Jersey, Channel Islands Income support fiasco.

Income support, don’t make me laugh. I was on the Jersey Rights Association Committee when they pushed the new income support system through.

I read through the whole report on it with horror, as it was a blatantly being introduced in order to rip off the poor in any way they could. If you went through it with a fine tooth comb as I did you knew that a huge rip off was coming, and now it is here, and it is hitting those who can least afford to be hit in the pocket.
What the States of Jersey have done by introducing this rip off income support system is to actually push a lot of people into actual poverty. Those who were on the verge of poverty already living then in relative poverty are now up the shoot without a paddle.

Many are now having to choose between eating and or for example having heating in their home.

I know senior citizens and families who are buying out of date food in order to survive, the cost of living has shot up to the extent that people cannot afford to buy the basic food needs of their children., let alone buy clothes to put on their backs.

Putting GST on everything is the straw which has broken the camel’s back, quite disgusting in an island reportedly the third richest in the world. The average wage report has been fiddled, and the real average wage is not reflected in the states report, it is BS.

The States have taken the average wage across the board, which means that the high percentage of high earners in the finance industry and big business in the island has been used to make the figures look good. If the finance industry workers wages were taken out of the equation and the figures calculated on the average wage of the working man/woman doing ordinary jobs such as, cleaners, waitresses/waiters, shop assistants, road sweepers, dustman, and barmen or women etc, the real average wage of working people in the island would actually shock most people, and I strongly suspect that it would prove that far too many are actually living in relative if not actual poverty.

Wages, pensions and the payments made by income support are well below what is needed to survive in the island. Everyone knows this, people are not thick and stupid, but they are being treated by the states of Jersey Government as if they are.

The wages and income rises of the low earners in the island is not going to even keeping up with the astronomical cost of living rises by a long chalk, this fact is this is what is going to push untold people into the poverty trap. The income support or social security pension payments etc do not cover the basic needs of survival in the island; ask anyone who is trying to live on them.

This coming winter is going to be the biggest ‘winter of discontent’ in the history of the island of Jersey.

I personally am really worried about for example the elderly and families with very young children who are going to have to go without heating in order to eat or vice versa, they will either start starving to death or passing away from hypothermia if something isn’t done to put the system right as the income support system in its present form just won’t cut it.

It isn’t a case of people tightening their belts as one idiot politician who has more money than common sense put it, but a case of the islands elite politicians being so out of touch with reality that they are either too stupid to know what they do or simply don’t give a s**t.