England has a long history of trying to tackle poverty and if we look at the initiatives over the centuries, certain things become strikingly clear: there have always been poor people, who have always been blamed for their condition and that the rich and powerful have always sought not only to crush the poor but to take advantage of their poverty.
The poor have always been blamed for their poverty and schemes have been tried to stop paying the indolent and put them back to work.

The 1601 Poor Law (the 43rd of Elizabeth I) – the so-called "Old Poor-Law" was passed in order, to quote from the preamble to the Act: "for setting to work all such Persons, married or unmarried, having no Means to maintain them, and use no ordinary and daily Trade of Life to get their Living by" i.e. the act applied to those we now call the unemployed.

Handing over provision for unemployment benefit and social security to the private sector became known as "farming the poor" in the 1720-30s, when it was tried following Knatchbull's poor-law Act.

The best-known example of this kind of privatisation is probably Jeremy Bentham's Scheme, of 1796. A private company was to be set up to build a chain of huge workhouses across the country. Their inmates would be forced to work for nothing, and given only a limited amount to eat, in return for working for the investors in the scheme.

Bentham and his supporters used much the same language as is being used now, claiming that the "scale of the potential market is huge … an annual multi-billion market".

Currently the Labour Government is trying various schemes for forcing people back to work and privatising the forcing of the workshy back into work. Their main inspiration is to return to the exploitation of the 18th and 19th centuries. Re-establishing what were known then as "bastilles", where the poor work less people were forced to enter, may well become policy again in the twenty first century.

It was the stated intention of the Poor-Law Commission of 1834 to return to the spirit of the 43rd law of Elizabeth I. The rich of the nineteenth century felt that the poor were being paid to be idle, and feckless, especially in so-called "Speenhamland Parishes", where a form of social security based on the varying price of bread was applied. There was a great deal of huffing and puffing generally throughout the early 19th century about this "pauperising" of the working population, and encouraging what is now called a welfare culture. We aegians call that law ‘Speen ham and egg land’. It was considered too indulgent towards the unemployed for providing outdoor relief.

Speenhamland had to go. The solution the Commissioners came up with was "Less eligibility" and labour-tests, to deter people from applying for relief. Anyone who wanted help from the government had to go into workhouses, which were run as rigid penal institutions where people worked hard, usually breaking stones or untwisting rope. Men and women were separated and even children were taken away from their mothers after they were born. Yes, folks, we are proud to admit that our glorious country set up gulags long before Stalin even thought of them. Under this system the modern applicant would probably be forced to slave for McDonalds, while not receiving any pay and not being allowed to eat any of the food, with strict punishments for those who stole any food!

Throughout the long and generally inglorious history of social provision in Britain, there have been all too many politicians eager to further enrich their already wealthy friends at the expense of the poor. One way in which this can be achieved is to have a compliant media which supports oppression and exploitation of the poor by printing endless reports about how the lazy and feckless poor, with their huge families, are scrounging off the state.

Let’s just look at a few figures to see what their claims amount to:

Actual annual estimated loss through benefit fraud: about £1.2 bn.

Annual gain from unclaimed benefits to which the poor were genuinely entitled: £2.6 bn.

Annual estimated loss through tax evasion or other tax fraud: about £15.9 bn!

The rich are robbing all of the rest of us! They are blaming the poor, whose ‘fraud’ is outweighed by their unwillingness or inability to claim benefit at all. The bureaucracy involved is hard to understand and deal with and many are too proud, or fearful, to apply for help through it. The poor are being robbed and then being blamed by the government for robbing the public purse, when it is the corporations and rich individuals who rob the public purse the most; thirteen times as much as all the poor combined! Or, if you consider the net gain indicated above, infinitely more, as the poor let the government keep more than twice as much of the money that they should have received as the villains amongst them ‘steal’. I wish people would steal £100,000 from me (if I had that much!) and leave me £200,000 instead. Or to put it another way, would that all thieves would steal less than they could claim legitimately, just for asking.

"The National Fraud Authority was launched just over a year ago after an official review concluded that efforts to detect, prevent and punish financial crime needed big improvements.

Argument over whether matters have got better has raged since then, with one leading law firm last year describing Britain as a “Klondike for fraudsters” even as Baroness Scotland, the attorney-general, vowed to make the UK the most hostile country in the world to financial criminals."
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(mrs aegian)