Friday 24 March 2017

London terror attack Day 3

Day 3 level of anger: perhaps ever so slightly lower, and only because I now know I am not the only one who feels similarly enraged.

In my rapid-fire reaction here , I speculated that the perpetrator was a person with some kind of purposeless past. We now know that he had been a criminal and was imprisoned. It has also be said that he was radicalized in prison.

Yesterday I asked if this man had multiple identities. We later learned that he had a name, but he was born with a different English name. Just a few minutes ago, Scotland Yard issued a statement that in fact he was registered by another name and has a few other aliases.

Was he on benefits? We have not been told. When his name was first announced, we were told that he was an 'English teacher'.

No one has come out to say, "Oh! That was my work colleague," or "Oh! He taught my son/daughter English." Did he work? Who knows.

It has been reported that he has children, and these children and the mother will inevitably be in receipt of some taxpayers' money. If the mother claims to be a single parent with a child under five, she gets income support currently at £73.10 a week (tax-free) (Source: https://www.gov.uk/income-support/overview), on top of Child Benefit, Housing Benefit, etc. For each child under 16, she could get Child Tax Credit of "up to £2,780" (Source: https://www.gov.uk/child-tax-credit/overview).

Why was I so angry yesterday? I felt that my taxes have been supporting this person and his families/children. If he had knuckled down to some hard work, finding a purpose in life, he would not have ended up the way he did. Innocent people would not have died.

I was angry because I felt that I was complicit in his crime because of the way the benefits system is set up.


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