Friday 4 October 2013

Welfare Dependent - who isn't?



If you're anything like me you'll be climbing the walls by now with that over-used phrase so loved by the ConDems and the media: welfare dependency.  We need to challenge and expose some of these nonsense soundbites for what they are.  

Think about that expression 'welfare dependency' for a moment.  When you analyse it you realize it's the most ridiculous expression on earth. I mean what is normally meant by welfare?  What do you understand by it?  I understand it to mean looking after the health and well-being of my fellow human beings.  Dictionary definitions will say 'the health, happiness, and fortunes of a person or group' and 'statutory procedure or social effort designed to promote the basic physical and material well-being of people in need.'

So being dependent on that or at least that concept is a good thing, isn't it?  Of course, successive governments are using it to mean 'benefit dependency' but again, put this phrase under scrutiny and its absurdity is all too evident.  Benefits are only, after all, the means to living, eating, clothing, shelter, warmth. Show me a person who isn't dependent on these things. Are MPs, CEOs, bankers or any other wealthy idividuals you care to mention somehow immune from this sort of dependency?  Of course not. 

Successive governments are using the phrase 'dependency' in the sense of addiction, with all its negative connotations.  If you think about it, it is actually the wealthiest in society who are more 'addicted to a culture of dependency' - a phrase governments, and especially the Coalition, like to bandy about a lot. Can it be called dependency at all when it is essential for living?  

Let's face it, if we substitute the word 'welfare' for the one of 'oxygen' - (we're all oxygen-dependent ) - we expose the phrase for its utter stupidity.