Steph Cocker is a young single mother from Sheffield who has outraged a lot of people by saying that she would not work for less than £5000 per month.
I will admit that her benefits are paid out of the taxes of large numbers of hard-working people, most of whom earn nothing like as much as £5000 per month. Nevertheless Miss Cocker does at least have some logic on her side. She would need to pay £400 per week on child care if she were working, and that alone works out at around £20,000 per year.
There are of course many people in Britain who earn £5000 per month or more, and I am sure that a lot of them do not deserve to earn anything like that much.
Miss Cocker has a boyfriend who does not live with her. I have a suspicion that had she been a young mother back in the 1970s, then she would probably have shared her home with a husband or boyfriend who would have worked to support her and the children. Social norms in this country have changed quite substantially over the last forty years, and Miss Cocker is too young to be able to take any blame for that.
Steph Cocker is one of a number of people who feature in the television programme Benefits Britain. Another young mother to feature in that programme is Leona, who lives with her boyfriend and daughter in Great Yarmouth. Her boyfriend eventually finds work as a scaffolder, but even that comes after several years of fruitless jobsearch.
Come to think of it, George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith both earn more than £5000 per month, and yet their record of achievement in respect of helping the British people into work is so abysmal that I somehow suspect that they would be overpaid if they earned only the minimum wage.
Related previous posts include:
The way out of Benefits Street
Tackling the abuse of benefits
Conservatives want jobs
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