[Skybird]

Its clear, similiar things are tried in Germany as well. Long term unemployed who refuse jobs, are pushed to nevertheless take offered jobs by reducing their benefits.

In case of the UK it might be even more pressing an issue since there are shortages of workers in certain areas that UK citizens did not want to do and left to seasonal workers and job migrants from abroad that now have been banned to enter or to work in the UK. I must not tell you about the shortages of truck drivers, as an example, further worstened due to Corona quarantines.

In principle I agree with such steps. It cannot be that the community has to pay for the daily bills of somebody who is offered work that would allow hiomn to come up for the costs of his living, but that he doe snto want, expecting to live at th cost of the others.

I would even go a step further, for reasons reaching beyond this imminent context, and exclude people who live of social wellfare and get general benefits like unemployment money from voting rights. Same for prisoners: voting rights are cancelled as long as they are in prison. A prisoner is no citizen in my book, but a prisoner. His citizen rights are temporarily disabled for as long as he is a prisoner.

It cannot be that people who live at the cost of the community are even allowed to vote for conditions and politicians that continue and maybe even widen their personal profits form this scheme. If you accept state aid you are under (moral) obligation to do your best to cut this period as short as possible. Once you are back in any kind of work you make aliving of you then can use this as a platform for looking for another, more wanted follow-on job. But if you are unemployed, the priority is to bring you into work again so that you do not cost the community more than absolutely inevitable.

I did over a dozen jobs in my life. Most of them were not really pleasant, or satisfying, and none of them turned me into a welathy man except just one, and I did not do them because I wanted to do them, but because it was what was available to me at those times. If I could have done and worked so, I can demand others to do the same.