They’re killing us by accident. Mostly.
Stan and Julia both post about the off-duty policeman who followed a mother who chastised her kid in public, and who then caused officers to visit her home, and warn her about her child-rearing methods and to warn her that she was now on the local authority’s list for years to come.
As Julia points out, they don’t seem to be so keen to follow up real cases of persistent child abuse from people who just might kick off in court, or in police stations, or on their doorsteps if police ask them how they’re bringing up their kids. Thanks to The Ranting Penguin, we learn that this one got away with arson. Baby P was seen often and his awful plight ignored but there are many cases of officialdom picking on the law-abiding, but it’s not only because they’re Gramscian Marxists, but because they are officials.
It’s not deadly, yet. What happens is that, if officials aren’t kept to their duties; to the idea that some conduct is wrong; that there are duties as well as rights that their ‘customers’ have, then anything is seen to go, and eventually the loudest and the nastiest will prevail – out of bureaucratic inertia.
This is so true in the whacky world of welfare benefits. Those who politely ask how their benefit claim is coming on because the bills are mounting up are told that their claim will be paid in chronological order. Please wait your turn. Take a number. All in due course. Those who ring or visit every single day are helped faster because otherwise their harassment of officials will waste even more time. Screamers go straight to the head of the queue, and will have their cases looked at again and again even though they are not entitled or are only minimally entitled because they’ve got enough money already. We put up with under-age kids who say they’ll get pregnant if they don’t get the accommodation they want – and not report them to the police. What manager wants the fuss of the Data Protection ‘issues’ that would arrive on his or her desk a week later? We fail to report to Social Services families who are clearly having too many children for their meagre accommodation to be safe or well-rested – let alone to get any homework done, ever.
Don’t rock the boat, don’t tick the boxes marked ‘refer’ or ‘call security.’ It’s just too much trouble.
So the irresponsible breeders and the drunks and the junkies who can come into the office and raise merry hell or to keep our phone lines busy and keep other work undone get a free pass and the red carpet treatment. We’re taught to be customer–friendly, non-judgemental, and diverse. We mustn’t think of them as scum or ever allude to their misdeeds (that’s never stated openly – it’s just part of ‘customer service.’)
So the Baby Ps it kills by inertia, and the seven kids squeezed into a housing association terrace built for four people, tops, whilst the parents trouser the benefits intended to buy more for them, and they’re well on their way to uneducated criminality, addiction and knife fighting to pas the time. The Reds are right in this one: poor housing kills because it creates poor human beings who kill or die young.
All this lacks malice and conspiracy on officialdom’s part – but still people die.
It gets worse, as Mark Steyn and Melanie Phillips point out.
Once extreme political correctness is added to the amoral moral equivalence of state bureaucracies everywhere, then the biggest fuss-makers and the biggest kickers-off of all get a free pass for years - until the get the message and decide to spread the word big-time.
And then the innocent die in handfuls.
2 comments:
Plus ca change, plus c'est le meme chose.
Those with nothing to lose- no home of their own, no job, no kids that they love, no reputation- are free to kick up a fuss, and in this day and age entitled to enough assistance to make it effective- after all they have no other calls on their time or resources. Those with something to lose are easily bullied.
Officials are ordinary people who respond to incentives, to please their paymasters, who are not directly the general public but senior officials and politicians.
Being sensible they do this in the easiest way possible. As would everyone- the rate of pay for junior officials is way too low to attract angels even if there are such creatures to be found.
The only way foreward is to recognise that Angels don't exist, that tragedies such as baby P will continue regardless of the reach of officialdom- and simply dismantle the costly charade that pretends to solve problems but really gives politicians a claim to improving people's lives without actually achieving anything.
Hello Pat, welcome and thanks for your comment.
The snag for me is that officialdom in many ways CREATED the underclass; having demoralised part of the respectable working class by laughing at its honesty and patriotism and morality, it then had nothing to offer (and didn't want to offer anything) but more welfare. Open-ended benefits that reward illegitimacy and fatherlessness and the careful removal of any kind of personal blame or responsibility and you're well on your way. Add to this the increasing unemployment caused by automation and the sex-mad culture of the glamour industry in all it forms and you get women such as Theodore Dalrymple describes - who are prepared to see their sons hospitalised and driven suicidal by their latest boyfriend - as long as he's fun in bed. And, as you say, nothing to lose. The taxpayer always picks up the tab.
Once a child's benefit-generating capacity has gone and they become non-dependants, out they go from the 'family' 'home.'
I'd love to think they're underpaying us, by the way, but I think what you need to do is to end child related benefits after child 2 and limit the state-supported breeding life to 10 years between 1 and 2, and make these people pay their own way.
I'd hire a hard core of git-hard social workers who know their stuff and have professional childcare specialists in each police force to work with them - and scrap the rest.
If doleys don't claim benefits on time, then no going back to pay arrears. If the can't keep their children, the they don't keep their children. let them learn responsibility the hard way - their predecessors a century and a half did.
But I'd insist a court sees the medical evidence of any of this before forced adoptions.
Scrap the rest - they're useless.
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