I have had recourse to benefits twice in my life.
Before, I think 1980 , the law allowed a student to sign on during term breaks, I would not have qualified for Unemployment Benefit if I had not previously worked but luckily I got my first job a few days after I turned 16. At the time the benefit rate was around 14 pounds a week for a single person, I was living with my parents and while it was not a fortune it was pretty good and made things a lot easier during the breaks between terms particularly during the summer
There was a rule that allowed those who had qualified once for Unemployment Benefit to carry forward the entitlement if they signed on again within 14 weeks which meant a student could carry entitlement all the way through their study years, if they signed on every term break.
To inject a bit of levity into a serious discussion, I have always used my own measure of inflation and it is one that is pertinent to those living a miserable life on the dole, my measure is "Beer Inflation"
Using the "Beer Inflation" scale and given that an average cheap beer in a cheap pub costs about £2.50 now, then the lucky single guy on the dole should be on about 10 times 14 quid today i.e. 140 quid a week, if benefit had kept up with inflation. As we all know it hasn't and the lucky recipient of modern benefits gets 65 quid a week and a requirement to prove they are seeking work after a very short period on benefit.
The second time I had to claim was 1993 when I was out of work for 8 months for various reasons. It was much much harder that time compared to when I was a kid and also much more humiliating, as you get older and have a career it is quite hard to listen to someone telling you that if you can't quickly find a job in your primary line of work that you will have to take anything that comes along. Not likely to look great on a CV when your work history says "Developed Scottish Financial Budgeting system for the Scottish Office" and the next entry is "199x to 199x plus 1, worked in Burger King", that didn't happen to me but I came close.
All of us live in fear of being out of work these days and I promise you even before the cuts that are coming it is not fun to live on the dole. There are genuinely work shy people in this world, they do exist, I knew one guy, one of my best friends, a very very smart intelligent man who only ever had a couple of short jobs after dropping out of Uni in 1977-78. He spent his entire life unemployed going on one government training course after another, he had a chip on his shoulder and he was definitely at fault he could have worked but he didn't really want to, he always found a way to turn down any chance of real work, I even tried to get him into Software Development at one time but he managed to turn that down chance as well.
Anyway he paid the price for that, he died in 2007 unemployed aged 49 from pneumonia (life long smoker of rollups), single and alone as his fiancée had given up on him and left him about 8 years before, she had even given him the chance to become part of her family business but that offended his pride and he turned that down as well. His friends, including me, did him great disservice by helping him out and regularly and buying him beer in the pub, it didn't help him and certainly did not encourage him into employment.
So yes there are real work shy people in the UK but they pay a price for it, long term unemployment equals reduced life expectancy and the quality of the life they have is poor. My friend lived in the same council house all of his life, he was lucky it was a nice council house in our town not one of the terrifying council estates like Easterhouse used to be, or some of the poorer bits of my home town.
Is a free house in hell something to be desired? I think not, if you are single and male you will be lucky if you ever get a council house and at least in Scotland if you did you probably ended up on the 13th floor of a building with paper thin walls non functional elevators and some very anti social neighbours.
Having been there a couple of times, life on the dole, if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, is a pretty terrifying experience and it is something that personally terrifies me. The purchasing value of the benefit is a fraction of what it once was and will never get better, most people that are about to be unemployed in the near future don't want to be, they will be forced into the situation by the cuts and they will be stuck as they will often have been higher earners, getting a bit older, employers will not want them because they see them as desiring higher pay or as being less flexible and thus a lot of people in their late 40's early to mid 50's will get trapped in lifelong unemployment, written off because the economy is unable to recover fast enough to provide them with the opportunities in their own area's of expertise and then trapped because no one wants them in the more menial jobs that do happen to be available.
In the Phils you get written off if you are over 30 and don't have a degree or some kind of business of your own, it won't be long before it's like that here too.
One last thing, for those of us that are old enough to remember, the primary reason for Europe is to bring us all together to stop the wars that ruined the first half of the last century, we pay a price for that but we get a lot in return, always remember free movement works both ways we have the freedom to work anywhere in Europe too, that might become a valuable right in the not to distant future.
I have been to Poland on business many times in the last 18 months and yes it is true that it is a poor country but things are changing there and chances are that a lot of poles may find their opportunities are better back home in the next few years. The guys we deal with over there are software developers and they are some of the best paid people in Poland we sub out work to them because they are about one quarter the price of the equivalent Brit and they are every bit as educated as the equivalent Brit in many cases more so, right now they have that advantage, in five years time they will be competing on merit not on price, all markets change over time, the European job market will change as well, I for one don't want a return to closed borders as I might end up being the one who wants to sell my skills abroad in Europe in a few years time.
