@BLToutanowhere
Sorry, but parents do need to retain some responsibility for their own children.
I've sympathy and am happy to provide support for families who have fallen on hard times because well, you know, life happens.
On the flip side, you want x, y and z, work for it. Don't expect me to pay for your selfish lifestyle.
We should also be looking at why we allow absent parents to jettison financial responsibility. No contact? Fine. But don't be creating new families when you don't provide for the ones you already have.
Marcus Rashford's tax affairs also seem to be less than above board, just saying. Absolutely typical of the left. Shout from the high heavens as long as someone else pays for it.
You have said this far more eloquently than me - thank you.
I imagine those opposed to my view are not on a household income of 16190. Can you imagine trying to keep body and soul together on after tax about 800 quid a month before bills?
So here is my lived experience: I have, as a child, as an adult. I have also lived in the south. There is no way that people can be poor in the south. I have lived in the north too, for work. Southern attitudes are, if working class: moan at the elitist government that they aren't digging deep enough, and amplified by the twitterati / celebrity bandwagon from the middle classes who have hit the middle-upper class glass ceiling.
In the north? You are skint, you save for it, you cut back, your family steps in, wordlessly, and fills in the holes. No questions, no invisible favours lists ("i did this for you, twice, you owe me") and if not family, friends, colleagues.
I do not advocate starving kids or the things you have said in your posts about my attitude being x or y. Its about the middle classes who like to open their gobs to close them again.
The issue is wider: noone wants to be on benefits and get handouts when they can have the independence and choice of working. And yet, two parents earning, one on a zero hours contract maybe are strugging, seriously, to make ends meet.
In the 80s in coal mining town my father lost his job and took him 4 weeks to find another. Unemployment money was not paid for the first 4 weeks - so they had nothing - literally nothing, my mum with an 18 month old and me. She rallied, but she told me since there was 3 days that the child money (about 15 quid a week) couldnt stretch and she and dad were on "cabbage soup" with "bits". Me and my sibling ate lile normal. It was nettle soup she had collected (being a war child she was resourceful) potatoes off the neighbour and kidneys the butcher gave her because the butcher's wife, who had a son in my school class found out about our situation. As a child I could have had free school lunches but noone told her. We were fed first, with vegetables, cereals, milk, our usual food. The point it, it was crap and the system has improved majorly. But too many people think its ok for "everyone" to be "entitled" to have as many children as they like consequenceless, backed up by people who really have no idea and think because it's what they "think" that this is "reality" when they have never lived on the grinding poverty of 800 quid a month and nothing else.
What people reallt need is the ability to work, and be paid fairly for work. We will never get this in a hierarchical society because inequalities will always exist and whatever
As I grew up there were plenty of families on our council estate with serial pregnant mums. They sent them out to "play" and their friends -me included - would be encouraged to bring them back for lunch or tea, as parents a bit better off than their parents fed them. Otherwise we knew they would provay get a bag of crisps for lunch, maybe a sip of milk or a tin of beans - between them - for tea (this is the north, remember - in the south this would never happen).
I saw it, I grew up there, before you say "this can't possibly be true as yiu sip your latte and eat your brie sandwich, then denigrate people with a different opinion to you as "racist" or "Malthusian"
Have you stood and campaigned change in employment and education of parents in bringing children up better? Where were you when the children's centres closed? Campaigning en masse? This is where massive differences came from, normalising good social practise, raising aspirations in women so they could be reslonsible - contraception advice, breastfeeding advice, work and skills opportunities. And also the idea that serially breeding is a bad idea and that it's morally wrong to financially support the feckless.
Until you have, and campaigned properly until it made a real difference, rather than "nasty tories and prejuduced people are stopping money going to where it needs to go" keep it shut against people who have a legitimite view different to you. Money is only the answer when you don't want to get your hands dirty but do want to appease yiur conscience.