Benefits Britain 1949 is now online here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8rIXWnFEsM
I just had to post about this and remind you to watch TV tonight, Channel 4 at 9 pm for a new TV series called “Benefits Britain 1949”. This new Channel 4 TV Series challenges those on benefits to live on 1949 handouts.
A pensioner from Nottingham is part of the experiment and has to live on £5.49 a day.
During the hour-long documentary, father-of-one and widower Melvyn is seen trying to live for one week by the benefit rules of 1949 – the first year the system was up and running – to find out how his income would change
Following the “Beveridge report” in 1942, the Labour Party government in 1945, following the defeat of Winston Churchill’s Conservative government, announced it would introduce a welfare state and the National Health Service was announced in 1948 and social security was implemented.
The report in 1942 by economist William Beveridge, recommended that the government should find ways of fighting the five ‘Giant Evils’ of ‘Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness’..
And the underlying message from the experiment? The 1949 system worked best for those who wanted to work. The system now works best for those who don’t. Until we turn that basic premise around, we will never transform the dependency culture of Benefits Britain 2013.