17 January 2006

A dependency culture?

Melanie Reid writing in The Herald offers a right-wing saloon bar rant about workshy scroungers:
"Nobody likes to face up to the fact that the average jobless Scot, in possession both of a healthy body and reasonable mental faculties, is workshy. It offends our romantic view of ourselves as tough, thrifty toilers with a can-do attitude, even though this honourable, sweat-stained image is probably the best part of 50 years out of date.
In the cold dawn of 2006, however, workshy – or, more accurately, work-ignorant – is a reality we should not disguise with warm words and gentle euphemisms. There is no nice way to say this. A whole generation thinks it is acceptable to take a free ride. There is a chronic attitude problem among a substantial section of the population, children of the dependency culture, who regard working for a living as a completely alien concept."

No sign of any understanding of the benefits trap - indeed £232 (gross) per week on the minimum wage is described as not bad. Nor is there any appreciation of the efforts being made by both public and private sector to encourage the long term unemployed back to the world of work, such as the pilot pathways to work promoted by DWP.

No, it's just a whinge, based on prejudice and anecdote. There is even a reference to a factory owner of Ms Reid's acquaintance, obviously the journalistic equivalent of "a man in the pub told me..." Pretty shoddy stuff.

Compare and contrast a much more cheerful attitude to financial dependency exhibited by The Scotsman:
"A SCOTTISH farming business collected more than £1 million in European Union subsidies, while six others took more than £500,000 each, according to figures released yesterday by the Executive.
Almost 750 farmers received more than £100,000, the figures for 2004 reveal. But 15,735 of Scotland's 21,047 farmers and crofters received less than £30,000, and 10,682 of those received less than £10,000 from Scotland's £484 million share of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) budget...
John Kinnaird, NFU Scotland's president, said that individual identification was not a problem.
"We should be proud of our industry and the value for money we deliver in return for public funding," he said. "All single farm payments will be in the public domain from now on, and rightly so.
"We must not be driven into feeling defensive about what we do as an industry purely because of a few simplistic headlines and soundbite attacks. Total subsidy to Scotland's family farms represents only 2 per cent of Scottish Executive expenditure. Farms, big or small, have a tremendous story to tell and the industry cannot afford to be shy in letting people know about it."

So it's entirely OK for farmers to have their hands in the public purse. Isn't it?

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