Benefits Street

Benefits Street on C4 has created quite a stir since it first went to air and has become the most commented upon TV programme of our time. People are hopping mad at the on-screen antics and the certain knowledge that each and every taxpayer is footing the bill for it.

Anyone that hasn't seen the programme I would urge to force themselves to sit through an episode, but look beyond the people to the surroundings and circumstances they exist with. It's not hard to imagine what that very same street would have looked like a generation or two ago when it unquestioningly would have been clean, tidy and respectable. The area of Birmingham in question is, or was, mixed residential/industrial/commercial and this street just as the others close by, would have housed the labour force for what had been an industrial powerhouse of a city.

When MG/Rover collapsed in 2005 six thousand workers lost their jobs. At its peek that company alone employed at least ten times as many, and these were all 'head of household' standard jobs. Not minimum wage in need of tax credits to subsidise lousy wages jobs, but proper self-supporting ones. Some will no doubt argue the company was over-manned and bound to go bust eventually. To counter that I'd say, how come the Germans can employ vast workforces and make their enterprises profitable, despite the cost of labour in their country being the most expensive in Europe? The difference is one of attitude. German leadership has a can do and must attitude, whereas Britain has been for three to four decades at least, blighted by the standard of leadership in command with the inevitable consequence that we are now up to our necks in the mess of their creation.

MG /Rover was just one company amongst a multitude of others that residential roads such as James Turner Street, Birmingham, B18 housed the workforces for. Now the majority of those industries are gone, replaced by minimum wage shelf stacking jobs, or benefits paid out for no return of labour at all; and we wonder why society has gone so wrong?

We are all guilty of allowing ourselves to lead by the nose and encouraged to snigger and sneer at the feckless whilst shaking our heads in disgust at their goings on. The national news follows close behind the program, which is where the real villains of our time can be viewed. Politicians and senior businessmen who like to lead the head shaking and display mock disgust, when they are the ones responsible for letting the country get into such a state in the first place!

All those who feature on Benefits Street are victims. They are for the most part simple folk who need the stability only proper leadership can provide, but which is entirely absent and has been for many years. Saddest of all are the children who really don't stand a chance and they remember; are the future.