Just been on a course about new benefit system

When you have people who are angry and have nothing to lose except their freedom, it takes very little to set things off. What then happens of course is that a tiny core of criminals capitalise on the situation and then mob mentality takes over.

There;s been a lot in the media about the riots, and the government's own investigation concluded that the biggest problem is a significant minority who feel so removed from society that they no longer see the sense in following that society's rules. After all, what's a pair of trainers or a flatscreen TV compared to the MPs duckponds and second homes claimed on expenses?

If you're going to deploy facts, at least get them right.

Right so some of the youth where i live, looted family run stops to protest about the Police?

how does that work? The police shoot someone, so i get some free stuff?

Flatpack - And that spending doubled under Labour. Education, NHS, Welfare spending all doubled from 1997 to 2010. And our problem is worse than it was in 1997.

Partly that was to do with wider economic principles. It's not as simple as saying spending doubled. It certainly didn't double per head of the population.
Much of the spending was on bureaucracy rather than at grass roots level, and certainly didn't benefit those most in need of it. Indeed, if you want to be cynical about it, much of it was aimed at the middle class rather than those in poverty, in a bid to convince them that New Labour weren't card-carrying communists.

Secondly, we have an ageing population and this has massively increased welfare spending. It's not actually the feckless single mothers and the unemployed doing that.

Likewise, Labour made a huge mistake in eduction. IMO they are responsible for the start of the postcode lottery trend in education and their idiotic notion to get everyone at university rather than just the brightest from any socio-economic background has actually reduced social mobility IMO and laid the foundations for the latest massive fees hike.

Great posts, Dahlen.

And Nicholas, re Tottenham - well, yes Another one of those pesky facts. Mustn't let them get in the way of a good old rant, though, must we?

Only if you can say that every child is born with the same opportunity to achieve happiness, health and self-sufficiency can you then say that those who fail to achieve it have only themselves to blame and can thus be abandoned.

We keep talking about the bottom 20% (or whatever) needing support as though it's a bad thing. Well, as long as we live in a capitalist society that bottom 20% is always going to exist. You cannot have people at the top or in the middle without having people at the bottom. If you don't want people living in such poverty that they require state support, then you need to have a true meritocracy, which is never going to exist.

It's the women who have to stand up here and say 'no'. They're the ones who will have to do all the work and give up their futures for their children.

Do you have any idea how unbelievably sexist that sounds?

We do not live in a world where it is the female of the species who has control over sex. Porn featuring violence against women is everywhere and 1 in 9 women will be raped. That doesn't even consider the women taken advantage of or coerced into having sex without using a condom. Research is showing that young men particularly are abandoning condoms and that young women are falling for the justifications they use.

It takes two people to make a baby Both are jointly responsible.

As you say, women face the consequences by suffering financially and giving up their freedom. Why should it be all down to women? Perhaps if more feckless fathers were forced into living up to their responsibilities, they'd be a bit more keen to use condoms. If they knew that they'd be hounded for maintenance for the next 18 years without exception perhaps the men could stand up and say 'no' too.

What do we actually know about the extent to which experts (people who have turned their lives around from benefits to tax-paying) have been involved in the proposal formation?

Well, the key advisors were Philip Green and that A4E woman. Both shining examples of socially responsible capitalism.

The WRB was led by Lord Freud, who clearly didn't know anything about our welfare system (I watched the Lords debate) and who broke Parliamentary rules to weasel his cuts back in after they'd been vetoed and everyone had gone home.

Very confidence-inspiring.

Germoline

^o in theory, Woman 2 - with the right support, education and opportunities, could produce 20 taxpayers over 6 decades
Woman 1 ? only 6, who may turn out to be largely tax avoiding wbankers (have nicked that from someone up thread!)^

Haha!

Well, the problem with that argument is that unless you're in the top-earning 40% of the country, your contribution to the tax coffers during your lifetime is lower than the amount you'll take out of it.

Since, sadly, Woman 2's poor background and schooling means she can't get a high-paying job, those 20 taxpayers will always be a 'burden' on the state.

I don't know what the solution is. I wish I did because then I'd be President Of The Universe.

Where can I get some kids? I want Sky+, lots of booze and fags, holidays and cars!!

I was about to have a big rant about refusing to support Cartoon Waynetta's multiple children - who gets helped by starving children? - until I saw the posts above about funnelling the money into childcare.

I've said before that I'd welcome good quality, wall-to-wall childcare provision for every family. As people keep pointing out, it would cost a fucking fortune. Far more than current child-related benefits. Stay at home parents cost less.

So in theory, Woman 2 - with the right support, education and opportunities, could produce 20 taxpayers over 6 decades
Woman 1 ? only 6, who may turn out to be largely tax avoiding wbankers (have nicked that from someone up thread!)

The nature/nurture argument has always fascinated me. As far as I am aware, genes will only ever dominate where environmental factors allow them to do so. Phylogenic inertia v. adaptation.

What do we actually know about the extent to which experts (people who have turned their lives around from benefits to tax-paying) have been involved in the proposal formation? What were the key influences in their change for the better? The only people who really know the answer to this are those people themselves and those working with them to achieve this. For anyone else, it is guess work.

Dahlen

I think you missed my point. I think the spending should be going into schools, libraries, sure start centres, maternity services, free extra-curricular clubs for children so that membership fees aren't required, free buspasses for children so that they can get to these places without relying on parents. That sort of thing.

And that spending doubled under Labour. Education, NHS, Welfare spending all doubled from 1997 to 2010. And our problem is worse than it was in 1997. We now have something like 3 million institutionally unemployed people. As I wrote before, it's not money that's the problem here - nor is it sure start centres or welfare-to-work-schemes or schools.

Can we please remember that both Natalie Nice and Waynetta Slob required male partners to create their children.

Any incentive to stop the poor reproducing smacks of eugenics needs to focus on male attitudes to creating offspring as well as female access to contraception.

Eugenics is about improving the genetic composition of the population. It's got the same scientific basis as aromatherapy. I don't see limiting child benefit to 2 children to be equivalent to eugenics although I'm certain that some will view it that way.

I don't think 'education' about contraception is the problem either. Everybody knows what a condom is. It's the women who have to stand up here and say 'no'. They're the ones who will have to do all the work and give up their futures for their children.

Orwellian, I wouldn't disagree with it depending on how it was done. If childcare was free/more heavily subsidised, people wouldn't need the childcare element of WTC anyway, and if early years education/extra-curricular clubs etc were freely available, some of the CTC wouldn't be needed either.

However, it would be a mistake to, for example, fund only early years education and use it as justification for cutting CTC entirely, because children from 5-15 still need childcare and extra-curricular clubs - in the case of the latter, probably more so since many activities are free for the under 5s anyway.

We've already seen, in the Tottenham riots, what a colossal sense of entitlement to other people's earnings does.

You're so right, oh wait. The Tottenham riots were caused by the Met's belief they should be allowed to shoot an unarmed man and have massive disregard for the truth.

If you're going to deploy facts, at least get them right.

Dahlen makes an excellent point about feckless sires!

You can't go round basing everything on "people you know". Well, you can, but it's irrational. If I were to base this part of the conversation on my acquaintance with Mumsnet, I'd be setting national policy according to my perception that most women with children are middle-class, have 4 or more DC and their partners are unfaithful. (Which may well be true )

I have just been trawling the DWP's figures to see if I can conclude anything from their data on family size & income group. Unfortunately they haven't looked at it this way, so I'd have to do coefficients of the data they have published. And I'm wasting my time here, aren't I ...

Dahlen - A Tory MP (so probably a vampire to boot) is advocating reducing child tax credits/child benefit and instead pumping the money into spending on early years education, childcare etc. What do you think about that idea?

garlicbutter

I've got to say your evolutionary post tickled me, Flatpack.

Evolutionary biology is indeed a strong force, though clearly not strong enough to motivate your Natalie Nice to have as many kids as Waynetta. I wonder why? Perhaps because cartoon stereotypes aren't really all that illuminating

I admit that it was a simplistic stereotype, but I used it to explain my view that we are far more driven by evolutionary biology than most people realise. Further, I don't think that the systems created by government take advantage of (or even take in to account) many of those evolutionary drives which we don't even recognise we're doing.

Take parks, for example. Now, when you walk through a path, even though you don't realise you're doing it, your brain is constantly plotting the most efficient route between your current location and your destination. That's why you always see worn patches at the junction of paths in parks. My local hospital has just put in a zig-zagging path between their car park and the main building. So what's happened? People ignore the zigs and zags and walk straight across the grass.

It's just how we're built, like when you shop for fruit and automatically pick the reddest apples and tomatoes, and your eyes can spot tiny differences between them, or when it's pitch black and you hear a noise you don't recognise and your body kicks in to 'fight or flight' mode.

But don't think I'm talking about people as automata who merely respond on instinct. The case of so many couples who have put off a family until later are a case in point. Biology can be ignored, guided, tamed - up to a point. The problem is that we're seeing Natalie Nice tame her biology in order to give her small brood the best chance, while Waynetta Slob doesn't - and we're paying for Waynetta to make that choice.

At the other end of the scale I could give you Angelina Jolie with her six DC, Queen Elizabeth with her four, Heidi Klum (4), Sarah Palin (4), Marie Osmond (8), Nicola Horlick (5), and quote Forbes: "there's been a significant increase in three- and four-children families among the top-earning 2% of households".

As Forbes also says, the influencing factor is disposable income. Waynetta doesn't have much disposable income so her brood is clearly not the result of a measured financial decision. It's more likely that, like lots of Natalie Nice's middle-class friends with larger families, she's not very good with contraception and gets a sense of personal fulfilment from her family. On Mumsnet of all places, I shouldn't have thought that too hard to believe

Statistical outliers like the super rich are, IMO, not an awfully useful way of looking at the majority. They might as well be on another planet for all the difference their decisions make.

I think the point I'm trying to make here is that the system allows Waynetta to make the choice between four children and two children. I think that it makes it too easy for her to choose four children. Why should she automatically get a bigger house because she's got more kids? Why should she receive more money? Do you remember this [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16812185 from the BBC?]] Seven children. Neither parent work. They've got Sky+, they can afford beer and fags, they're spending £120 a month on phone bills.

Now I do agree that a nice fulfilling family is a great thing. But I also question why the taxpayer should pay for fulfillment. I think it's wrong.

Garlicbutter, I would imagine most of those rich people with many children are not relying on the state for any help and probably use mostly private healthcare, schooling etc (please no comments about the Royals as they are a case unto themselves and deserve another thread on the rights and wrongs of the monarchy). People who are supporting themselves have every right to use their earned money as they see fit.

I actually don't have a problem with anyone having as many children as they want. I do have a problem with people having as many children as they want but expecting the state to pay for them (particularly having children when they are already on benefits and know they cannot support them through their own hard work). Have 3024809 children by all means, but don't expect other taxpayers to pick up the tab (not aimed at you or anyone on here but on workless families who have more children than they can support themselves).

I disagree with giving people the responsibility to choose how many children they want to have without giving them responsibility to support them.

Can we please remember that both Natalie Nice and Waynetta Slob required male partners to create their children. Any incentive to stop the poor reproducing smacks of eugenics needs to focus on male attitudes to creating offspring as well as female access to contraception.

flatpack: You see you then go right back on what you said above and claim that it's lack of money that creates 'spongers'? OK, exactly how much money makes the spongers stop? The reason I ask is Labour doubled welfare spending, and the number of spongers went up.

I think you missed my point. I think the spending should be going into schools, libraries, sure start centres, maternity services, free extra-curricular clubs for children so that membership fees aren't required, free buspasses for children so that they can get to these places without relying on parents. That sort of thing.

I suspect that if she found her money the same or even less every time she popped a sprog, she'd quickly acquaint herself with contraception.

Most people with large families are either comfortable or " poor" IME. Everyone else has to cut their cloth accordingly.

I've got to say your evolutionary post tickled me, Flatpack.

Evolutionary biology is indeed a strong force, though clearly not strong enough to motivate your Natalie Nice to have as many kids as Waynetta. I wonder why? Perhaps because cartoon stereotypes aren't really all that illuminating

At the other end of the scale I could give you Angelina Jolie with her six DC, Queen Elizabeth with her four, Heidi Klum (4), Sarah Palin (4), Marie Osmond (8), Nicola Horlick (5), and quote Forbes: "there's been a significant increase in three- and four-children families among the top-earning 2% of households".

As Forbes also says, the influencing factor is disposable income. Waynetta doesn't have much disposable income so her brood is clearly not the result of a measured financial decision. It's more likely that, like lots of Natalie Nice's middle-class friends with larger families, she's not very good with contraception and gets a sense of personal fulfilment from her family. On Mumsnet of all places, I shouldn't have thought that too hard to believe :)

Flatpack - that is a very good anthropological take on the benefits system! In 50 years time I wonder what the country will look like in terms of social and cultural makeup. It will be interesting if spending keeps going up and up on welfare then perhaps we will get to a point where the majority are not bothering to work or save for a pension because they think they will get it all paid for by the state. The few remaining workers will pack it in after their tax and NI rates become unbearable and then nobody will be working in this country. We will have to ask other countries for foreign aid for ourselves.

Dahlen
Think about it. If being a feckless sponger is so easy and comfortable an existence, how come none of us want it for our children?

It's because we recognise that a happy, well-rounded life comes from having hope that things will get better, having goals and dreams and the ability and opportunities to pursue them - all things denied to people brought up in homes where the parents lack the skills to work, where the drug dealers are the only ones with no money worries, and where the people working hard on NMW regularly have the bailiffs at the door. Oh and where the bankers and politicians commit offences that are 1000x worse than your average benefit fraudster yet don't even lose their jobs in many cases (or if they do it's with a big payout). Yeah, it's a dream life at the tax payers expense.

I have thought long and hard about this issue. I think you need to look at it from an evolutionary perspective.

Let's take two different people. Woman one is yer run-of-the-mill working or middle class woman who went to school, worked hard and never took a penny from the state. Woman two is yer stereotypical Waynetta Slob who's never worked a day in her life.

One has two children at the age of 30(ish). Her two children go off to university, and have their own (two) kids at about the same age. So this one woman has passed her genes on to two children and four grandchildren (6) after 6 decades.

Woman 2 has four children, starting at 16 and going through to 25. Her four children do the same thing, each having four children. However, because she's having children earlier, after 6 decades she's got 4 children and 16 grandchildren (20) plus a batch of great-grandchildren on the way.

Now in this theoretical exercise, who is the bigger evolutionary success here? It's clearly woman two, who has 20 sets of genes out there instead of 6.

So from a genetic point of view, woman 2 is doing the 'right' thing. She's ensuring the survival of her line and she's doing a better job than woman 1. Her life might be a bit grim from the point of view of people like me but she's done what we're all basically here to do, and done it better than most of us.

I don't think that enough people look at this problem from the point of view of evolutionary biology.