"I have had enough!"

After reading the letter from the American and seeing your advert for letters i thought i would write a short one.
I am British and i feel i have been betrayed by my country. I have worked all my life (17 years, i am 33), always paid my taxes and national insurance, I have never been involved in criminal activity, always been a good citizen.  What has england done for me in return?

Nothing!  Frst of all housing, I cannot save enough for a deposit for a house and even if I could our system means that you can get 3 to 4 times the the yearly salary you earn for a mortgage. in my case i can get a mortgage of about 75,000 -
80,000 pounds. When you consider that the average property in the south of england costs 150,000 pounds and that is just for an apartment, a house will cost anything of 200,000 pounds  upwards, well that does not leave me a lot of options to buy a house, so I have to keep renting for now, and that costs me 600 pounds a month, plus I then have to pay council tax of 110 pounds a month. I spend 230 pounds a month to
travel to my place of work in london by train, which is invarably late or cancelled, and you are lucky if you can even get a seat!  The trains are dirty, the seats are too small and uncomfortable. So i spend about 950 pounds a month just to travel to work and have a place to sleep. I earn about 1400 pounds a month so after these initial expenses I have about ё450 left to buy food (which costs about 200 pounds a month) and pay the rest of my bills including credit cards, electricity, water, telephone.  That does not leave a lot of money to have any fun!

My wife is Russian, she has been living with me here for 3 years now.  She was working in our local cake shop for a while, until it closed. Since then (& before) she has applied for many jobs, basic jobs, shop assisstants, large companys, small companys etc..  However it always seems that the job has just been filled or she doesnt quite have the right qualifications or
any other excuse they can think of.  I am increasingly becoming suspicious that there are racist motives involved in these responses.  They can't complain about her English language, as within 1 year of living here she was speaking very fluent English & now she speaks better than some English
people.  When starting the cake shop, she had 1 day of training, then the next day had to open the shop, receive the delivery, sell the goods, cash up the money at the end of the day, place the next days order by telephone, clean up & lock the shop, all on her own.  Basically she had the duties of an assistant manager. she is a 20 year old proffesional dancer and never did any of this type of work in Russia.

For 1 year now she has been rejected for various manual jobs, so we decided to try & apply for some unemployment benefit! I tried this once before, for myself. I could not afford to pay the remainder of my council tax & applied for assistance, I filled out form upon form, submitted bank statements, marriage certificate, any other documents they asked for.  About 2 months later I got a letter saying that I earned too much money! But I still did not have the money to pay the bills. Anyway we just applied for unemployment benefit, after 1 year of trying to find work for her to be told that she was
not entitled to any, not even entitled to medical treatment!!!  I am furious, she is after all entitled to pay tax & national insurance when working, I have paid mine all my life & I currently pay 5000 pounds a year in tax and national insurance.  If I have this 5000 pounds a year back in my pocket I could probably afford to buy a property.

If this were really a free country I would have the right to refuse to pay tax due to the fact that I do not support the illegal invasion of Iraq & do not want my money spent on it. Capitalism & greed are not necessarily good things, at least when you go to Russia you can feel the warmth of the people
& feel that the country still has a soul.  I think we sold our soul to the USA a long time ago.  I am off to the Embassy to see if i can get a Russian passport!!

Sorry if it sounds like i am complaining, but I have had enough and I don't really care anymore, I am not complaining, just telling it like it is. So many people cannot afford a 1st property in this country, it will become an epidemic sooner or later, I can't imagine how they will fix this problem. We used to have government owned council houses, but Margaret Thatcher sold
them all.

Mike