I think socialists need to think about this like the right does: the riots don’t really mean we need to change our political strategy.

I mean, we’re already (I hope) in favour of large scale redistribution to increase equality, investment in accountable, publicly owned social services, pro-employment economic policies and improving the wages and conditions of workers.

I think it’s pretty clear that applying such policies and turning them into a new political settlement would reduce the risk of riots.

‘I’m sure the intentions are good’

I’m not.

‘…but I don’t agree with any of this. Here’s four key weaknesses of the “tough love” approach’

Its big on tough, short on love.

‘Orr writes, “There was outrage when the last Labour government floated the idea of residential centres for young mothers who chose to start families without being able to provide material support to them. Maybe this should be looked at again.”

Rounding up single mothers – did anyone even suggest the same for single fathers, btw? – under one roof is a drastic, authoritarian ‘solution’ to a problem which doesn’t exist. The ‘residential centres’ weren’t dubbed Gulags for Slags for nothing.

This is about labelling single mothers as inadequate while ensuring that their children not only grow up without a father, but mix only with *other* children without fathers.

Excellent article, agree with every word. Deborah Orr has long been living off her ability to write one decent article followed by six terrible ones – and expecting us to treat all seven articles in the same way. Thanks very much.

I think socialists need to think about this like the right does: the riots don’t really mean we need to change our political strategy.

Given that this article calls for increasing taxes on ‘the rich’ in order to pay for more public spending I think you might be pushing on an open door here.

I am sick to death of the phrase “tough love”, its reached the same annoyance levels as “lessons will be learned”, “hard working families” and “I take full responsibility”. What the least well off in society have been treated to already is less like tough love and more like spousal abuse

‘I am sick to death of the phrase “tough love”, its reached the same annoyance levels as “lessons will be learned”, “hard working families” and “I take full responsibility”.

Add to that ‘If it isn’t hurting it isn’t working’ and ‘We’re all in this together’.

To: Shatterface @2 : – “Rounding up single mothers – did anyone even suggest the same for single fathers, btw? – under one roof is a drastic, authoritarian ‘solution’ to a problem which doesn’t exist. The ‘residential centres’ weren’t dubbed Gulags for Slags for nothing. This is about labelling single mothers as inadequate while ensuring that their children not only grow up without a father, but mix only with *other* children without fathers.”

This is an example of the constraints of many on the Left. There is evidence to suggest that children in a family with two parents together generally do better than those in single parent families. This is not to attack the many many single parent families who do wonders in bringing up their children.

However, the constraints of the Left do not allow many on the left to say anything supportive about the family as this may lead to them being thought right wing. Why is it considered right wing to support families? This should not be a left right matter. The Left should be supporting families. Lack of fathers is a real problem. Is it no wonder that kids with no great support at home end up joining gangs because they receive support and care from the gang.

Further there is a problem that exists with young girls often under the age of consent having children who are manifestly ill qualified to become parents at that stage of their life; and where almost certainly there will be no input from a father (and even if there was, how is a 15/16/17 year old teen ready to become a good father). To say this is not labelling single mothers as inadequate but to observe that many teenage mothers are likely to be inadequate; and to provide centres to help them develop parental skills, receive support from the state etc is in fact socialist.

Hang on… there’s been “a failure to stigmatise unemployed people”? On what planet did this failure occur?

In any case, the more we stigmatise unemployed people, the more we define them as an underclass reaping the rewards of their own fecklessness, the less people on the Right are going to believe these oiks are worthy of having money spent on them either by the state or by employers. If anything I’d expect them to start clamouring for the abolition of the minimum wage as the only possible way of making it worth employers’ while to offer jobs to such worthless scum.

@7 Er, what? How is being opposed to ‘gulags for slags’ somehow about being in favour of the breakdown of families?
I can assure you Lefties would love it if every child was always born into two parent families. Reality however has other ideas.

“a failure to stigmatise unemployed people”

A FAILURE TO STIGMATISE UNEMPLOYED PEOPLE???

Cheesus Christ, has this woman ever come within miles of the Daily Male?

Stigmatising the unemployed is practically a national past time. Any more and it will become a full time job.

Maybe if unemployed people spent their days stigmatising themselves, they would find themselves in full time employment? Just imagine how many Daily Male readers and writers would find themselves with nothing to do!

Paul D @ 7

There is evidence to suggest that children in a family with two parents together generally do better than those in single parent families.

There well might be, but that hardly justifies penalising single parents, does it? I mean, if a man walks out of a marriage or away from his pregnant partner, how does battering the mother ‘help’ her? How does throwing her on the streets improve her life? Does it mean that her husband or partner will come running back to her? Does it mean that he will suddenly stop punching her in the mouth, gambling, drinking or womanising the rent away, for example? Nope, you cannot just use the above statement and say. Two parents are better than one, therefore single parents should receive no help.

Why is it considered right wing to support families?

It is not, at least not in principle, but how that ‘support’ manifests itself normally is. Say you ‘support’ families via a tax cut? Why? How can a tax cut of a few fucking quid be deemed as ‘supporting families’?

When we advocate support for families, i.e. better childcare, we are slapped down by the scumbags on the Right. ‘How dare you put families above profits’ they boom, ‘how dare you put children at the top of the agenda when shareholder’s money is at stake’. So don’t give my this shite about defending families.

Lack of fathers is a real problem. Is it no wonder that kids with no great support at home end up joining gangs because they receive support and care from the gang.

And you think having a Government legislate to keep dysfunctional families together is going to improve that? How exactly? How will having their mother punched black and blue every night improve that child’s life?

Don:

There’s quite a bit I agree with in your piece. But…

“…if Orr spoke to anyone who is unemployed, or who is a lone parent, then she would know that there is an enormous amount of stigma to “living off the state”,…”

Anyone? Your rhetoric here implies that all unemployed persons or never-married single mothers feel stigmatised by living off the state. That is plainly false. Such people exist in abundance: even if they are a minority, they are substantial minority. And they often refer to their benefits as their “pay” – like the 34 year old single mother with 12 kids by four different fathers who is receiving over £31,000pa in benefits and has never worked.

“…abundant evidence about how this stigma causes poor health amongst many other social problems”.

OK, but those who live parasitically off the state do make many ordinary, respectable, working class claimants feel deeply ashamed of claiming their own entitlements. In other words, the shameless freeloaders in society give welfare benefits a bad name and make the stigma worse for ordinary people.

“She’d know that there are parents who don’t get the help which they are entitled to and need because the “tough” rhetoric has scared them off.”

Have you any evidence for this?

“And she’d know that a generation of politicians using right wing language around “living off the state” has been part of the problem, not part of the solution.”

Why is pointing out what is true part of the problem? Far too many people do live off the state, and welfare dependency is a problem. Leaving able-bodied and able-minded people to rot on benefits is imprudent and inhumane. We need a welfare system through which such people briefly pass on the way to getting their lives back in order. Unfortunately, such a system would be, in the short/medium-term at least, far more expensive than the current one.

Paul ilc @ 12

That is plainly false. Such people exist in abundance: even if they are a minority, they are substantial minority.

Really? On what criteria are you judging that?

like the 34 year old single mother with 12 kids by four different fathers who is receiving over £31,000pa in benefits and has never worked.

A Daily Mail wank piece to stir the blood of the constantly furious, sure, but just how accurate is that? What do you really ‘know’ about this woman? No, not what you have projected onto her or what the scum in the Daily Mail have told you to believe, but what, objectively, do you actually know about her? Just because you don’t feel that he is stigmatised enough is not really the issue is it? How stigmatised is she? I am willing to bet she is far more stigmatised than you or the Daily Hate can ever comprehend.

In other words, the shameless freeloaders in society give welfare benefits a bad name and make the stigma worse for ordinary people.

It is the sub-human vermin who have used these freeloaders for their own political ends that have blackened the name of the welfare State and produced the stigma and this is deliberate.

Far too many people do live off the state, and welfare dependency is a problem. Leaving able-bodied and able-minded people to rot on benefits is imprudent and inhumane.

Had you cunts realised that thirty years ago, perhaps you wouldn’t have adopted Milton Friedmen’s policies?

How did we get here, Paul? What you people ‘appear’ to forget is that we did not go to bed in April 1997 with a fully functional all singing and dancing, full employment economy and wake up with Tony Blair in number ten and a policy of driving otherwise honest people onto welfare dependency.

You cunts had managed that in eighteen long hard fucking years of destroying communities. I wish even a couple of you had the grace to scrape up a backbone between you and actually go and actually understand what you have done.

The Orr piece was interesting in particular for paragraphs 3 and 4.

Why do people keep doing things which aren’t good for them? For example, why do some children act up in lessons? Why do some parents fail to teach their children to behave properly? Why can’t some adults behave properly? Why can’t everyone behave in a socially well adjusted way?

I don’t know the answers, but I think the questions are worth asking.

This is a classic example of the ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’ rhetoric used by former self-proclaimed lefties when they find their own interests are being served quite nicely by the status quo.

The right won’t countenance the giving of benefits without stigmatising the recipients so, reluctantly, we must stigmatise them to keep the right happy.

Meanwhile, we can forget about the disabled being stripped of benefits even after being assessed as unable to work, or the fact that many young families live in B&B accommodation, the closing down of educational opportunity, the escalating bonuses, those in need of social care being left to sit in their excrement, etc., etc. Just concentrate on straw men, like the young, able-bodied, well-educated who refuse to work!

Of course, it’s complete bollocks, Orr is simply trying to elide any cognitive dissonance caused by her inexorable move to the right. Bankers create wealth, the poor are irresponsible scroungers – but I’m still of ‘the left’.

It’s pathetic.

Jim

the more you use ‘you cunts’ the less likely that your views will be persuasive to those of other viewpoints – and if you’re not here to be persuasive to them, what is the point of posting?

Paul D made some valid points – but, as is common on LC it seems, these issues are not welcome here.

Why is it considered right wing to support families? This should not be a left right matter. The Left should be supporting families. Lack of fathers is a real problem.

What can the left do support 2 parent families?

Where does this idea that ‘the left’ is somehow opposed to two-parent families come from?
Especially since all the research on two parent families that found them better than single mothers was only for loving + committed parents, and found that those with broken relationships who stayed together for their kids sake actually made their kid’s lives hell – ie worse than being raised by the one parent. Plus it’s largely down to many hands making light work. You might as well also ask “why is the right opposed to polyandrous relationships?”.

Of course if you want to have mothers and fathers to bring up a family then do not go to war so fathers get killed , one good idea because we have a couple of hundred dead fathers, plus we will have perhaps 800 fathers who will come home with serious problems and family break up.

The idea that people will get married and stay married is bit far and I have seen mothers stop children having anything to do with children, I’m a grand parent and I have been stopped seeing my grand son until we went to court.

So all this is more of the same political bull shit

“It is the sub-human vermin who have used these freeloaders for their own political ends that have blackened the name of the welfare State and produced the stigma and this is deliberate”

Looks like you’re partial to a bit of daily hate yourself. No doubt we should shove this Tory vermin into the gas chambers?

“Where does this idea that ‘the left’ is somehow opposed to two-parent families come from?”

Probably the unfortunate association of the loopier wing of the feminist movement with the Left. Plus the fear of causing offence to single parents by suggesting that two-parent families are superior which I suspect is more prevalent on the mainstream Left.

“You might as well also ask “why is the right opposed to polyandrous relationships?”.”

Because the Right (and not just the Right) rather likes the idea that children are brought up by those who created them. Until relatively recently two-parent married families were the norm for the vast majority of the population.

On the estate where I grew up the parents of my friends are still together with the exception of one couple. This is far higher than the population as a whole which raises the question as to why such a high proportion of people are able to stay together where I lived but not elsewhere (and where I lived is a street of semi-detached houses so nothing out of the ordinary). Is it a generational thing perhaps – do the youth of today have excessive expectations?

“She argues that a failure to stigmatise unemployed people ”

In what planet does anyone who believes there is no stigma to being unemployed live on? Has she ever spoken to anybody who is unemployed?

*In addition to above I should have said “created or raised them” lest anyone think I was forgetting foster parents. The key in either case is stability and not having someone you have grown up loving wrenched away from you because all of a sudden your parents who loved each other enough to get married have inexplicably realised that actually they can’t get on any more.

Probably the unfortunate association of the loopier wing of the feminist movement with the Left. Plus the fear of causing offence to single parents by suggesting that two-parent families are superior which I suspect is more prevalent on the mainstream Left.

Well I’d probably be more satisfied with a link to prominent lefties actually attacking families, or couples, while praising single parents (as opposed to just defending them from unearned invective), because what is usually meant by the right about the left being ‘anti-family’ is that the left is pro-gay. Which generally doesn’t translate all that well to a discussion about parentage.

Because the Right (and not just the Right) rather likes the idea that children are brought up by those who created or raised them. Until relatively recently two-parent married families were the norm for the vast majority of the population.

As long as each man fathers 1 child with their shared wife, polyandry technically fulfils the ‘created or raised buy them’ part quite well, and ideas of marriage and relationships have changed many times over the years. (As any gay-rights marriage will be able to tell you at great length)

There should be an “advocate” in that there last set of brackets :/

No amount of therapy can affect the price of property, cost of university education, or gas bills, etc.

Perhaps struggling families are given more ‘insight’ into how very difficult their situation is and why becoming Mummy or Daddy while still a child yourself is unlikely to be plain sailing?

Just visiting @ 16

the more you use ‘you cunts’ the less likely that your views will be persuasive to those of other viewpoints

The people I describe as ‘cunts’ are not in the slightest bit interested in being persuaded of anything. They have come to this and every single debate with their mind firmly made up. In fact, they appear to have created a rather elaborate alternative universe, where the history of this Country and indeed the planet never happened and this alternative history has wiped out everything. Any attempt to question their ‘assumptions’ is met with a complete rejection of even the most (by decent people’s standards) uncontroversial facts.

How are we supposed to engage with people who appear to completely have forgotten the Nineteen Eighties? How do we debate with people who reject the idea that there was mass unemployment created in that period via deliberate policies born out of the same ideology that now demands that cancer suffers should look for work? How do you engage with people who think the welfare state was an invention to tackle a problem that never really existed?

This is what people like Deborah Orr seems not to understand. The Right are not ‘just like us, but just slightly different views’. They are lying scum who make things up ignore the basic facts to further their own political debates. You cannot ‘engage’ people who think that unemployment is a modern invention created by a ‘generous’ welfare state.

Perhaps you should ask the likes of Paul and other vermin why they post here when they can simply make up ‘facts’ to suit whatever argument they want to put forward?

What can the left do support 2 parent families?

Yes, I agree with that. What exactly CAN a government do when two people start to hate each other? What policy could change people’s perception that the perfect person they married suddenly became a drunk, gambling, fat, balding, lazy, impotent, frigid, unfaithful, boring, older person? A tax cut might work, eh?

If a husband came home from work one day and found his wife in bed with the builder who was supposed to be putting a new driveway in, perhaps she would have thought twice, if she knew her tax bill was going to rocket?

Richard @ 20

I reserve my hatred for people that go out of their way to deserve it. What people like Paul and Deborah Orr are getting out of attacking the weakest members of society is anyone’s guess, but I for one weep for a Country that has thrown its history out of a window and replaced it with political dogma that now means we are never allowed to examine problems we have with anything like background.

Look, I have a pretty jaundiced view of the Right in general and the modern Tory Party in particular. Okay, guilty as charged, but why are they allowed to get away with this sort of crap every day? Why are they simply allowed to re-write history to fit in with what they now happen to believe.

What term would I be justified in using (if not vermin) for the type of people who rattle on and on and on and on about the fraud (one percent or something) to discredit the vast majority of benefit claimants who happen to find themselves in terrible situations? What term would I use for people who knowingly ignore common facts and pretend that unemployment is an invention of new Labour circa 1997?

[27] “They have come to this and every single debate with their mind firmly made up” – to be fair, Jim, I think most LC commentators proselytise rather than listen (and yes, I am as guilty of this as everybody else).

Having said that I think views can be changed or at least influenced but this probably takes time? – a particularly insightful comment will percolate in the mind for a bit and may chip away at preconceptions until a different position is arrived at.

We all have many frailties I’m afraid.

A&E chargehand @ 28

Having said that I think views can be changed or at least influenced but this probably takes time? – a particularly insightful comment will percolate in the mind for a bit and may chip away at preconceptions until a different position is arrived at.

I agree, but only if the mind is open. If somebody comes to a debate where they are simply not interested in a debate, then are they likely to change?

If someone believes that New Labour moved millions of people from low paid, rubbish work into a ‘generous’ welfare system and that getting incapicity benefit is as easy as turning up with a sore back, then no amount of ‘insightful comment’ is going to change them, is it?

We all come to every debate with preconceived ideas and opinions. That is a given, but surely to when we start of with the premise that everything that happened before we left uni or got a job or whatever never really existed, the debate is over?

We have people here who deny that unemployment reached epidemic proportions fifteen years before New Labour got into power and that the Tory Party of the day were forced to fiddle the figures to the extent that they effectively became meaningless.

Are those people likely to say, when the evidence is shown to them, ‘Oh, that means everything I have believed and written makes me look like a complete twat and a pretty shallow twat as well’ or (and I think we know were I am going here) they would dismiss it as ‘Left wing BBC/cultural elite bias’ or attempt to explain it away via some kind of revisionist nonsense?

If it is the latter, is it fair to use the term ‘cunt’ to describe them?

Cyclux @ 18 & 24: “Where does this idea that ‘the left’ is somehow opposed to two-parent families come from?”

It probably originates in The German Ideology, where Marx and Engels see the bourgeois family as causing the division of labour and the formation of a class society. Since then, totaltarian regimes, particularly of the left, have been suspicious to say the least of the family, seeing it as an obstacle to the classless society.

Many feminists have also been suspicious of the family, as Richard mentions above.

More concretely, despite the huge amount of evidence that children born to young single mothers, the Labour government made such single motherhood an attractive proposition. Since 1997, a young single never-married mother of two children has seen her benefits increase by 85%. And if you subsidise something, you inevitably get more of it, as incentives do work.

@ 30:
Sorry, the first sentence of my final paragraph should read:

‘More concretely, despite the huge amount of evidence that children born to young single mothers are seriously disadvantaged, the Labour government made such single motherhood an attractive proposition.’

The trouble is, that when people say “don’t blame the poor”, it’s difficult not to notice that some people are poor because they have made bad decisions, or – more importantly, their bad decisions are exacerbated by being poor.

If a middle class person fucks up, more often than not they will have enough of a support network to insulate them from the impact. (family who can bail them out, money to pay for lawyers, an education to fall back on which will help them find a job)

The state should be there to provide at least the bare equivalent of that middle class support to people when they fuck up. – Case in point – I finish my degree, go back to family home, where parents are prepared to support me, but also push me out the door to go and find a job. – The state fulfills the same role, supports you when you’re out of work, but cajoles you to find a job. We all need a bit of cajoling sometimes.

@30 & 31 The question there becomes “how many of these ‘incentivised’ single mothers actually were single?”, and not say structuring their life around maximising benefits like a non-dom structuring their life around maximising their tax avoiding.

Jim:

@13. To reply briefly and probably futilely:-

1. The existence of the British underclass is not disputed. Except, apparently, by you.

2. What do we objectively know about anyone? We have to go by reports. And the volume of press reports and of sociological studies about the attutudes and mores of the underclass supports the view that may are not stigmatised by their condition but have made a lifestyle choice to live in the way they do.

3: “It is the sub-human vermin who have used these freeloaders for their own political ends that have blackened the name of the welfare State and produced the stigma and this is deliberate.”…So no-one must ever mention or criticise underclass freeloaders or benefit cheats because this discredits the welfare state? The ordinary, salt-of-the-earth working class people with whom I work know of and dislike the freeloaders who live in their neighbourhoods. Suppressing discussion of the problems with the welfare state will not make those problems disappear.

4. It’s all Thatcher’s fault, is it? I don’t think that will wash after 13 years of Labour government – under which the rioters came of age. Labour’s legacy included educational failure on a massive scale despite huge increases in funding… 63% of white working class boys, and over 50% of black boys, have a reading age of 7 or under at the age of 14. Perhaps then it is not surprising that 99% of the 1.8m jobs created between 1997-2010 went to immigrants…

@27:

1. “The people I describe as ‘cunts’ are not in the slightest bit interested in being persuaded of anything.” Pot…kettle…black? And untrue in my case, anyway.

2. “What exactly CAN a government do when two people start to hate each other?” Divorce is regrettable, and more mediation and a less adversarial process might help. But divorced parents are not the problem I am discussing, as in most cases both parents remain involved. The young women who, following the incentives, choose the single-parent-never-married lifestyle are the problem here.

3. “we are never allowed to examine problems we have with anything like background.” Self-awareness and self-criticism are not your strong points, are they, JIm? 😉

4. “people who knowingly ignore common facts and pretend that unemployment is an invention of new Labour circa 1997?” A straw man! I’m not saying that unemployment was invented by Labour in 1997. Don’t be silly.- Socially, we are where we are as a result of accumulated maladjustments deriving from policy mistakes by all post-war governments.

5. Your use of terms like ‘sub-human’ and ‘vermin’ say more about you than they do about the people to whom you apply them. You are evidently filled with hate and anger, and you give the impression of a totalitarian attitude and an inclination to eliminate your political opponents by violence. Moreover, using the word ‘cunt’ as the supreme term of abuse suggests a very unpleasant attitude not only to the orifice from which you emerged into this world but also to women in general.

The label ‘single mother’ has become an epithet of abuse; to be an incapacity benefit claimant is to invite suspicion, if not outright contempt, black youths grow up in a miasma of stigma, the term ‘chavs’ is a regular catch-all denigration of the poor.

Where does Deborah Orr get the impression that there is not enough stigma attached to poverty, has she ever been in a job centre?

Right-wing ideologues like Charles Murray have been banging on about using stigma as a tool of social policy for decades.

The reason why there are more poor people isn’t because we have suddenly become lazy and feckless, but because inequality has accelerated and social mobility declined. Wealth has become more polarized and the ‘losers’ more concentrated in the areas where nobody else wants to live – creating a downward spiral of deprivation. Then, the fact that some estates contain a large percentage of benefit claimants is taken as proof of an ‘entitlement’ culture! Meanwhile those with the real sense of entitlement – Old Etonians, government subsidised bankers point the finger at the ‘underclass’ while merrily stuffing their pockets.

The bottom 50% share just 5% of the nation’s wealth – if anything, the social tensions we are witnessing come from a sense of unentitlement.

Cylux @ 33:

“The question there becomes “how many of these ‘incentivised’ single mothers actually were single?”, and not say structuring their life around maximising benefits like a non-dom structuring their life around maximising their tax avoiding.”

If fewer of the incentivised single mothers are genuinely single because actually they have a partner nominally living elsewhere but in fact living with them, then that would strongly suggest that they are engaging in benefit fraud. Either way, genuinely single and benefit-dependent or not single but a benefit fraud are both behaviours that need to be discouraged.

Structuring your tax affairs so as to avoid tax is of course perfectly legal, unlike benefit fraud (and tax evasion); so your parallel does not stand up.

p.s. apropos my previous post:

“In this sense, Karl Marx was partially right in arguing that globalization and financial intermediation run amok and the redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital could lead to capitalism self-destructing (he was only partially right as his view that socialism would be a better economic system than capitalism turned out to be utterly wrong). Indeed, if there is not enough labor income given rising income/wealth inequality, there is a structural lack of aggregate demand especially when debt burdens don’t allow households to borrow to bridge the gap between anemic incomes and spending goals. And recent riots from the Middle East to the UK and massive popular demonstrations in Israel (and rising popular anger in China) and soon enough in other advanced economies and EMs (if advanced economies were to double dip) are all driven by the same issues and tensions: Rising income and wealth inequality, poverty and unemployment and hopelessness in both the working class and even the middle class, which are feeling the squeeze of falling incomes and opportunities. In the U.S., we are now back to a second Gilded Age as income and wealth inequality is as high as in 1929 at the onset of the Great Depression after the Gilded Age of the 1920s. And after five rounds of unsustainable tax cuts in 2001-10, federal tax revenues are now at a 60-year historical low of 14% of GDP, when the U.S. historical average is 19%.”
Nouriel Roubini: http://goo.gl/2lch3

CW @ 35:

“Where does Deborah Orr get the impression that there is not enough stigma attached to poverty….Right-wing ideologues like Charles Murray have been banging on about using stigma as a tool of social policy for decades.”

Unfortunately, the welfare system, voluntary sector agencies and social services have remained non-judgemental and value-neutral. So the underclass rarely experience a sense of stigma, living as they do among others like themselves.

“The reason why there are more poor people isn’t because we have suddenly become lazy and feckless, but because inequality has accelerated and social mobility declined. ”

I agree with you about social mobility, which declined sharply under Labour. And a major part of that problem is the failure of the state education system, which turns out sub-literate and innumerate young people while only 12 teachers out of a workforce of c.450,000 have been suspended for incompetence in the last 9 years.

‘Inequality’, however, is not a synonym for ‘poverty’. You can have a poor society in which everyone is equal — ie equality of misery.

To: Jim @11 & 27

In response to your comments about my post, I was certainly not talking about penalising single parents where one parent is left by another for whatever reason or a man say refuses to have any input in the first place. I was focusing on those situations where teenage and sometime underage girls get themselves pregnant in order to to obtain accommodation and benefits. This does happen and is not something made up by the Mail and Express. Just because the likes of the Mail and Express may go on about it does not mean those on the Left must therefore take the opposite view just for the sake of it. This type of behaviour is surely not something that should be encouraged or supported. With such widespread contraception why should there be so many pregnancies anyway if not deliberately sought?

I have no idea what you are going on about when you refer to the government legislating to keep dysfunctional families together. I never suggested that at all. Indeed putting the child first may mean taking children away from their birth parents in some situations where such “parents” are evidently not up to the job and putting their flesh and blood at serious risk.

Your use of bad and hostile language is not likely to lead to your posts being regarded as thoughtful and considered. Your use of the word “vermin ” to describe myself and others is offensive, unjustified and simply pathetic. You appear to accuse others of not being interested in being persuaded by anything. However this accusation can fairly be laid at you given what and how you have written. I do not know about this alternative universe you are going on about but it seems you may be more likely to frequent this rather than some of those you attack in rage.
.
You admit you have a jaundiced view of Tories and the Right. Fine, I have never been keen on the Tories myself and am not impressed by the current government. However I was similarly unimpressed by the last few years of the Labour government. However to take a view that you are going to write off everyone and everything they may say of a significant section of the population without more is really not useful – and also when it can be argued that there are plenty on the Left who should perhaps not be taken seriously.

I thought Peter Oborne’s article the other day was pertinent and can easily be identified and agreed with by folk on the left. I also thought Deborah Orr’s article a good one which should be debated in considered terms and not in rage.

.

@36 Well yes, funny how similar behaviour that favours the rich is legal while that behaviour when done by poor people is illegal.

Cylux @ 40:

“Well yes, funny how similar behaviour that favours the rich is legal while that behaviour when done by poor people is illegal.”

But it is not “similar behaviour”.

The parallel to defrauding the benefits system is defrauding HMRC (ie tax evasion). Both are illegal and should be punished.

And the parallel to arranging your affairs quite legally so as to minimise the tax you pay (ie tax avoidance) is quite legally arranging your affairs so that you maximise the benefits you receive.

Neither of these is illegal. And if the government wants to prevent specific examples of either, it can legislate.

Please, can we abandon the conflation of tax evasion (illegal) and tax avoidance (legal) here?

[30] “It probably originates in The German Ideology, where Marx and Engels see the bourgeois family as causing the division of labour and the formation of a class society” – was it Marx who described the family as “the gas chamber of the bourgeoisie”?.

@ 42: “the gas chamber of the bourgeoisie”

I don’t know if it was Marx or not, but it doesn’t seem likely as genocidal gas chambers had not been used in his day, as far as I’m aware. More likely to be post-1945.

To my ear, it sounds the title of something that would be entered for the Turner Prize! 😉

@41 I’m talking about arranging your living arrangements quite legally to obtain the maximum amount benefits on offer. As far as I’m aware as l’m aware as long as you live separately and remain unmarried you fulfill the requirements. That this results in farce in terms of keeping couples living arrangements separate is no less than the farce of spending no more than x amount of time in any particular nation.

tax avoidance and tax evasion are essentially the same thing, and deserve to be mentioned together; some people seek to find ways of not paying their due taxes.
The laws of the land are devised by the privileged class in their own best interests. It would be folly to assume that all Laws are fair and correct and moral.
imho, the morality matters far more than an artificial legal technicality.
Cylux makes a very good point about how people structure their life.
Just speaking personally, I would not be bothered if an individual found a way of paying slightly less tax … but when a team of accountants and lawyers are hired to ensure that the absolute minimum of tax is paid, then this has to be deplored as tax avoidance/evasion on a professional scale.

Cylux @ 44:
“I’m talking about arranging your living arrangements quite legally to obtain the maximum amount benefits on offer….as long as you live separately and remain unmarried you fulfill the requirements.” OK, but not good for the child(ren). And if the couple are really living separately, they are not a functioning family unit. Ergo, they are single – which is what you were questioning above.

Rook @ 45:

“tax avoidance and tax evasion are essentially the same thing”

You are assuming what you are trying to establish. They aren’t “essentially the same thing”: the former is legal, the later is a crime.

“The laws of the land are devised by the privileged class in their own best interests.”

Really? Is that why we have progressive income tax, a free health service, a welfare system…?

“It would be folly to assume that all Laws are fair and correct and moral.”

Nobody here is claiming that all laws are fine and dandy. All legal systems are imperfect. If you morally disagree with a law in a democratic state, you should campaign for its repeal. Disobeying a law you morally disagree with nevertheless incurs a penalty.

“imho, the morality matters far more than an artificial legal technicality.”

Whose morality are we talking about here? Yours? The problem is that in a liberal democracy we have to live with moral pluralism and the lack of moral consensus.

“I would not be bothered if an individual found a way of paying slightly less tax … but when a team of accountants and lawyers are hired to ensure that the absolute minimum of tax is paid, then this has to be deplored as tax avoidance/evasion on a professional scale.”

Why does the scale matter? How does the scale alter the morality of it? It’s wrong to murder a 100 people, but it’s also wrong to murder one. The single murdered individual doesn’t count for less morally than the 100 (unless you are a particularly crass utilitarian). By the same token, if it’s immoral quite legally to avoid tax corporately, then it’s immoral quite legally to avoid tax personally. In which case you can campaign for the law to be changed.

By the way, since you bring morality into it, I would mention that tax evasion can be moral, too, even though it is a crime. Consider an unjust law requiring all gays or Jews to pay an extra tax. Morally, a gay or Jew would be perfectly justified in evading such a tax.

Paul iLC @ 34

1. I don’t dispute the existence of an underclass, nowhere have I disputed that. Where does that shite come from because I have never said anything like it.
2. So, you are suggesting that unemployment is not stigmatised? Get fucking real and read a paper.
3. Read what I have said. Ninety nine percent of the people who claim benefits claim legally. The scum never point that out, do they? I have no issue in pointing out that fraud occurs, I have an issue with people who claim the one percent is representative of the vast majority.
4. Not ‘Thatchers’ fault, but ‘Thatcherism’s fault. New Labour made no attempt to reverse the huge destruction caused by the wholesale vandalism caused by the Tories.
5. I am filled with hate and anger all right, I hate the scum who have openly and deliberately destroyed communties.

Paul D @ 39

I was focusing on those situations where teenage and sometime underage girls get themselves pregnant in order to to obtain accommodation and benefits.

How many times does that happen? Not how many teenage pregnancies occur, but how many actually occur to get a council house? Have you seen the actual council houses they actually get? Not very nice are they?

With such widespread contraception why should there be so many pregnancies anyway if not deliberately sought

Errr, women have been getting pregnant for thousands of years before welfare payments. In fact many women are still getting pregnant in such fashion in Countries where no such payments are made. Richer women have been getting pregnant without the incentive of a council house. How many richer men have been cuckolded in such a manner? How many people get divorced due to extra material affairs which lead to pregnancies?

If these women are all getting pregnant for council houses, then how do you explain, in this age of plentiful contraception, Britain’s quarter of a million (from memory) abortions?

Your use of the word “vermin ” to describe myself and others is offensive, unjustified and simply pathetic.

Whereas terms like ‘parasite’, ‘scroungers’ and the like to describe people at the bottom of the social pile is perfectly acceptable? Wide sweeping generalisations about people just because life happens to have been dealt a bad hand is okay in your moral code, but the most vicious attacks on people by some of the wealthiest and powerful in society is ‘pathetic’ and ‘unjustified’.

Last week we saw looters run riot through cities and undermining our culture. It is you cunts that have done far, far worse damage to our culture. Not at the buildings but at the very fabric of our culture. You people have fostered a corrosive atmosphere where people have been wrongly persecuted and demonised for your own little entertainment.

We now live in a Country where people who cannot walk up stairs are called scroungers because no one will give them a job. Hatred? You fucking got it mate. I despise scum like you far, far more than any looter. Most of the damage the average looter has done will and can be repaired, but you cunts have turned our people against each other.

To: Jim@48

I’m very sorry Jim but you are accusing me of things I haven’t done and don’t agree with. You are labelling me in the most offensive manner without even knowing anything about me. Your attacks are certainly not justified in terms of what I have actually posted here.

I am not against those at the bottom of the social pile. I have never used the terms ‘parasite’ and scroungers’. I get far more angy about the tax avoidance of rich people – like all those premiership footballers who have schemes where a lot of their income is taxed at lower rates as Corporation Tax. I believe that if rich people (not middle income people) were targeted for the tax they ought to pay then there would be less need for some of the drastic cuts going on.

However, going back to the matter in hand, there is a problem in our society whereby a lot of young folk have no experience of stable families or family support; have not grown up in an atmosphere where people go out to work; see the consumerist society and think they want some of that without having to earn it; and have no respect for any authority. This causes unpleasantness, anxiety and stress to an awful lot of ordinary people from all classes and we should be doing something about it.

Oh, and by the way I am in fact unemployed myself and know it is not easy finding work.

My two cents…

Far too much time and effort is wasted on people who do not want help ( a minority of people on the dole ). It is strange to me when we the UK set up a benefits system that basically encourages a lazy lifestyle, several people i know have commented that when they work ( granted poor paid jobs ) they come out on marginally better off than if they stayed on JSA, free council tax, and income support , therefore they actively turn down formal revenue streams in favour of cash in hand odd jobs. WE are reaping what we have sowed….

Only one option…. IMO but its way too right wing for most

@50 – Mass murder, right.

Never mind the fact that our benefits are actually very low by first-world standards. No, facts have no place in this!

50
Another option, jobs which pay a living wage, is that too left-wing?

52. jojo

Another option, jobs which pay a living wage, is that too left-wing?

But people who are not productive, who do not add enough value to anything to earn a living wage, cannot be paid a living wage. Companies will not add employees who cost them more than they produce. The only option is for the state to top up their wages to something like an acceptable level.