A Liberating Guide to Life Without Benefits

Today, George Osborne made his Autumn Statement – which is kind of like the budget speech but not quite as big a deal. In it, he set out his economic agenda for after the next general election. It was actually pretty boring, but he saved his A-game chat for the pre-match rumblings, when he announced that he was going to destroy the welfare state as we know it. "Britain can no longer afford the welfare state," the Chancellor claimed on Monday. You have to wonder how many more people are going to kill themselves before David Cameron steps up to one of his gold lecterns in a fetching white dicky bow and cuts us some slack.

It remains to be seen whether the Tories will get the chance to put this into practice by winning the 2015 election. But if they do, it might seem like the freeloading shirkers of this land are pretty screwed – especially those of you who are unlucky enough to be under 25 in a country governed by a Party whose members have an average age of 68.

But perhaps we're looking at this from the wrong angle. Perhaps this is just the impetus that benefits scroungers need to liberate themselves from the drudgery of vital financial support. Here's a guide to life after the welfare state for the feckless and indolent.

GET A JOB

So you’ve been happily flicking between Jeremy Kyle and Top Gear repeats ever since you left school, only ever moving to brush the toast crumbs out of your crotch or piss your dole money away on scratch cards and fags. But as halcyon as these days might seem to you now, they don't have to be the high watermark in your life. It’s time to become one of the "hardworking people" who MPs of all political colours seem keen to praise – or at least somebody they won’t demonise with quite so much relish.

Before you get too upset about the prospect of having to work all the time, remember that the only jobs going these days are on zero-hour contracts that don’t guarantee you any work whatsoever. In other words, having a job is likely to feel remarkably similar to unemployment, except that you’ll have less money.

In a world without benefits, there are likely to be a few growth areas in the jobs market, namely in the bailiffs, pawn brokering and edgy political stand-up comedy areas. Look into your soul and decide which of these scenarios you could best live with: forcibly evicting crying families from their homes, stealing heirlooms from crying families, or seeing yourself on endless Mock the Week reruns in ten years' time when your material is no longer relevant. That's right: You're going to be returned to the lonely hell of your jobless Dave-watching days – only this time, you'll be the star of the show.

START A BAND

Let's look at things in a glass half-full kind of a way: If you have about as much chance of getting a proper job as you do becoming a rock star, you may as well give the latter a go. When your mates are floundering in jobless purgatory without so much as the dole to support them, the money you speculate on pay-to-play gigs will look like the sound investment of a canny Theo Paphitis in the making. Except your mates won’t be able to spend £6 on a ticket, so you might have some difficulty getting the numbers in.

Of course, arts funding is at the bottom of the priority list for overstretched council budgets, so that community hall with the drum kit in the corner will be gone as soon as you can say "bought by an oligarch and left to stand derelict". Not to worry, though – this will simply make things more difficult for your tone-deaf competitors and speed up the Darwinian aspect of making it big in the music game. When the Big Society steps in to pick up the pieces, you'll soon be practicing in a – fuck yeah – church, handily situating your new rehearsal room right next to your new food bank. It’s surprisingly easy to get that trendy emaciated look when you’re eating cold baked beans with a comb because you pawned all your forks.

JOIN A SQUAT

Housing benefit has taken another hit, so I suggest taking up squatting. Politicians are, of course, pushing to ban this forever, effectively making dropping out of society in any real sense a criminal offence. But never fear, because the current legislation against the squatting of residential properties has already been shown up in court. If police surveillance can’t prove that you’re living somewhere – as opposed to just visiting – you won’t get prosecuted. My advice is to play it safe by carrying a bottle of wine and some flowers with you every time you enter your squat, before spending ten minutes walking around making cooing noises and pointing at light fixtures.

BECOME A LOAN SHARK

When you don’t have a payday, the idea of a payday loan becomes a bit nebulous – but presumably loan sharks will still exist in some form or other and will be doing a roaring trade. If you can't beat them, join them. The government have been looking into tackling the problem of desperate people getting screwed over by interest rates that near 6,000 percent and they have decided that they're going to put a cap on this figure. (In 2015. I guess they wanted to give the payday loan companies another couple of years to adjust and break a few more homes.)

Another proposal is to make the companies undertake more stringent checks on whether the borrower can afford to pay the loan back. That means now is the time to become an early-adopter in the new black market of lending to people who are so completely fucked that they got turned down by Wonga. If you don’t have any money to lend, take out a payday loan – like I said, there's still time before they have to start checking up on your credit rating – and pay back the astronomical interest rates with the even more astronomical rates you charge your ever increasing number of debtors.

GET ON THE BUY-TO-LET PROPERTY LADDER

Before long you will tire of black market loan sharking. The screams of the impoverished as your enforcers confiscate their possessions or limbs, the offers of degrading sexual favours in lieu of payment – you’ll want to go legit before your soul becomes too toxic. It’s time to become a landlord. When the housing bubble caused by Help to Buy bursts, swoop in and buy up as many houses as you can.

Don’t bother renting out to poor people ­– remember, the amount of housing benefit you can milk out of them is going down, and they’re kind of sad to look at. Rent out to an exclusive set of zany, wealthy people – say, the kind of people who might be attracted to a property because it's sold to them as a clown village – and spend their rent on expensive wine and 3D models of yourself making it rain.

Congratulations – thanks to the government’s motivational technique of impoverishing anyone without a job, you’re no longer a depressing slob!

Follow Simon (@simonchilds13) and Kyle (@kyleplatts) on Twitter

More fun stuff about austerity in the UK:

Our Work Culture Is Killing Us

Thanks David Cameron, We're Really Looking Forward to Permanent Austerity

Why Aren't British People Rioting in the Streets Against Austerity?