Somewhat in the spirit of this XKCD cartoon. There are memes that allow us to tell if other people are likely to be worth speaking to – like biomarkers for language. For example, someone who disbelieves in plate tectonics probably has a wide range of other weird beliefs.
The latest one of these I’ve noticed is the idea that you have to be unemployed to get housing benefit in the UK. Knobber after horrible knobber shows up talking about claimants “in houses working people couldn’t dream of”. Wrong, wrong, wrong. So unfortunately, I’ve come to the parting of the ways with Tim Garton Ash. In an otherwise mostly sensible column:
It’s surely not right that people can be worse off if they choose to work than they would be on welfare; or that people on inflated housing benefits make rented accommodation in some areas unaffordable for the working poor.
You don’t have to be unemployed to get housing benefit, Tim. I predict bad things.
The thing I *really* don’t understand: there is much doom-n-gloom around about the ‘cleansing’ of London… but precious little about where these people are going to come from to magically fill the rental spaces of these landlords who ‘will not reduce their rents, even if housing benefit is capped’. Let’s face it, right now, given the choice between a DSS and non-DSS potential tenant, a landlord will choose the latter every time. So if they are there, at these prices, we would already be ‘cleansed’, right? Or what?
Fact is, it’s the landlords that get the money.
Another fact is that landlords often charge higher rents to people on benefits because they know that the taxpayer is paying.
Landlords are profiteering.