to be fed up of George sodding Osbourne and his Knobbish Ideas

[avivabeaver]

The economy is proving harder to fix than he first thought

Solution- suggest cutting £10bn from the benefits budget and "limit the number of children people can claim for". So- are you supposed to choose your 2 favourite and just feed them then? Or what?

^I've long advocated putting a limit on the number of children the state pays out for.

But personally I prefer the limit to be fixed at however many children you have at the time you start claiming. So if you have 3 kids at the time you claim JSA then you get the appropriate benefits for 3 kids. If later you have a fourth then it's fine. Your choice. But the state doesn't have to pay for it.

We really have to move away from the bizarre notion that the state should support our lifestyle choices no matter how unaffordable they may be.

My OH & I work and pay our taxes. If we have another child our employers don't give us more money because of it. Why should the government?^

niceguy2 I completely agree with your opinion.

And for those who talk about accidental pregnancies: we have 2012. You can get free NHS condoms and the Contraption pill in every Family Planning centre.

OP, YANBU. I work, pay taxes, 1 child and no plans for another, so that makes me An Authority, right? Indeed we do have 2012 in this fine and illustrious year I am vv unhappy to be stuck with a government stuffed full of millionaire sadist scum like our pal Gideon. I don't know what the Contraption pill is, but FGS don't tell the coalition about it or it will be made chargeable.

This has to be one of the most disgusting comments ive ever seen on this site.
How does this post fit in to the Mumsnet policy of We Believe You.
This is mysogynistic in the extreme.

TM08Mon 08-Oct-12 12:06:14

PrairieFlower - r.e.the rape exepction rule - I think this would result in a lot of false rape allegations. If a woman knows the only way she can claim benefits for her unborn child is by claiming to have been raped, she'll go for it if desperate enough.

As far as I was aware, there's already a cap in place for benefit claimants (I think you can't claim more than £25,000 a year - a vast amount of this is housing benefit-), so why deduct more?

It's all too much too soon.

Quite apart from issues of rights, responsibility and humanity the idea is utterly unenforceable.

Cheap, point scoring and divisive with no thought to proper crafting of socially and economically sustainable policy.

Have a larger than average family, both of us work and have never had state help other than CB. Am happy for our taxes to support the children of those in need and accept paying for the few who abuse the system as a necessary price to pay for that.

Please can we get rid of this awful government.

This thread is very sad. I was an unemployed mother. Worked before having dc but partner was kicked out last year due to violence. I claimed benefits for 1 year. I now work a 50 hour week as care worker on less than minimum wage. I rarely see my children. I work my ass off to support them but still have to claim tax credits as without them i couldn't manage. I feel bad enough about having claimed benefits for the last year that I now don't claim housing benefit in fear of being seen as a scrounger.
My ex does not pay or look after the dc much. The men in all this get of lightly. Women like me end up being made to feel like failures. Very sad situation. I don't know how to fix it but women turning on other women certainly wont fix the situation.

^why are you working for less than minimum wage? If you work 50 hours a week and still don't make a living wage then you should claim HB, and fuck anyone who thinks you are a 'scrounger'.

I get less than minimum wage as I work overnight as a carer. I get minimum wage for the first 113 hours I work but the rest (87hours) is paid at a flat rate of £50 a night. I don't claim housing benefit even though I'm on less money working than I was being on benefits as I feel like people judge me for having children and not managing to support them on my own.
My kids are missing out but my pride and fear are doing it. I feel terrible to work these hours and still have to scrounge tax credits. It's threads like this that make me feel like this. Maybe i'm just too sensitive?

Honestly I do not get it, the UK has a debt totalling a trillion quid, the USA has a debt over 15 trillion dollars. Both Governments are still running a hefty deficit and will be for the foreseeable future. Neither can cut enough to actually stay in budget, without causing mass riots/civil disturbance.

Exactly HOW do people expect this to end? Cutting 10 billion off welfare is basically pissing in the wind really isn't it.

I mean really, a trillion quid, how exactly is that ever being paid back? 15 trillion dollars??????

I don't have any clue what the outcome is, but it won't be pretty.

One wonders if people with disabilities will be 'allowed' to have children with this new ruling.

Interesting report from the IMF this morning.
Gideon, you got it wrong!

This thread has made me very, very sad. To an extent, I can see why only paying for a certain number of children makes sense. But I can't help but think that this is simply another tactic to get everyone to turn on people who need benefits.

I am on benefits. I have a child because when I fell pregnant I was 21, had never had sex before and was so horribly naive I didn't know what to do. Why didn't I abort/give him up for adoption? Because, again, I was naive, and not really very clever, or good at anything, and nobody would employ me. So I thought maybe the one thing I could be good at was being a mother. You'd be surprised how many of my peers are basically having children for that exact reason.

People don't have babies to get a council flat, FFS. Stupid teenagers might say it, and a select few might even do it, but trying to say that every family on benefits has more children so they can get more money is disingenuous and just serves to stir up hatred.

I think fabmum really hit the nail on the head last night. She said this:
"We all agree that people who can't afford children shouldn't have them. The question is whether legislating to stop people doing the things we don't approve of will lead to unacceptable suffering among children, who are not responsible for their parents poor choices."

I'm not sure about "approve of" - I don't disapprove of people having children, it's just when they expect someone else to pick up the bill, repeatedly.

However on the second point there fab, I would say that facilitating and enabiling a system that allows and encourages parents in poverty/on benefits (not always the same, obviously) to bring more chidren into a this envrionment in fact leads to more unacceptable suffering among chidren in the long run. Fifteen years of chucking money at the problem made it worse, in simplet terms!

Galaxy: "You'd be surprised how many of my peers are basically having children for that exact reason."

I think a lot of people might have a go at being good at something else if they actually had to find the money for that choice themselves. I'm sure you're a great mum, but that's what I think.

"One wonders if people with disabilities will be 'allowed' to have children with this new ruling."

That is a ridiculous, scare-mongering, smearing thing to write. And I think you didn't withdraw your horrible insult?

Completely agree with you there Brycie.

Benefits that are too generous have contributed to the problem we have now, where too many children are bing brought up to parents that don't have aspirations, who won't support education.

We need more jobs to be created and we need free, or at east heavily subsidised childcare. That way we would have more families being able to be a part of society, rather than just living in the edges being given handouts.

Yes, I agreed with you earlier when you were trying to separate the two issues (ie: we should not pay for everyone's unlimited children = apparently we think people with disabilities should be thrown onto the streets ) and I thought you did that very well but I didn't say so as the conversation moved on very quickly.

Why is it a scaremongering thing to write. Some disabled people have to manage on benefits, are they too going to be penalised?

As for your other point, I answered it pages back.

Because people on different kinds of benefits will be excepted of course. I didn't see your apology. What did you say?

But they're not being excepted now, ATOS are hounding them off benefits.

As an aside, that is purely and simply because of fraudsters who so many people on here think don't exist.

But as to your main point; this will be about people on work-seeking benefits not people with disabilities. And if this is your only objection then do you accept it's fine for those on normal work-seeking benefits?

The thing is, I can't see how benefits are too generous. They have already capped the maximum a family can claim at 26k. 26k to support a large family isn't much at all. I don't see how they can reduce this further and not throw large families into absolute poverty.

There always has been, and always will be, poor people who have children they can't afford. The choice is whether you allow the kids to suffer.

And yes, don't want to make this particularly personal, but my relative is having the size of her telly checked and all of that stuff by people questioning her entitlement. While others can quite legally take the mickey out of the system.

frothy I don't believe the benefit cap. The mum at my daughters school would have to have at least a 4 bed house (call that £1500 in rent) she gets £400 child benefit she would get income support (think it's £111 a WEEK) then she would probably be on tax credits etc.... Equivalent of far more than 26k a bloody year!

Thank you Brycie.

One of the things I can't get my head around about the point that some people try to make about disability benefits is that if there were less people being given generous benefits for just having children, then there would be more money available to support those who are disabled or have long term illnesses.

It seems that people think that those of us who agree with the benefit cap, and agree with some benefit cuts are the ones who are trying to take away from the disabled. But it's not like that at all. In my mind, the people who are prepared to take benefits without giving anything back, the ones who have a child then time their next one perfectly to maximise the time they can stay on IS before having to look for a job, are the people who are taking benefits away from the disabled.

People with disabilities and their carers ARE BEING AFFECTED BY THESE CUTS.

So stop denying it because it sounds bad.

They are ideological cuts too because in the long run they will actually cost more in terms of appeals and people being forced into residential rather than the current bargain basement system of being cared for at home but it's happening.

Don't try to silence us because it sounds bad. It is bad.

Brycie, you nor anyone else can guarantee that this will not affect those with disabilities.
And no, I don't agree with it over all.
As for your relative, do you mean the authorities are questioning the size of her television, or just nasty people? Sorry, that's not an atttack, I'm honestly unsure.