they will be the larger families who suddenly find the main breadwinner out of work

Yeah, that’s what really pisses me off about this whole “you should think about how many kids you can support before you have them” line – most of us aren’t in the position of knowing our future income streams for the next 18 years with any degree of certainty. Plenty of people thought they could provide for their families just fine, until someone pulled the rug out from under them.

Well, George Osborne’s family had at least one too many…

The mad monk, deplored poor spunk

Easy, Tiger. I’m still getting my head round this image of Osler slamdunking Stroppy round the flat.

It is of course lumpenproletarian fecundity which is the issue.

Nobody should fall for this specious argument.

And what argument would that be? I can’t seem to find it in the article.

cjcjc – All Osborne has to do is bring in compulsory sterilisation of anyone earning under £44000. He’s missed a trick there.

Stroppybird and Dave are an item???

Why exactly is it that those on lower incomes tend to have more children? This will inevitably be more expensive for the welfare system.

Keith Joseph (aka Sir Sheath Joseph) featured on a Private Eye front cover not long after making his singularly unfortunate remarks.

The photo had been taken in a laboratory somewhere, with everyone dressed in white coats. Joseph is looking into a microscope, with an advisor whispering into his ear.

The word balloons were (from memory):

Advisor: Look, millions of new Conservative voters!
Sir Sheath (for it is he): Yes, but will they be in time for the next election?

“Why exactly is it that those on lower incomes tend to have more children? ”

More sprogs = higher probability that one will win lottery/play premiership football/ be successful enough to look after you in old age.

You certainly do have a very broad definition of the lumpenproletariat there, Kate!

All parties have these types, but of course I nearly fell out of my wheelchair with Caroline Flints attack on the poor sods in council houses.

The liberals have one or had one he is gone now.

But the idea that people have kids to have benefits, like the idiot who said I know a women who had a kid just to get a council flat, I said she could have had the flat without the child, yes but she had the child to make sure.

Every party has one or two or three.

Why exactly is it that those on lower incomes tend to have more children?

I think you’ve missed a rather important preceding question, namely: do those on lower incomes really tend to have more children? Are you sure?

It’s a more difficult question than you might think.

“The reproductive success of 400 very wealthy Americans was contrasted with that of the general American population … Although selection of an adequate comparison population was problematic, these 400 Americans did appear to have had more children that did the general population. The mean number of children ever born the the “Forbes’” sample was 3.1; the mean age of the “Forbes” sample was 61.7. In contrast, the mean number of children for ever married females in the general population of the “Forbes” 400′s mean age was 2.7.”

13 – some people definitely do. My cousin, for instance. It’s just not as large a problem as ‘everyone’ makes it out to be (tends to happen where there are plenty of council houses anyway, it’s just a sure-fire way of getting out of the parental home). I’d imagine the absolute numbers are pretty low. But denying it happens at all is living in happy fantasy land – and nobody pays any attention to people in there.

Anyway, this basically stinks of being the route to shadow-forced-abortion-decisions – which is the most worrying aspect to me. I’ve no qualms about abortion personally, but it’s not the kind of thing where I can pretend my ethics apply to everyone (unlike with contraception generally, mind you. Free yourself of daft medievalism!) – and being forced to choose between destitution or an-act-you-consider-to-be-murder is no place for a person in a modern civilised society to find themselves.

“Why exactly is it that those on lower incomes tend to have more children?”

Actually I think you’ll find that a lot of middle class people have more children as well.

Firstly a disclaimer here. I have 2 kids and I count any more than that as a large family, (and madness, my 2 are plenty enough thanks).

If you surfed the Mumsnet forums after the CB debacle, (I needed a laugh), there were plenty of reasonably well off people talking about losing the money for their 3, 4, sometimes 5 children. I also have plenty of experience of people at my kids schools who have larger families, 3, 4 or more is quite common.

Just to look at the party leaders, Cameron has 4 (well obviously 3 now with the sad death of his eldest son), Clegg I think has 3, Ed M 1 with 1 on the way, and him and his (not) missus have plenty of time for a couple more.

It’s not just the poor who are breeding!!

“It is of course lumpenproletarian fecundity which is the issue.”

Not to worry – we can just drop them all out of helicopters, the tactic of your hero General Pinochet.

I’m reminded of the late Sir Keith Joseph’s ill-judged speech at Edgbaston on 19 October 1974:

“Many on the right-wing of the Conservative Party looked to Joseph to challenge Heath for the leadership, but Joseph’s chances of this were damaged by a controversial speech (written by Alfred Sherman) at Edgbaston on 19 October 1974. Covering a variety of social conservative topics, while drawing on an article written by Arthur Wynn and his wife which had been published by the Child Poverty Action Group, he warned about single parents ‘who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5′, the traditional taboos against which were easing at the time. However, some of the references he made to the quality of ‘human stock’ raised the spectre of eugenics, and under fire for this, he accepted that he had no chance of winning and urged Thatcher to stand. The barrister Jonathan Sumption later admitted privately to a journalist that he had written the speech whilst working as an assistant to Joseph.”
http://wapedia.mobi/en/Keith_Joseph

After Sir Keith Joseph’s speech, some of us at the time wondered whether eugenics would officially become part of Conservative Party policy as that would reflect a decisive and surprising lurch to the left:

HG Wells, a founder of the Fabian Society, was an enthusiastic proponent of eugenics:

“After being exposed to Darwinism in school, H.G. Wells converted from devout Christian to devout Darwinist and spent the rest of his life proselytizing for Darwin and eugenics. Wells advocated a level of eugenics that was even more extreme than Hitler’s. The weak should be killed by the strong, having ‘no pity and less benevolence’. The diseased, deformed and insane, together with ‘those swarms of blacks, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people … will have to go’ in order to create a scientific utopia. He envisioned a time when all crime would be punished by death because ‘People who cannot live happily and freely in the world without spoiling the lives of others are better out of it.’ He was hailed as an ‘apostle of optimism’ but died an ‘infinitely frustrated’ and broken man, concluding that ‘mankind was ultimately doomed and that its prospect is not salvation, but extinction.”
http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v18/i3/disciple.asp

Social Democrat governments in Sweden maintained an active eugenics policy from 1934 through 1975:

“In Sweden, the Sterilization Act of 1934 provided for the voluntary sterilization of some mental patients. The law was passed while the Swedish Social Democratic Party was in power, though it was also supported by all other political parties in Parliament at the time, as well as the Lutheran Church and much of the medical profession. From about 1934 to until 1975, Sweden sterilized more than 62,000 people, with Herman Lundborg in the lead of the project. Sweden sterilized more people than any other European state except Nazi Germany. However, it is more reasonable to compare numbers per caipita. If so, Finland has sterilised the most and the Nordic countries and the state of California sterilised about the same percentage.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

“Why exactly is it that those on lower incomes tend to have more children?”

Partly economic – a hangover from agricultural societies where more kids means more hands to do the work and then, in early industrial society, more potential wage earners

Partly social – As you go down the income distribution, for a variety of reasons, social networks tend to be narrower and smaller, such that family becomes more important as a source of identity

“These women, he charged, were ‘producing problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, sub-normal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters’.”

Positive correlation – being from a single parent household and becoming a single parent

Positive correlation – being the offspring of an unmarried mother and being taken into care

Positive correlation – being in care and being in prison

Positive correlation – offspring of single parent and being unemployed, homeless, mentally ill, addicted, poor health, shorter life expectancy

And you are saying he was wrong ? I would say he was remarkably prescient.

And before anyone tells me about their friend who was from a single parent family and went to Oxford/was a millionaire at 25/has a succesfull media career, it doesn’t alter the fact that statistically, at societal level, the odds are against it.

“20. Matt Munro

Positive correlation – Being poor and negative outcomes”

Edited for truth.

Gee – well lets just close our eyes, hold hands and wish that everyone would be rich…

But who said this in 1959?

“‘Surely it is not seemly for critics – sometimes secure other than by their own efforts and seldom thereby demoralised – to seek to deny some share of security to their fellow citizens.”

Keith Joseph.

This review of a biography of Joseph by Peter Clarke, suggests his conversion from Keynesianism and being a “progressive” Tory to right wing monetarism was not entirely ideological and might have had something to do with the collapse of his family firm Bovis with the loss of his fortune at the time of the Heath government:

” Perish the thought that Bovis itself might have been the victim of its own entrepreneurial failings! Joseph looked elsewhere to explain economic circumstances in which he had lost the bulk of his fortune. Later that year, the Preston speech publicly accepted the analysis, as Denham and Garnett deftly put it, ‘that the problem, at root, was a moral one (significantly, he would later characterise his preferred economic policy as one which guaranteed “monetary continence”).’”.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n14/peter-clarke/the-antagonisers-agoniser

I remember his “eugenics” speech and the outrage it caused, seems nowadays you can get away with suggesting this shit now without a murmur.

Thatcher’s children are everywhere. (And no we are not “all Thatcher’s children nowadays” – count me out for a start).

@18 That piece of satire was brilliant; eugenics a lurch to the left, quoting answers in genesis as a reliable source of information, that is a work of genius. I’ve never laughed so hard for at least a couple of hours.

Its damn lucky now that our knowledge of human genetics has pretty much demonstrated that not only are eugenics programs immoral, but they’re also kinda pointless and not even worth the effort of instigating.

@22

“Gee – well lets just close our eyes, hold hands and wish that everyone would be rich…”

When you’d rather ignore poverty as a root cause and close your eyes, hold hands and wish that everyone would just get married properly, like everyone did back in that golden age when it was ok to call black people ‘fuzzie-wuzzies’ and beat your wife?

Chaise Guevara @ 25:

Ah, it’s the application of Rule 1 from the Socialist’s Book of how to React:

1. Shout one or more of the following: racist, xenophobe, Islamophobe, neo-con, Reaganite, Tory bastard, bigot.
2. Say “Oh, so you’d like us to go back to the 1950′s”. In addition, you might like to add: “when people called black people wogs/pakis/fuzzy-wuzzies” or “when gay people were beaten up every minute” or “when there were notices in the windows saying ‘No blacks, no Irish, no dogs’ or “when you could beat your wife” etc.

I think a new, amended edition of Socialist’s Book of how to react is needed. The old edition is getting a bit predictable.

And as for beating your wife, Surah 4:34 of the Quran says you can do it if you do it moderately. Your not an Islamophobe are you?

@26

Yeesh. I’m criticising the previous post. He’s making out that marriage is some magic cure-all that prevents children from growing up to be failures or criminals. He’s doing so by citing stats related to single-parent families while ignoring the causation/correllation trap: poverty tends to be a major cause of these things, and single parents are more likely to be impoverished. The ‘golden age’ thing is to point out that there never HAS been a golden age and that previous eras when everyone got married had their share of problems too.

Of course, you ignored my central point about poverty entirely and incorrectly claimed that I called someone “racist, xenophobe, Islamophobe, neo-con, Reaganite, Tory bastard [or] bigot”, so you obviously didn’t actually read my post very well. Much better to see what you want to see, yes?

“And as for beating your wife, Surah 4:34 of the Quran says you can do it if you do it moderately. Your not an Islamophobe are you?”

LOL. And you don’t think that it’s possible to be against spousal abuse without hating all Muslims? Nice dichotomy there.

I hate to admit this but judging by this recent news report about teen pregnancies in Britain, Sir Keith may have been onto something:

“Almost one in five girls say they have been pregnant at least once by the age of 18, according to a Government survey published today.

“Just under half (46 per cent) decided to keep their baby, while more than a third (36 per cent), had an abortion, the figures show.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/a-fifth-of-girls-pregnant-by-18-survey-reveals-2032952.html

“The survey concluded there was a ‘noticeable trend’ between the young women who fell pregnant by 18, and their GCSE results.”

24 – really depends on the eugenics program in question. Tay-Sachs disease among certain american jewish communities is the shining star – I’d love to see a similar program over here for cystic fibrosis. Downs syndrome would be another example, though less obvious.

A successful eugenics scheme depends on good science. well-defined (and achievable) outcomes, and – most importantly – voluntary participation with wide takeup.

Obviously, the vast majority of schemes aren’t like that, and give the term ‘eugenics’ the pejorative perception such schemes deserve.

Impossible to breed social success into people, anyway – or out of them, for that matter. It’s not a well-defined and achievable outcome by a loooong shot.

Let’s leave the decisions on how many children to produce in the hands of those who deserve it – those producing the kids. I can’t see any other approach ending in anything but disaster, ja?

Also, there’s a noticeable trend between home environment before schooling, and GCSE results. ‘stupid people are breeding the intelligent into oblivion’ realy is an old, dead, tired meme.

@29 Very true examples, I was referring to the practices of forced sterilisation of the mentally handicapped, that were born more out of distaste for the mentally handicapped than any actual knowledge of developmental biology. A bit like that American org that offers money to female drug addicts if they submit to being sterilised first, that was reported on libcon a fair while back.

Not something one can normally say in public but: LIAR
Keith Joseph did NOT say that. The Daily Mirror deliberately misreported him.
The consequence was that instead of Sir Keith Joseph, who entered politics to help those worse off than himself (the vast majority), the Conservative Party elected Margaret Thatcher in order to get rid of Ted Heath who combined left-of-centre politics with Falangist economics.
The Daily Mirror may have done this because they thought that Keith Joseph appeared the most electable of the Tory leadership candidates (I thought that too) – he was much more concerned with helping the poor than Mrs Thatcher or Mr Wilson.
The lie perpetrated by the Daily Mirror was not even about proletarian women – it was a question about girls who were unable to comprehend that sex might make them pregnant. Is Dave Osler saying that his wife does not understand the link between sexual activity and pregnancy?

@ 32 John77

Keith Joseph did say those things:

“The balance of our population, our human stock is threatened…..a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up.

They are born to mother who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5. Many of these girls are unmarried, many are deserted or divorced or soon will be. Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment……. They are producing problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, sub-normal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters.

Yet these mothers, the under-twenties in many cases, single parents, from classes 4 and 5, are now producing a third of all births. A high proportion of these births are a tragedy for the mother, the child and for us.

see page 11

http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101830

As for him being PM, Thatcher thought he should have been PM as well. Joseph, however said if he had been:

‘it would have been a disaster for the Party, country and for me.’

Are you really saying a Tory with health problems who other Tories called as the ‘Mad Monk’ should have been PM?

@ 33
Keith Joseph was not “toast” because he quoted the Child Poverty Action Group but because the Daily Mirror deliberately misquoted him as favouring involuntary sterilisation of a girl of low intellect.

@ 33
What Keith Joseph said is not what Dave Osler said that he said, as you can see from your quotation
The girls of low intelligence were implicitly the fewest among the sub-categories that he mentioned – some compared to many, many and most. Dave Osler, remembering the Daily Mirror’s smear, is saying that KJ blamed everything of girls of low intelligence, which is simply not true.