Sorry to hear of your unemployment, as an over 50 year old

Comment on General Election 2010 Poll Results by David.

Sorry to hear of your unemployment, as an over 50 year old you are in the worst group to be unemployed right now: the over 50s are in the highest group of long term unemployed!

You have less than 15 years before retirement (10 if a woman) and realistically who is going to hire you, retrain you (assuming your original career is in a dying industry) for a new job when they are only going to get 10 years of trained work out of you! I run a business and I wouldn’t hire an untrained 50+ year old (they’d have to be at least partially trained to consider taking a 50+ year old on).

At your age I would suggest looking at self employment and claiming tax credits at the same time to top up your self employed income as you don’t want to become one of the long term unemployed. It’s what I had to do after my back gave out in my last year at University in my early twenties! I wrote a little about it at https://stallion-theme.co.uk/claiming-working-tax-credit-instead-of-job-seekers-allowance-income-support/

Now I run a very successful online business as a search engine optimisation consultant, businesses pay me to help them get good rankings from Google. I’m very good at what I do which is why you probably found my site near the top of Google for some kind of general election search.

Good luck if you go the self employed root, it can be hard work, but well worth it when things go well.

You are wrong on immigrants claiming benefits, they may well be taking jobs that could be taken by British born workers (which doesn’t make economic sense when ~2.5 million are unemployed), but they are not in general claiming benefits etc… as the majority of immigrants aren’t entitled to them.

Unfortunately the tabloids and the BNP use the odd extreme example of immigrants milking the system as the norm, when it isn’t.

Do a little research and you’ll find immigrants can’t claim a great deal when they arrive here, so immigrants claiming benefits is not a big issue. One of those scaremongering tactics used by the likes of the BNP to generate interest in their sort of hate politics!

David