NO one wants to be laying bricks on a cold and wet morning in Doncaster – but there are people on benefits relying on me.
That is the joke comment that I posted on TikTok and Instagram which went viral.
Except it is not really a joke because it is a reality in Benefits Britain.
And it is even less funny since Chancellor Rachel Reeves handed out yet more benefits in her Budget last week.
While I had a trowel in my hand yesterday, the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer gave a speech claiming he is going to “reform the welfare state”.
He stood at a lectern which carried the slogan “A Britain Built for All”.
The problem is that it is not a Britain being built BY all — it’s being built by people like me.
Look, I am all for paying towards the pensioners who have done their graft, and I’m fine paying towards people who are unable to work for physical or mental health reasons.
But it makes me feel sick that people choosing not to work are getting a cut of my money when I’m going outside grafting in sub-zero temperatures, doing hard manual labour.
‘Money for nothing’
I know guys who are around 30 years old, who have never worked a day in their life, and they’ve got their houses paid for by the state. They say they are better off out of work than in it.
That’s because they are only looking for minimum wage jobs, which would pay £12.71 an hour, to keep their benefits.
The benefit cap is £14,753 for a single person, but child benefit is on top of that.
Plus, the unemployed get lots of other reductions, such as paying less council tax.
While they would earn more in work, some people decide it is simply not worth the bother and get by on what the state hands out.
In a way, it’s not their fault that they are getting a good chunk of money for doing absolutely nothing at all. It is the Government that created the system.
I believe the people actually claiming benefits should be doing community service in return. And if they don’t do it, they don’t get paid.
That would give them the incentive to go and find proper work.
From the age of 16 to 18, I went to sixth form and, when I left school, I ended up in a dead-end job in a warehouse because I needed money.
Dead-end job
One day, an engineer working there asked me how much I was earning and he said, “Bloody hell, I get taxed more than you get paid”. That was like a wake-up call to better myself, so I saved a bit of money and paid £1,500 for a course on dealing with asbestos.
I went from £270 a week to around £600 a week, and I was happy for five years.
But it is a dangerous job and, when I had my son, I wanted to make sure I would be there for him, so I gave that up and became a brickie.
It is right that the Government is spending more on apprenticeships, so people can afford to learn a new trade.
But once they have had, for example, a forklift driver’s licence training paid for by the taxpayer, they should have to then go do that job.
A lot of them just do these courses to demonstrate to the benefits office that they are “looking for work”, but then keep claiming.
There’s no excuse for people to say, ‘I’ve got two kids, I can’t work.’. You can still get up and go to work
I think the Government should have kept the two-child benefit cap. I’ve got one son. If you want more than two, you need to be able to pay for them yourself.
My partner and I put our son in a nursery from six months old and we paid £975 a month. We both continued to work full time. There’s no excuse for people to say, “I’ve got two kids, I can’t work”. You can still get up and go to work.
As a bricklayer, I voted Labour at the last election because a lot of people have been leaving the trade due to lack of work and the pay rates plummeting.
Labour promised to boost the economy with another 1.5million homes by the end of their five years in government.
Yet during their first year in charge, the number of new homes being built was just 208,600, which is six per cent fewer than the previous year.
They’d need to build 300,000 a year to meet their target and they are way off at the moment.
If they were building more homes like they promised, there should be more demand for tradespeople like myself and our rates would go up. But the opposite happened.
A few years ago, I was on 75p a brick — and now it’s 60p. So if you’re laying 500 bricks a day, we are missing out on £75 a day, which is a lot of money. Particularly when the cost of living is rising.
‘Revoke my vote’
Now the Government is putting the minimum wage and public sector pay up.
They don’t think about self-employed people like me who are doing piece work.
There are nearly 4.5million self-employed workers in the UK standing on their own two feet.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve had to have four days off due to the weather and I’ve not been paid a penny during that time.
It makes me feel sick that people choosing not to work are getting a cut of my money when I’m going outside grafting in sub-zero temperatures, doing hard manual labour
We can’t start work until the temperature has reached two degrees, which is around 10 or 11 o’clock in the moment.
So we’re losing four hours every morning, on top of everything else.
We don’t get thought about in the slightest.
I’ve still got bills to pay. My gym, for example, has just put an announcement up saying that from April 1, their prices are going up.
This will be the result of minimum wage rise and higher taxes.
I am 100 per cent definitely not voting Labour again. I wish I could revoke my vote.
I keep watching Sir Keir and he just dodges question after question.
And he keeps on saying he’s changing taxation to help the NHS.
But I believe the best way for the NHS to receive more income is to get more people up off their backsides and into work. It is time for Britain to be built by ALL of us.
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