Television, drug of the nation

what if you can't recover? what if there aren't any jobs for you to get? what if the jobs you can get are less money that the benefits you're claiming, so you wouldn't be able to feed your kids?
have you ever been actually poor? without a safety net?

I have worked in slums in the Philippines - that is proper poverty amongst people who have no safety net and who are born into structural poverty from which there is almost no hope of escape but they retain dignity, morals and concepts of self responsibility that would be utterly lost on the drug taking shoplifting moron that featured in Benefits Street.

3 years ago my small firm was almost wiped out in the recession. We scraped by on my wife's salary including topping up the business from it. I worked for nothing for over a year but every creditor was paid and so was every member of staff. No one was laid off or had any income cut. All on the basis that they all had mortgages like me and kids etc and a lot of them were in single income houses so please don't pose hypothetical "what ifs". A lot of the time I have been better off than most but I have also done lots of voluntary work and I have had many nights of being unable to sleep because I do not know where the next £ is coming from. I have had plenty of days of going for a walk with the dog at lunch time because I did not actually have the cash to go to the pub with staff.

So rather than question me about what I would do why not make an argument about why we should support a recidivist drug taking single bloke who proudly proclaims his profession as a £200 a day shoplifter?