Universal credit system not working is where this sentence should end.
Universal Credit, the gift that keeps giving -_- /s
…No support for anything outside STEM and ‘bullshit’ jobs.
…Narrowing focus on STEM in our now-privatised Universities.
Sure, we’ll have all the programmers in the world, but no artists* to bring Cinema and Videogames to life!
Our economy is narrowing towards a short-sighted focus on finance, and digital technology. To the detriment of everythings else. Our country has lost its Soul, lost its mind!
The world doesn’t need more bean-counting accountants.
The Arts give the world its beating heart! Colour! Excitment! Joy! Inner Depth! Culture! …soft power internationally.
I am sorry/not sorry, but the current lot are quite a hateful bunch. Even before those sado-masochists George Osborne and his thug Ian Duncan Smith created UC, there was a hollowing out of The Arts. But those two characters are odious to me (and many others who rely on State support).
*Digital artists 2D and 3D, animators, sound engineers, musicians, Voice Actors, Body Actors, Actors, Writers, screenwriters, craftspeople, etc.
Im sure it does fuck over creatives a lot but id be shocked to learn if there is anyone it does help
This is a genuine concern. The system was fine. For self assessment purposes you’re self-employed. I’m an author and my SA is under the same as farmers (you do the two-year avg assessment). Artists don’t earn monthly. Working tax credits is based on yearly earnings and is perfectly workable. This system makes no sense. On one hand the tax office accepts you don’t get paid monthly but the other hand decides you have to. It’s clearly designed not to work. I only know one person who is salaried, everyone else is on contracts or self-employed. It’s strangely very anti-capitalism and very anti art. It’s evident it’s designed to fail to usher in UBI or the whole (in my case publishing) arts/contract system needs to change to match and instead of lump payments as your contract pays out your publisher pays a monthly stipend and that’s never going to happen because they’d all be out of business in a year. We’ve decided to model our society on pulling the ladder up behind you.
[deleted]
I wasn’t sure what the difference was going to be between the artists here and any other self employed person but turns out these artists want to pursue hobbies and stay on universal credit indefinitely and never seek paid employment.
Seems reasonable that’s not working out for them
I couldn’t get a STEM related job even though that was what my degree was in ! trades are whats needed and hotel jobs and carer jobs, thats about it …
Universal credit doesn’t work for any one
If you get paid by your job every 4 weeks there will be months you get paid twice in one month. Which means you get ZERO Universal Credit
Universal Credit is not meant to help people though. The government spins it that way but years have shown that the Tories are determined to punish those who need benefits (excluding pensions) for whatever reason they seem fit.
Feels nearly impossible for the lower classes to get into creative industries these days. Unless you’ve got parents already in the industry or they are well off enough to support you when you start out you’ve got no chance.
I teach Digital Art & Design at a college. From my perspective, it is clear as day that the Tories have a bitter hostility towards the creative sector- particularly towards working class creatives.
When studying to be a teacher, I was told to look at the bursaries the government offered to encourage new teachers. Here are the amounts offered in 2023/2024. These are offered tax free and make the course financially viable for someone like me (there are many unpaid work placement hours required).
|Mathematics|£29,000|
|:-|:-|
|Biology, chemistry, or physics|£29,000|
|Engineering or manufacturing|£29,000|
|Computing|£29,000|
|Special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)|£15,000|
|English|£15,000|
As we can see, there is not a damn sausage for anything creative. Even English has been sidelined. If I specialised in a creative field for this course, I would be expected to give up £30k and teach 100 hours for FREE as part of the course. What working class creative/ new teacher can afford that? The government also have the gall to further discourage our young artists and push them towards STEM with bullshit ads like [this](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54505841).
The Tories are intentionally attempting to starve the creative sector of new artists, by discouraging teachers from raising the next generation of artists. This is despite the creative sector contributing £109bn to the UK economy in 2021, 5.6% of our entire economy.
Hang on…when did attitudes towards people on benefits switch so dramatically?
Did rebranding “jobseeker’s” into “universal credit” suddenly make it socially acceptable to just fuck around all day whilst the system pays your bills?
This is how universal credit treats self-employed people in general not just people in the arts. There’s an earnings threshold of over £800 aprox. a month which if you’re employed by an employer then fine, you get UC and you’re not hassled to find work but if you earn the same a month from self-employment you go into the intensive ‘searching 35 hours a week for jobs’ group. How you’re supposed to spend 35 hours a week job searching when you work 24 hours already I don’t know. You’re given appointments to tell the job centre what you’re doing to find work…when you’re at work. It doesn’t matter if your self-employed job is possibly more lucrative than a minimum wage job either. They want everyone on the minimum wage jobs.
They also fail to understand that many people take self-employed jobs because otherwise, they wouldn’t have work at all and some employers hire the self-employed in a sort of fake employment status so they avoid paying sick pay and NI. I got accused by the job centre of making a ‘lifestyle choice’, by being self-employed. Well no I didn’t, I would actually like job security and have someone paying me sick pay and my NI but it wasn’t happening, so I decided to try and help myself.
So if you have a job on coronation Street you’re an artist now. I don’t think so.
.U.C. is dog shit but this is The Guardian so, “artist” probably means middle class nutters making aand passing of crappy abstract pieces as being, “deep” and, “meaningful” not working class tradesman keeping skills alive. Maybe they should have chosen better courses more likely to lead to careers then artistic and philosophical guff.
15 comments
Universal credit system not working is where this sentence should end.
Universal Credit, the gift that keeps giving -_- /s
…No support for anything outside STEM and ‘bullshit’ jobs.
…Narrowing focus on STEM in our now-privatised Universities.
Sure, we’ll have all the programmers in the world, but no artists* to bring Cinema and Videogames to life!
Our economy is narrowing towards a short-sighted focus on finance, and digital technology. To the detriment of everythings else. Our country has lost its Soul, lost its mind!
The world doesn’t need more bean-counting accountants.
The Arts give the world its beating heart! Colour! Excitment! Joy! Inner Depth! Culture! …soft power internationally.
I am sorry/not sorry, but the current lot are quite a hateful bunch. Even before those sado-masochists George Osborne and his thug Ian Duncan Smith created UC, there was a hollowing out of The Arts. But those two characters are odious to me (and many others who rely on State support).
*Digital artists 2D and 3D, animators, sound engineers, musicians, Voice Actors, Body Actors, Actors, Writers, screenwriters, craftspeople, etc.
Im sure it does fuck over creatives a lot but id be shocked to learn if there is anyone it does help
This is a genuine concern. The system was fine. For self assessment purposes you’re self-employed. I’m an author and my SA is under the same as farmers (you do the two-year avg assessment). Artists don’t earn monthly. Working tax credits is based on yearly earnings and is perfectly workable. This system makes no sense. On one hand the tax office accepts you don’t get paid monthly but the other hand decides you have to. It’s clearly designed not to work. I only know one person who is salaried, everyone else is on contracts or self-employed. It’s strangely very anti-capitalism and very anti art. It’s evident it’s designed to fail to usher in UBI or the whole (in my case publishing) arts/contract system needs to change to match and instead of lump payments as your contract pays out your publisher pays a monthly stipend and that’s never going to happen because they’d all be out of business in a year. We’ve decided to model our society on pulling the ladder up behind you.
[deleted]
I wasn’t sure what the difference was going to be between the artists here and any other self employed person but turns out these artists want to pursue hobbies and stay on universal credit indefinitely and never seek paid employment.
Seems reasonable that’s not working out for them
I couldn’t get a STEM related job even though that was what my degree was in ! trades are whats needed and hotel jobs and carer jobs, thats about it …
Universal credit doesn’t work for any one
If you get paid by your job every 4 weeks there will be months you get paid twice in one month. Which means you get ZERO Universal Credit
Universal Credit is not meant to help people though. The government spins it that way but years have shown that the Tories are determined to punish those who need benefits (excluding pensions) for whatever reason they seem fit.
Feels nearly impossible for the lower classes to get into creative industries these days. Unless you’ve got parents already in the industry or they are well off enough to support you when you start out you’ve got no chance.
I teach Digital Art & Design at a college. From my perspective, it is clear as day that the Tories have a bitter hostility towards the creative sector- particularly towards working class creatives.
When studying to be a teacher, I was told to look at the bursaries the government offered to encourage new teachers. Here are the amounts offered in 2023/2024. These are offered tax free and make the course financially viable for someone like me (there are many unpaid work placement hours required).
|Mathematics|£29,000|
|:-|:-|
|Biology, chemistry, or physics|£29,000|
|Engineering or manufacturing|£29,000|
|Computing|£29,000|
|Special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)|£15,000|
|English|£15,000|
As we can see, there is not a damn sausage for anything creative. Even English has been sidelined. If I specialised in a creative field for this course, I would be expected to give up £30k and teach 100 hours for FREE as part of the course. What working class creative/ new teacher can afford that? The government also have the gall to further discourage our young artists and push them towards STEM with bullshit ads like [this](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54505841).
The Tories are intentionally attempting to starve the creative sector of new artists, by discouraging teachers from raising the next generation of artists. This is despite the creative sector contributing £109bn to the UK economy in 2021, 5.6% of our entire economy.
Sources-
[https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fe-funding-initial-teacher-education-ite-bursaries-2023-to-2024/fe-ite-bursaries-funding-manual-2023-to-2024](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fe-funding-initial-teacher-education-ite-bursaries-2023-to-2024/fe-ite-bursaries-funding-manual-2023-to-2024)
[https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/arts-and-creative-industries-the-case-for-a-strategy/#:~:text=1.1%20Economic%20output,-Recent%20data%20from&text=The%20creative%20industries%20sector%20contributed,the%20UK%20economy%20that%20year](https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/arts-and-creative-industries-the-case-for-a-strategy/#:~:text=1.1%20Economic%20output,-Recent%20data%20from&text=The%20creative%20industries%20sector%20contributed,the%20UK%20economy%20that%20year).
Hang on…when did attitudes towards people on benefits switch so dramatically?
Did rebranding “jobseeker’s” into “universal credit” suddenly make it socially acceptable to just fuck around all day whilst the system pays your bills?
This is how universal credit treats self-employed people in general not just people in the arts. There’s an earnings threshold of over £800 aprox. a month which if you’re employed by an employer then fine, you get UC and you’re not hassled to find work but if you earn the same a month from self-employment you go into the intensive ‘searching 35 hours a week for jobs’ group. How you’re supposed to spend 35 hours a week job searching when you work 24 hours already I don’t know. You’re given appointments to tell the job centre what you’re doing to find work…when you’re at work. It doesn’t matter if your self-employed job is possibly more lucrative than a minimum wage job either. They want everyone on the minimum wage jobs.
They also fail to understand that many people take self-employed jobs because otherwise, they wouldn’t have work at all and some employers hire the self-employed in a sort of fake employment status so they avoid paying sick pay and NI. I got accused by the job centre of making a ‘lifestyle choice’, by being self-employed. Well no I didn’t, I would actually like job security and have someone paying me sick pay and my NI but it wasn’t happening, so I decided to try and help myself.
So if you have a job on coronation Street you’re an artist now. I don’t think so.
.U.C. is dog shit but this is The Guardian so, “artist” probably means middle class nutters making aand passing of crappy abstract pieces as being, “deep” and, “meaningful” not working class tradesman keeping skills alive. Maybe they should have chosen better courses more likely to lead to careers then artistic and philosophical guff.