Another day yelling at the radio!

I think I will have to write to the BBC and ask if they will let me sit in on the 'Today' programme when they are discussing topics that the interviewers (and sometimes the interviewees) know nothing about. That will certainly save my vocal chords and also save me from throwing the radio at the nearest wall!
This morning they were talking about the cuts that the government have planned for those on certain types of benefit. Both the interviewer and the politician being interviewed had absolutely no idea what they were talking about and after a couple of minutes of them talking out of their backsides I was compelled to turn on my hairdryer to drown them out.
After working seven years in a jobcentre I think I have more knowledge than both of them put together. What they didn't mention is that successive governments for many years have developed the 'benefit culture' that we now have and it will probably take several generations to undo the mess. In our jobcentre we used to have three generations of some families who had claimed jobseeker's allowance and no-one in the family had ever worked. I used to be an adviser for the long term unemployed and very often I would have someone sitting in front of me who had never worked since leaving school and were now in their mid-forties. They would go through the motions doing only what they were expected to do in order to get their money with absolutely no intention of ever really making an effort to find work and after going through the New Deal programme they would sit in front of me or another adviser six months later because they had to do it again. They knew the routine and some of them continued this for the whole seven years that I was advising. Many of them were not very well educated and I believe some of them deliberately made themselves unemployable if they ever did get near to an employer.
Employers here are not too keen on taking on someone who has been out of work for a very long time so we had a stalemate situation.
Another problem that started in the seventies was with young girls who got pregnant either while at school or soon after leaving. They soon found that if they had a child and no husband, they would go straight to the top of the housing list and they could also get financial help with buying things like furniture and carpets etc. while receiving income support so they didn't have to work. This didn't only happen in deprived areas but very soon caught on all over the country. Many of these girls went on to have even more children, usually with different fathers (who were rarely named and even more rarely contributed financially for the child's upbringing), so consequently spent their whole lives being kept by the taxpayer.
In most cases when the youngest child reached sixteen, the single mother was expected to look for work (although that age has been brought down a lot now) but you would be amazed at how many of these women managed to get pregnant when the youngest child was fifteen by saying that they thought they had gone through 'the change' and didn't think they could get pregnant! Oh, and it was a one night stand or they couldn't remeber the name of the father!
Some of these women are now over sixty so technically 'retired' but they have never lifted a finger to work and put some money in the pot. They have been kept by the taxpayer and now get exactly the same amount of pension money as women who have brought up their families without any help from the state and worked all their lives, sometimes in two or more jobs at once.
Is this a fair system? No. It is one nurtured by successive governments in order to massage figures especially when elections have been looming.
I could go on even more but at least I feel better for getting this off my chest!