Has been shaped over the last 50 years and based on my experience and the experience of the times, my parents and those before them.
My Great Grandparents were ordinary lower working class. One a dressmaker in a factory, the other a fruit a veg stall owner. Wives I suspect were at home looking after the family.
Grand Parents. One opened a small dressmaking business, the other became a street bookie. Worked for Joe Coral before betting shops were legal. They had taken a step up the ladder.
My parents, Father came out of the Navy at the end of WarII, worked in a dressmaking factory, rose to manager, left and started the most successful belt factory in the UK. When they married they lived in the attic of my Grand Parent rented house until I was 3, then moved to a Council flat in Mile End, then to one in Highbury. Working class areas.
Then Dad's business took off and we moved to a "house on the hill" in Loughton Essex. Had European holiday when most people had a week at the seaside, brothers had private/State education in a boarding school. I was a lost cause so went to State school. We were Middle Class.
Brothers became top programmers and joined the Middle Class. I joined the Working Class, chef, dressmaker, porn, dressmaker, porn, salesman, porn and rose to Middle Class.
None of the above would of been possible without the State building the structure we lived in. Even though it was far easier to pull ourselves up the ladder, we needed the structure around us to make it happen.
And so does everyone today. In fact with business centralising, growing bigger, jobs being exported. We need more support.
No one can live in 2012 without the Government structure around them. What some don't want is to pay for it. And that's the debate that matters. The West is in debt not because Governments built a structure to make their lives better. It's because they didn't tax the recipients enough to pay for it. Targeting the poor, less able is a Red Herring. They get very little and spend it in the shops owned by the 1%.
If you think you can survive without the Government, get off the Internet, stop using electricity, driving on the roads, in fact go find an island buy it with cash, no banks allowed and build a boat and go live on it. You won't pay taxes there.
