Just checking to see if you have burnt me in effigy yet.
Yes,that was a unfortunate typo - but I think you know what it was meant to say.
Let me cite you a real-life example to illustrate my point.
The first "Ivory Tower" that DH and I inhabited was in a little inner-city terraced street. In the house next door to us lived a young mum of fragile mental health. She had a partner, but he was violent. My heart went out to that woman and her children. They had no way out, nowhere else to go. Eventually though they were forced to flee for their own safety. I don't know what happened to them. At the same time as this was happening my Mum told me about a colleague of hers who was talking in the canteen about how her daughter had just secured a council flat by, amongst other things, making a false allegation of domestic violence. She was quite open about the fact that the allegations were false and had been made with the sole purpose of queue-jumping the waiting list.
Where was the vulnerable disenfranchised girl in that situation? I'll tell you where she was - cowering in the house next to me, waiting for the next blow to fall.
Are you honestly telling me that the second woman in this scenario was equally as entitled to that flat as the first? I am not disputing the second girl's right to be on the waiting list, only her right to use dishonest means to queue-jump the list ahead of others genuinely in a much worse situation than her.
Apparently, according to this conversation in the canteen, it was not uncommon for young girls in their vicinity to allow themselves to fall pregnant, then to falsely claim that the child's father had deserted them, or that he was violent, in order to push themselves up the housing list and make themselves eligible for benefits that they would not otherwise have been able to claim. A subtle and premeditated fraud that would be difficult to prove. And these were not the disaffected daughters of households where no adult had ever worked.
These are the kind of people I am talking about - not those who end up in difficult circumstances through no fault of their own. And I have maintained this from the start.
Perhaps it would be better to describe it as an attitude of mind rather than a type of person.
I know there is nothing that can be done about this, because in taking measures to discourage the selfish few, we risk harming the innocent many.
But the attitude of those few still makes me mad.