For one week only in the only national newspaper to have backed the right Miliband for Leader, Owen Jones writes:
It’s not your bog-standard
scrounging-family-with-loadsa-kids-passed-off-as-the-tip-of-iceberg story. Unemployed
mum Heather Frost doesn’t just have 11 mouths to feed – her daughter even
has a horse. Pun-happy headline writers couldn’t believe their luck. “Benefits
mum of 11 is taking us all for a ride” screamed one paper – get it? If you’re slogging
your guts out for hours a day and struggling to look after your own kids as gas
and food bills soar, it’s the sort of story guaranteed to wind you up.
And that’s exactly the point.
Ever since the Cameron-Clegg love-in at No10’s
rose garden, journos and politicians have scoured the country for the most
extreme, shameless examples of benefit “scroungers”. The idea is to make us
believe that anyone taking benefits is a workshy baby-making machine dribbling
on the sofa watching Jeremy Kyle on repeat all day – courtesy of you and me,
the hardworking taxpayer. The details of the now notorious Frost family don’t
matter that much.
It was hardly mentioned how they had a working
dad who abandoned them and the daughter with a horse is in work and paying her
own way. The family just don’t really say anything about anyone else. There are
1.35million families with kids where at least one adult claims benefits. Guess
how many have more than 10 children: Half a million? Ten thousand? The truth is
there’s just 190 of them.
But what really winds me up is we never talk
about the millions of people desperately looking for work. This week it was
revealed 1,700 jobseekers desperately applied for just eight new jobs on
minimum wage at a new Costa store in Nottingham. Or take the revelation back in
October that up to 66 young people were applying for every job in shops and
supermarkets. Many of them didn’t even hear back when they applied. Instead we
hear about the Frosts of this world – however tiny a minority.
It certainly suits George Osborne, though. From
April, he’s cutting tax credits for working people, benefits for people thrown
out of work, making the low-paid and unemployed pay council tax, and slamming
households with the bedroom tax. Debt is rocketing, the deficit is going up and
there’s no growth. Of course he wants us all to talk about the Frost’s horse. But
don’t forget – it’s really him taking all of us for a ride.
The real point about Frost wasn't the only the media focused on-it was that this unmarried mother has had her children by three different men (there was no one "father" as Owen Jones disingenuously implies)and these fathers all took off in the safe knowledge their kids would be looked after by our welfare state.
ReplyDeleteThat's the world we create when we pay unmarried women to have as many children as they like, outside of married commitment, because the taxpayer will pick up the bill.
We've replaced marriage with Government-that's the real story here, and the real tragedy for the fatherless Frosts, and the millions of other kids like them.
On that, Owen Jones (and the Left in general) has nothing useful to say.
I don't know who you think was in government in the 1980s.
ReplyDeleteI'm referring to the changes to the benefits system in the 1960's, which conflated several categories of single motherhood, abolishing any distinction between widows and unmarried mothers (Tony Blair continued the trend by abolishing the 'widows pension').
ReplyDeleteAs a result, irresponsible men and women repeatedly have children outside marriage, in the knowledge that the state will pick up the bill.
Before the 1960's, it would have been considered a disgrace to have children by three different fathers, none of them husbands.
Owen Jones solution is to keep financing the creation of more unmarried fatherless households.
That's the best the Left has to offer these days.
Again, ... oh, what's the point? You'll grow up eventually. You might even read something. Peter Hitchens would be a good place to start.
ReplyDelete"Again....oh, whats the point?"
ReplyDeleteMy sentiments exactly, if defending the current 'welfare-not-marriage' benefit system is the best you have to offer.
You and Owen Jones are really Thatcherites; your solution to moral poverty is money!
Whether state handouts instead of marriage or markets instead of Christianity, it's all the same Universe. The belief money can replace morality.
In defending this benefit system, your closer to the Old Lady than you think.
I do not defend this benefit system. Nor does Owen. He and I would arrive at very similar conclusions from entirely different starting points, on this and on many other things.
ReplyDeleteYes, we all think the Frosts are detestable. But what then? Shall we have the children begging on the street? Put them into the ironically named "care" system? What? Whatever you think of the mum and the dads the kids are not to blame for their predicament and the point here is to ensure that these kids are fed, clothed and housed. I guess back in the Victorian age, there might have been a view that the children should be punished for some kind of moral contagion but this is the twenty first century. We try not to visit the sins of the parents on their children, though God knows, these kids will probably have a hard enough time of it.
ReplyDeleteNow this is slightly disingenuous.
ReplyDeleteOwen Jones certainly does defend benefits for unmarried mothers-and I've never heard you reject the idea.
If someone were to propose cutting child benefits for the unmarried, Owen and his cohorts would be screaming.
Yet, when it comes to declaring marrriage better than any other lifestyle, Owen says that's "morally judgmental".
Money instead of morality-he's a Thatcherite.
James from Durham.
ReplyDeleteYour answer really does sum up the ideological barrenness of the modern Left.
You say, almost with resignation, that the Frosts may be "detestable" but there's just nothing we can do about it, except keep throwing money at creating more Frosts.
Deary me, it's a counsel of despair!
There's something very simple we can do about it, that wouldn't affect any of the Frost children-or any other children already in existence.
We could simply give nine months notice (as Peter Hitchens suggests) that all FUTURE benefits for unmarried mothers will be stopped.
That way, people will make sure they think twice before having children outside of any kind of stable commitment.
Of course, since the Left doesn't believe in personal responsibility-such solution can only come from the Right.