the property prices soar in the area, young people leave the community to find somewhere (relatively) less expensive to buy or rent property, leaving the village to the aging 'older' residents.

I'm of an age that can remember when Welsh villagers started burning the weekend retreats of wealthy English for exactly this reason - are we soon to see mobs of pitchfork wielding wrinklies storming up the drives of immaculate barn conversions (with a break to pop in for a cream tea, naturally) & hurling flaming torches through the windows, only to find that as they're naturally triple glazed (to keep out the appalling noise of church bells, cows & sheep which disturb the sleep of the saintly city bred rich) they bounce right back at them resulting in city bankers (new rhyming slang if ever there was one) waking of a morning to find their driveways littered with the still smouldering remains of Mrs Miggins & the vicar by the mock Georgian front door.

We live in a country rapidly developing a blame-culture, so at whose door do I lay such blame for the immolation of hundreds of elrerly villagers (for it will happen, mark my words )?

These two:



It is down to programmes like Channel Four's "Location Location Location" that city types now believe they have not made it in the corporate dog shag dog world of city brokering/money laundering until Phil Spencer has persuaded them to take a 19th century cottage & fill it to the brim with Harvey Nichols's finest tat at "only £500,000" whilst Kirsty Allsop trawls the villages of the Dordogne to find some toothless crone willing to part with her ancestral home for "only €15,000,000" (plus rebuilding expenses and another €300,000 to bribe local planning officials), all the time training the chinless idiots they're sourcing property for not to see a room, but to see a "good space", not to see a home, but an "investment opportunity" - this at a time when the property market in the UK is poised on the brink of another nose-dive, so whilst Mr & Mrs Joe Average are patently unable to get even the smallest toe on the property ladder without their bankers hitting it with a 25 pound club hammer (or "interest rates" as they're commonly known) the major TV channels continue to churn out these kind of programmes (one of which with a supreme touch of irony is actually called "Property Ladder") just to rub their noses in it - "Hey you filthy poor people, here's an hour's worth of programming designed specifically to show you what you cannot, and will never in your wildest dreams be able to afford" - enjoy!

Bs

Jim

Those property programs are one of my - many - pet hates. I find them offensive. The scenarios you describe are spot on, and hi-light the true problems in this country; that massive divide between those who have money and those who dont.

Lets see a program about a real young couple, without a pot to p1ss in, struggling to get together the smallest of deposits, to part buy/part rent some housing asscociation cupboard. I'm sick of all those couples turning properties down because they 'dont like the stables' or whatever. Who are these people and why can't they off back to where they came? People dont pay their TV liecense to be reminded of what paupers they are.

Blacksword wrote: Who are these people and why can't they off back to where they came?.