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January 25th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
By
Lord Carey, Former Archbishop Of Canterbury
Last updated at 10:11 AM on 25th January 2012
‘My fellow bishops are wrong’: Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey
When the Church of England bishops voted against the Government’s proposal to cap welfare benefits at £26,000 a year, I have no doubt they did so because they believed it was their duty to speak up for the very poorest in society — especially those voiceless children who, through no fault of their own, might suffer as a result.
As the bishops pushed for an amendment to the Government cap which means that families can still claim £50,000 a year in benefits, they must have known the popular opinion was against them, including that of many hard-working, hard-pressed churchgoers.
They also knew that the case for welfare reform had been persuasively made, even if they didn’t agree with it.
Yet these five bishops — led by the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds — cannot lay claim to the moral high-ground.
The sheer scale of our public debt, which hit £1trillion yesterday, is the greatest moral scandal facing Britain today.
If we can’t get the deficit under control and begin paying back this debt, we will be mortgaging the futures of our children and grandchildren.
In order to do this, we desperately need to reform our welfare system.
Opportunities to do so in times of prosperity have been squandered and now we are forced to do so at a time of high unemployment, under the guise of cutting expenditure.
Aside from the financial imperative for reform, the social importance of these changes cannot be underestimated.
Political leaders have woken up to the problems facing the so-called ‘squeezed-middle’ — those on average incomes who are bearing the brunt of the cuts, including wage freezes in the public and private sectors, together with the effects of rising inflation and tax increases.
As a result, our burgeoning benefits bill is increasingly stoking social division among this squeezed middle, who feel resentment at ‘hand-outs’ given to the long-term unemployed.
Vices
The truth is that the welfare system has gone from the insurance-based safety-net that William Beveridge envisaged in 1942 (designed to tackle the ‘Giant Evils’ of ‘Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness’) to an industry of gargantuan proportions which is fuelling those very vices and impoverishing us all. In the worst-case scenario it traps people into dependency and rewards fecklessness and irresponsibility.
The Bishop of Ripon and Leeds (the Right Rev John Packer) quoted the Bible as he criticised the Government’s plans in the House of Lords this week.
He pointed out that ‘Christianity, along with other faiths and beliefs, requires us to think most of those that have no voice of their own. Children are one of the most evident examples of that.’
Opposition: The Right Rev John Packer outlines his motion to exclude child benefit from the Government’s £26,000 cap on welfare payments
While I quite agree with the sentiment, I can’t possibly believe prolonging our culture of welfare dependency is in the best interests of our children.
The debate this week about welfare has centred around material poverty — on how many thousands of pounds per year each family receives, and if children have to share bedrooms. Yet young people raised in workless households suffer far more acutely from poverty of aspiration than from any material poverty.
These children have no role models to illustrate how liberating a lifetime of work can be — materially and spiritually.
I cannot imagine how my own life would have turned out if the humble 1940s council estate upon which I was brought up had been a ghetto of dependency like many of those to which children are confined today.
Although it was in Dagenham — then, as now, one of the poorer areas around London — it was home to hard-working people. My father was a low-paid hospital porter and my mother stayed at home to care for us five children, so they were used to pinching pennies. They couldn’t give us the gadgets, presents or foreign holidays that many children today take for granted.
Instead, their greatest gift to us, their children, was their unfailing work ethic, and their belief that our lives could be more prosperous than theirs if we applied ourselves.
Despite leaving school at 15 to work for the London Electricity Board, I have strived to fulfil that belief.
The biggest tragedy of the culture of welfare-dependency into which Britain has slid is the way it has squeezed such hope from people’s lives.
Many people cannot see any prospect for a better life for their children and are trapped in despairing and dreary circumstances. If we cannot make the rewards of hard work more appealing than a life spent on the dole then we will have failed a generation of children.
Failure
It is this determination to break the cycle of dependency among such families that I think is the most important aspect of the Government’s so-called cuts programme.
‘Committed Christian’: Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith is right to reform Britain’s welfare system so it rewards work, not idleness
Indeed, Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, gives the lie to the argument that good Christians who care for their fellow man should continue to support our bloated welfare state.
He is a committed Christian whose motivation is to dispel the modern myth which lies behind our benefits culture —the idea that some people can neither be helped, nor help themselves into work.
He, like many others in recent years, has come to realise that we have betrayed the poorest and most vulnerable by merely throwing money at them, be it income support or housing benefit, with no strings attached.
We have not tackled the root causes of poverty — the twin failures of aspiration and education — and have instead condemned generations to a lifetime of grinding envy and hopelessness.
Mr Duncan Smith’s most important insight was also the most obvious. In order to encourage the jobless to join the workforce, employment has to pay significantly more than a life on benefits. Reform cannot stop there, however.
There must also be effective and well-made interventions in the lives of problem families.
Nor can this issue be left solely in the hands of the state.
Church and local communities are already playing a key role, offering community support and running church schools and academies in tough areas.
If, as seems likely, the Government manages to introduce an annual benefit cap of £26,000, the churches will be at the forefront of helping families who will feel the pinch.
Christians should be among those who will need to spot the gaps left by the inevitable retreat of the State after financial cuts.
Sacrifice
Some of the social entrepreneurs we now badly need will come from the Christians who still populate this country, as they did in the Victorian era.
Then, philanthropists such as Dr Barnardo and Salvation Army founder William Booth saw growing social deprivation and decided, at great sacrifice to themselves, to do something about it.
I have no doubt that, although the bishops were wrong in their opposition to these cuts, they will nevertheless continue to represent the poor of our country.
But instead of opposing the Government’s welfare reform, I hope they will lend their support to the most important battle of all — that of preserving hope against the despair and pessimism which blights our workless communities.
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This is the most sense I heard from any churchman for years!
In some recent TV program, I heard ‘homelessness’ described as a family where each and every child did not have its own bedroom.
So any woman who decides to have, for example, ten children can demand from society a house with at least eleven bedrooms?
Absolute madness!
35 % of the tax I pay each year goes on benefits,
How the devil are we to reduce the country’s deficit if this is allowed to continue?
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Re:- Kate Evans @ 7.33
When there is full employment…………i.e more jobs than there are people to do them, then your “state run single room hostel” theory may hold water. But as long as there are more people than jobs then your utterings are a fantasy. Even if you take out your so called “scroungers” who dont want to work from the unemployment figures there are still more people than jobs. Even the hardest and most conciensious of workers are people from no fault of their own find themself in a position of hardship. Your prayers at night should be “there but for the grace of God go I”. Incidentaly, single persons Job Seekers Allowance is about two thirds of the state pension and N.E.E.T’s get even less. Dont spout from your ivory tower……….because even the mighty fall and it could be you and your family on benefits tomorow.
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“The problem for DM readers is that, as usual they swallow the editorial bilge whole. £26000 is not paid as a salary as the Tories would have you believe, landlords take the bulk of it before claimants ever see it; – Michael Edwards, Leeds UK, 25/1/2012 10:18====================Utterly irrelevant. It’s still a benefit and therefore counted in the income. Working people who pay rent have to pay it out of, more often than not, even less than a nett income of £26,000. Try paying rent of nearly £11,000 out of a nett income of £23,000 then moan.
– Carolyn, Isle of Man, 25/1/2012 12:32
Irrelevant? If you want to cut down on benefit payments then isn’t the vast amount paid to private landlords important? If rent went to council housing instead then the money would feed back in to the system and not fly out of it. Certainly there are people out there abusing the system, but not just the poor. Landlords have been milking it too. What exactly was the plan when council housing was sold off?
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The fact that the proposed cap represents a pre tax income of £35,000 says it all. The message to the scroungers has to be:-
“If the cap fits wear it”
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“The problem for DM readers is that, as usual they swallow the editorial bilge whole. £26000 is not paid as a salary as the Tories would have you believe, landlords take the bulk of it before claimants ever see it;
– Michael Edwards, Leeds UK, 25/1/2012 10:18====================Utterly irrelevant. It’s still a benefit and therefore counted in the income. Working people who pay rent have to pay it out of, more often than not, even less than a nett income of £26,000. Try paying rent of nearly £11,000 out of a nett income of £23,000 then moan.
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He is just a nasty old man ( If ever a person got the right face ) His experience of the real world amounts to what he sees from his chauffer driven limousine , not unlike many of our know it all politicians !
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These children have no role models to illustrate how liberating a lifetime of work can be — materially and spiritually.
Can this man possibly know anything about work—-try it—you might find you don’t like it!
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If the benefit cap of £26k is brought in then surely the minimum wage should be increased so that a 40 hour week will bring in £26,001. That by the way would be an hourly rate of £12.50 not the £6.08 that it is now.
There are many of my friends and neighbours who would be happy to earn £9 per hour let alone £12.50. It is not that the benefits are to high, it is because employers are being greedy and keeping wages low.
The Government should put some of its energy into working out how much money an average family of 2 adults and 2 children needs to survive in a given area. I can tell you with absolute certainty that £6.08 ph, which is a common rate around these parts, is not enough.
How the hell is an economy going to grow when the wage earners dont have enough money to spend to make it grow….
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“I am amazed that in a modern democracy, unelected people, who are in a position because of their career choice, can derail the wishes of elected representatives. Why on earth do we need a two tier system anyway” YOU want to imagine the damage New Labour would have done with 13 years of totally unfettered power? Before people knee-jerk react calling for trashing the contitutional balance of our nation they might need to understand why it has saved us time and time again. But then, anyone ignorant enough to buy this 26k benefits salary garbage the current gov is selling cant be expected to have good reasoning powers
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As usual, the same comments about benefit recipients receiving large handouts, and other people working long hours to fund them. Someone has already made the point that, in the case of rents, the money goes directly to the landlord. Before Thatcher abolished rent controls in the late 1980s a fair rent could be registered and the ridiculous rents we see today were largely unheard of. With regards to those working long hours, I sympathise with you, but until you tell your boss that you want to reduce your hours where are the jobs going to come from (unless we ban foreign call centres, stop immigration, stop companies off-shoring jobs and introduce a maximum 5 day, 35 hour week).
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