The scum Tories have enacted a series of measures that, taken together, but several hundred pounds a year from welfare income and are trying to enact a measure that means you would have to serve two weeks slave labour for every year on welfare.

What is their rationale, just meanness or "the budget" ?

The right-wing press have trained the public to hate people on welfare here (their have been physical assaults and suicides over this) so teh Tories claim that people on welfare just "don't have the habit of work", the usual stuff that blames the poor for their poverty. And there's also an element of budget-cutting used as an excuse.

If it wasn't for the fact that I have SUICIDE RISK stamped on my file in big letters (putting me in the "severely vulnerable" category), I'd be down about £700 a year.

Muddling along at best, for many it's certainly getting worse with no respite on the horizon.

Even in the South, which is not the worst affected part of Britain, there are possibly more people with jobs than at the height of the recession; but many of these jobs are part-time and/or very insecure. Casualization is the name of the game, at all levels. I certainly don't see much that's getting better.

Health, education and other public services are suffering badly from cuts. The NHS is just barely able to cope right now; heaven help us if there's a major flu epidemic or other crisis.

And as others have remarked, people who are poor, unemployed, disabled, or otherwise in need are being stomped on, in the good old Thatcherite tradition of making it a virtue to kick people when they're down.

Even Labour are infected with the virus of Thatcherism, but they'd be significantly better than this lot.