Some healthy debate (at last)

I have spent some time but maybe not enough, venturing around blogland to gauge how people are coping and what their views are, in regards to what is to come as part of reforming the welfare state (whatever that actually turns out to be).

There is, understandably, a lot of fear out there and little hope...but I could just be reading specific blogs and not getting a generalised view (if there is such a thing).

A friend sent me a link to a blog called 'Labour List' and the specific posting I was sent is 'Coalition 'welfare' policy - back to the workhouse'. Remember doing a blog posting myself, few years back, saying this is what I fear would happen (workhouses for the mentally ill) and believed would happen at some point in not too distant future...anyway, I am digressing.

What I like about this posting (apart from it's content) is the level of debate is has triggered. Some of it, maybe, not so much debate as disagreement but overall it makes for something healthier/good for me than just 'ranting' (as I am apt to do) or going round in circles with my own view and nothing to bounce it off. I do discuss things with friends and fam (my daughter) but, I think, it is more objective...make that more indepth/broader....to get views from people not personally involved with me.

I recommend people read the posting and the responses because, can only speak for myself here, I am finding out information I did not know before but I am also seeing different perspectives...more importantly it is healthy to see something like real debating going on rather than reinforcing or being part of a hysteria raising cycle/circle.

It could just be me, locked up in MandLand, and sometimes too trapped by the terror or too angry to absorb anything properly because I am too busy wanting to get back at the 'bad guys and girls' (Angry one woman mob with nowhere to go) but I have not yet come across a blog where I have seen debating between people of differing opions going on about a subject that is so important...something that it is going to change the very nature of our society and, as yet, I have yet to be shown it likely to be anything other than brutal and harsh for those of us who can't cope with mainstream due to illness/es.

I will be posting on that blog (working on composing myself appropriately beforehand...which might fail and I will just burst in with usual off top of head stuff) but I wanted to give people the opportunity to have a look at it for themselves and make up their own minds about it.

Link to "Coalition ‘welfare’ policy: back to the workhouse"