Possessions

The Brother phones me up.

His little sister Pixie is shrieking in the background but she’s just too vulnerable to come to the phone right now.

The Brother speaks as he no doubt ‘writes’ on the numerous forms and letters with which he fails to provide usable information to The Social for his own benefit claims; with that wind-tunnel-vowels-into-puddles-of-scummy-consonants vortex mixing non sequiturs into an all-you-can-blag buffet without gaps or pauses for breath or to trying to establish understanding or to identify himself or me or any inflection other than slowly rising angry tones which tell you from the start that under no circumstances is he going to listen to anything at all that you say until he’s said his piece and put you in your place because saying it is all: The Word shall set him free – or at least Pixie’s rent will soon be free, he hopes, and so growling and interrupting my polite greeting is just the ticket to ram home the fact that he’s been terribly inconvenienced by having to sacrifice precious time from his busy schedule working at the Wii-face to say just how disappointed he is that some other servant of the State is remiss by dint of not immediately reaching into the big old barrel of twenty pound notes that we all keep by the phone to send to Pixie so that she can go on living in the flat she recently rented at (it turns out) about forty quid per week less than The Housing are prepared to give her and which doesn’t leave her with ‘anything to live on': it’s about fifty pounds actually but who’s counting?)

Succinct Town is not a suburb of Castle City.

This is how the steamroller of the Welfare State tries to roll forever and take over the universe.

Pixie has rented a home of her own. Moving out confidently to make her way in the world like the social entrepreneur that she is, she’s decided that it’s long overdue that she left her Mum and her latest boyfriend’s house, and no doubt a gaggle of diversely-surnamed little half brothers probably monickered Jo-Boy, Tyson and Jakub who have been getting on her ‘pecs since they discovered just how high a decibel level they could generate for her and the neighbours’ listening pleasure without Him thumping them or Our Mum cutting them briefly off from her thin, cool, struggling stream of highly conditional but nevertheless genuine love.

She’s found a nice place to rent privately in Castle City’s economically obsolescent outskirts which is conveniently far away from the highest concentrations of needle-carpeted rookeries just as most of her school friends have done in recent years to put down roots and to blossom into mothers; sometimes within weeks of signing the lease.

Only she hasn’t read the small print.

To be fair she probably hasn’t read anything that didn’t have the word ‘celebrity’ in the first paragraph or that has ‘Fits sizes 16 to 18’ printed on it since she finally learned at about twelve how to read at all, but what she hasn’t done at any time during her daydreaming is to speculate about the consequences of signing a legally-binding contract but not being able to pay all the rent with someone who works out of the back of a taxi company’s office where his pit-bulls sleep except on overdue-collection days and who never gives receipts and who holds onto the rent book throughout the tenancy. He’s not been getting enough rent and has been Having A Word. Sharrylleanne and Nicole and Kimberley-May get every single penny of theirs paid okay and they were all mates at school together so why not Pixie?

This last is, approximately, what The Brother wants me to answer. You’ll have guessed by now that he wants me to answer it just so he can tell me I’m wrong. He intends to bully me into persuading The Housing to go to their Bumper Barrel O’ Twenties and do that whole All Creatures Great and Small thing with some Housing Benefit clerk playing James Herriot and the taxpayer representing the archetypal breach-birthing cow or the aardvark that’s swallowed (but which just can’t quite pass) an ocarina. It’s ironic that I have to explain the facts of life to a man who utters synonyms for the act of generation as every third word, but there you have it: there are a million stories in the naked city but only one verb.

I try to explain, but to save wear on my PC’s ‘f’ key, I’ll not quote our dialogue at length here; nor his many and essentially fertile interruptions, nor detail the Cloverfield soundtrack-bassy thumpings from Pixie’s room around him that are so loud that it seems her bed or sofa must be being repeatedly flung up into the air and then cast down onto the carpetless floor as if by some malign supernatural force.

Single people under 25 are not expected to live alone in four-roomed flats solely at the taxpayer’s expense. They are entitled to Housing Benefit at the shared accommodation rate, which is about half the rate allowed for a single unemployed adult living alone. Pixie should have got a shared house with a room of her own and a kitchen, living room, and bathroom in common with a couple or three others by this logic. Up to 25 you’re supposed to muck in like students. But Pixie is a rugged individualist who needs her ‘space’, according to The Brother.

Anyway, she has single friends at about her age who get all their rent paid. Do they have children? Some of them. There you are; ‘families’ have bigger needs and get more benefit. But, argues Brother Rumpole, some of the friends are alone, under 25 and ‘on the sick’ like Pixie and they get all their rent paid even though they aren’t parents. I explain that, yes, more of their daily spending-money benefits income will be excluded from means-testing help with their rent. If they get health or disability related benefits the system disregards certain food-and-bills benefits and adds disability premiums. There’s a core subsistence level that the government calculates for individuals or families according to their health, age, and mobility and to the numbers, ages and sexes of any children. The sicker you are, the more your spendable benefits are excluded from this matrix of subsistence 'needs'.

In the background, Pixie’s bed (or sofa) has ceased it bungee-thumping, and she is shouting the plaster off the walls with a deep, chthonic boom you wouldn’t think a (human) female chest and voice box could make. Perhaps she’s floating above the bed now.

The system allows proportionately more of the food-and-electric-and-mobile-phone benefits to be excluded from Housing and Council Tax Benefit calculations, with the mother of all exclusions on those who have the higher rate of Disability Living Allowance for both ‘Care’ and ‘Mobility', as they generate very high disability premiums. There’s nothing wrong with the logic of means-testing: the more knackered you are; the more fate has hammered you down in mind and body and the less you can reasonably be expected to do to provide for yourself. I suffer no pain at all at the thought of paraplegics or the blind getting extra help so that they can rent more expensive ground floor suburban flats that allow wheel-chair access or that permit guide dogs to be kenelled there.

Oddly enough I rarely get elderly paraplegics or the totally blind yelling at me, though occasionally they are sincerely grateful if I point out that they’re missing a trick and they find themselves better off after my advice. Poor old gimmers: they just don’t have the proper attitude some of them, unlike their juniors and betters.

The problem, of course, is that government ‘logic’ doesn’t take into account Ingenuity, Indolence and Greed or any other Hawkwind songs. Not everyone who wants to escape a life of getting out of bed early five days a week to work amongst unfriendly strangers is fortunate enough to be totally broken.

‘How do you fecund expect her to live on fecund nothing at all when she’s fecund sick?’ inquires The Brother sweetly. It’s tempting to reply that until a few magical moments ago I had been entirely unaware of her very existence and that therefore I had had no expectations at all as to her viability, but I know that that’d be a sacking offence - unlike say squandering trillions on a housing bubble - and so I hold my tongue.

He mutters something to the wailing voice behind him and the line crackles as she howls her disability qualifications at him to pass on to me. A positively First Century Galilean sound they have; what with her troubles and her attacks. And her ‘issues.’ How thoroughly the underclass has adopted the pusillanimous vocabulary of the victim-generating middle classes. But in the end it turns out that whatever it is she has wrong with her, the Department for Work and Pension’s top specialists have tragically only been able to award her the lowest level of ‘disability’ which means that The Housing have rightly taken most of her spending money benefits into account and haven’t been able to ignore the fact that she’s under 25 and single and renting a starter home at a cost and in a neighbourhood that’s more suitable for a hard-working, tax-paying family; the poor bastards.

There is a brief period of negotiation like that in August 1939 during which The Brother offer me an enticing banquet of illegal (and on one occasion physically impossible) alternatives to me doing my lawfully contracted job. Most of these choices are variations on the theme of me telling some fellow lickspittle from The Housing to ignore the various Housing Benefit Acts (note the date of that first one! Who knew that it was all Her fault?), and by forgetting all that Whereas and Notwithstanding stuff to make with the Barrel of Cash already and no messing about as he’s got Lego Star Wars to win.

You can wear this kind of person down. Pixie is doing half the job anyway as I can hear her ever shriller and ever more abusive howling begin to erode his shallow half-brotherly ability to give a shit. I’m imagining pea soup vomit spraying horizontally and maybe Pixie looking over her shoulder: right over her shoulder at 180% from straight ahead right now. I urge him to repeat to her that the law of the land won’t allow The Housing to give her more than her fifty quid or so, no matter how much she yells at him. He demurs and asks me once more why she can’t have more fecund cash (as if asking again and louder will change the world) because she’s on the sick. But not sick enough I explain. Again. She’s got something that the Welfare State considers to be dealable-with by a few extra pounds a week (or millions nationwide, let us not forget) and that’s it. She’ll have ‘panic attacks’ or be obese and unwieldy or be a moderate self-harmer or otherwise less than calm and gymnastic in enclosed spaces like factories or offices or supermarket warehouses, though I’m guessing that pubs and convenience stores and night clubs might therapeutically count as the open air.

But that’s the truth – she’s only got something trivial wrong with her, physically, but I'm expecting changes around these part. After all, if you pay folk if something happens then some people will assure that that particular something will indeed happen. That's market forces for you. If you pay peanuts you get monkeys. This is what that saying means: not that low wages produce poor workmanship, but that people will answer demand in ways that complement the demand. If you pay peanuts you get monkeys; if you pay bananas you get gorillas; if you pay with the coins stolen in a mausoleum at midnight on Halloween from the skeletal eye sockets of unpunished and unshriven embezzlers you get accordionists. Once she learns today’s lesson, I confidently expect her condition to get worse if she can squeeze it past the doctors.

‘So you’re saying if I broke her leg, she’d get more benefit?’

And you’d get a medal, or deserve one, I think.

Eventually, worn down between the brick wall of my persistence and cunningly-hidden indifference to his grief on one side and the Gadarene squealings behind him on the other, he goes off the line in the sure and certain knowledge that, while she can’t have any more benefit per se without becoming a mother or growing sicker and more disabled (both obviously very attractive career options) she can apply to The Housing for temporary relief whilst she looks for somewhere that she really can afford. She won’t look, of course. Even if The Housing do agree to pay a temporary top-up for up to six months and it goes straight to the landlord’s bank account to appease his wrath she’ll still not search for anywhere else to rent despite her present panic. She’s going to be too busy with her personal and relationship problems and rowing with her whole family to go house-hunting any time soon. So in eight months or so after the top-up has ended forever, her underpaid and out-of-pocket landlord’s pocked face will lose its film-star charms and he'll become all insistent again. Pixie’ll do a runner to another part of Castle City or to one of its exotic neighbouring mill towns leaving debts to the landlord and The Housing alike, but then it’s amazing how nimble you can be even with her disability when you need to carry a bed and a fifty-inch plasma TV screen down three flights of lightless stairs.

She’s hoist on her own petard.

Two petards.

First petard: she’s never ever given any consideration as to whether The Social and The Housing really would provide her with what she wants as much as abundantly as she wants it and as soon as she needs it for the Lord will provide. Her Mum’s on the sick with kids and she gets by and her friends with babies have their own places and they get by and some of them just like her are on the sick and they get by, and so somehow she has slightly distorted the nature of Welfare State and the grimmer reality that underlies it into some warped version of the allegory of the lilies of the fields and the fowls in the skies, African or European.

Second petard: she’s not used the masses of information that have always been available to her. The Housing will have written to her once her too-small help with the rent was awarded and so she would have been able to see from the start that she wasn’t going to be able to manage. Therefore she didn’t need to wait for the landlord to come a-calling or for The Brother to get out so he could shout at me. If she had had any self-possession at all, she might have phoned The Housing in advance of signing the lease and asked what she’d get if she moved into her lovely new home alone – and not rented it when they told her. Every building in the Welfare State is plastered with posters and signs and almost all correspondence has letterheads and warnings and rights and duties and exhortations to call the authorities at all kinds of local call centres or drop in advice centres before everything goes horribly wrong: we’re waiting for your call. But she’s slightly distorted all this potential help and advice to mean ‘Please ignore this letter and just get back to feuding with your mother and schoolmates and don’t bother your pretty little head with thoughts of…well, anything at all really, until The Man Comes Around, and then who you gonna call?’

Two slightly distorted petards.

And the moral of the story is?

The myth of Right-wing myths about welfare mothers and doley scroungers.

The Left says that girls don’t deliberately get pregnant to qualify for benefits and accommodation of their own, and I’m sure that a sizeable minority of them do so (I’ve heard some admit as much). They also deny that others invent or exaggerate their ‘disabilities’ for the same purpose. But there's another much wider carriageway on the welfarist road to Hell. A majority of the young people whom I meet and who have the biggest beefs with the system do so because they assumed right from the start that they’d be getting it all straight away...and with no expiry date, world without end. They'll do their individualist thing regardless: petty crime, or truancy, or unprotected sex or making tenancy agreements with slumlords and they'll expect it to be alright because the system is all about always making it alright. They are so poorly educated and incurious and accepting of their ‘rights’ that it never occurs to them that it’s not going to be perfect from the start. Guess where that puts getting jobs and responsible parenthood in their hierarchy of priorities? Talk about The Imp of the Perverse: this is the Demon of the Irresponsible.

Multiply the costs of all this by fifty-two to get the annual spend per tousled head and then by several hundred thousand nationwide to figure out where all the policemen and body armour and hospital cleaning crews and physics equipment in schools have gone to this year.

When things go wrong, they intend to fall back onto their cosy beds and let it all get sorted out.
You, dear reader, are the bed that they expect to fall back on when Life happens to them.

Kind of puts that whole bed-bucking thing into context, doesn’t it?

Lightning reflexes

Little vignette of the Welfare State we're in for you; hot off the steaming pavements of Castle City.

5.05 I'm walking home from work in the bowels of the State when the path past the Housing Association 'social housing' estate that borders Northwester Towers' Southern Drive and deer park.

Heading in the same direction as me but a little slower and straight ahead are three shambling products of Labour's Britain.

Call them Tracksuit Boy, Beach Ball and Vicky Pollard. I don't recognise them not them me, the Lord be praised.

Tracksuit Boy is brush-cut, eighteenish and already overweight with an Iceland carrier bag full of health-food snacks no doubt.
He is muttering in what twelve years of compulsory and lavishly-funded state education would describe as 'English' that he was 'going to.'
'You're going to claim, are you?' Beach Bimbo asks him, encouragingly.
'I'm going to claim,' confirms Tracksuit Boy; sure-footed in his three hundred word vocabulary and an intimate and thorough knowledge of the way the world really works. I don't know whether he's talking about claiming more money from the British taxpayers or claiming compensation for some injury or other or claiming to be Emperor of France, although Sarko's got at least one of those pretty much nailed down.

I scuttle to overtake them in the hope that they won't recognize me and perhaps connect a person who is both a neighbour and also an adviser for Britain's soon-to-be-bankrupt benefits system and join any dots leading to my door, windows, car, roof....

Isn't bigotry great?

My cat-like tread takes me past them and into the fresh air away from three colourful and spontaneous lives innocent of all deodorants, when my shiny office shoes slip on the ill-kept, uneven and rain-greasy housing association paving slabs.
Reflexes trained during decades of inhabiting unfriendly schoolyards, being a conservative speaker at student union meetings and being employed by and sharing the roads with the people who elected New Labour three times come to my rescue and I skate rather than slide, tumble or worse - especially at my age - hip-smack the mossy stones.

Here's where the lightning reflexes come in because as quick as a flash and without time for conscious thought, Tracksuit Boy calls to me cheerfully 'You should claim compensation for that, mate.'

Oh, it wasn't bigotry - just ordinary prejudice.

And of all the things that he could have been in life: a sailor man in our nation's fleet or a bricklayer; a welder, soldier, or actor; a policeman, salesman or juggler, he has somehow become a person who can see the simple beauty and financial potential of a stumbling man.

Chain mail limbo dancing

Just a quickie to depress you further and to hammer your just prejudices deeper in.

A colleague of mine read a customer's letter out to us last week.
This customer had been trying to persuade a benefits decision-maker to give him more money to live on. He complained that he only got such-and-such for Jobseeker's Allowance (the routine welfare payment for those fit young men too gormless to persuade some dippy doctor that they have panic attacks, agoraphobia, or Depression), and so much Housing Benefit to help pay the rent.
He didn't mention his Council Tax Benefit but then folk on Income Support or income-based Jobseeker's Allowance have their entire bills paid for them by the local authority and after a few years on the dole they forget - if they ever knew - that they have any Council Tax liability at all. 'I don't pay Council Tax' shall be the whole of the law. The Poll Tax rioters should be spinning in their graves.

So anyway he wrote; clearly and politely in prose that could have been that of a suburban housewife describing the high cost of living, that what with one thing and another he just couldn't afford to make ends meet, and so he hoped that the decision-makers could see their way to upping the payments made to him. Then came the clinching and final very matter-of-fact sentence which I paraphrase here only slightly.
'If you don't pay me more I shall have to shop-lift or steal money to manage, and I'll get even more fines and then how will I manage?'

Do you see what he did there?
He went straight from expressing in some detail his dissatisfaction with the Welfare State through to his sole conceivable option of breaking the law and violating the property rights of others, and then straight on to anticipating with self-centred regret how the consequences of his crimes would impact his own comfort and convenience.

It's my contention that the underclass are a kind of aristocracy.
The purity and blamelessness of their pain and their insoluble and eternal helplessness absolve them from all moral responsibility and especially the duty to ever, ever exert themselves for their own support other than by insisting that the tax base and the tax collectors do so.

We may well deserve it for taking the Half Crown ourselves, but welfare advisers in the bloated bureaucracy are on the receiving end of daily abuse and why-me whiny self-pity as people complain that their benefits have been stopped because they failed to 'sign on' and how do we expect them to manage?

I love that one.
I fantasize about saying, perhaps the day after I see the Lottery jackpot clearing in my bank account (or failing that the day after a Conservative government announces that there will be no more 'hardship loans' and interim Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit payments based on 'nil incomes' for people who neglect to do the one simple, easy thing that they are expected to do to feed and house themselves, which is to attend the Job Centre for half an hour once a fortnight) that I never heard of them before today and therefore that I have no personal plans, opinions, or ambitions regarding their future managing behaviour and prospects.
No, strike that 'behaviour'. They don't connect their behaviour with outcomes in their lives at all, (' It's not my fault - the Job Centre messed up') except for their ability to browbeat or wheedle some bureaucrat to simplify and indeed to perform the task of supplying and filling in a new claim form and suggesting wordings whereby a decision-maker might change their mind and allow benefit payment back to the start of the sanction.

The other one I like is when someone - usually young and single and childless and gormless complains that they've rented a flat and that it turns out to cost twice the maximum amount of Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit that they are entitled to due to their age and state of health. How do I expect them to be able to afford to live?
What were their expectations, I wonder, when they signed the lease?

The underclass are an aristocracy: an aristocracy of weakness and failure.
They aren't subject to the same laws as we are and they are absolved lifelong from personal responsibility for their subsistence, breeding, housing, clothing, and entertainment. They are surrounded by brow-beaten and servile lackeys who seek to extort from some distant and unseen peasantry (that'll be you, dear reader), the means of their subsistence and pleasure.
And the threat is there - always there - of violence: violence to the lackeys or, failing that, to anyone who insists that they pay their fines, attend interviews, return overpayments from fraudulent claims, or to reply to correspondence.

The Normans: ruthless and murderous looters though they were, at least got around to building great cathedrals and endowing monasteries and universities. I suspect it'll be a long time before the country feels any lasting benefit from this aristocracy from importing Chinese-made trainers, Burberry caps and plasma-screen televisions. Forever, possibly.

This lad could only think of theft to support himself in the absence of more generous welfare payments, and so I wondered who set the bar in life so low for him?
Who persuaded or taught or showed him that if 'they' didn't support him, he'd have to start shoving burgers or vodka or iPods into his tracksuit pants to make ends meet?
It was someone who met him long before us advisers and the other lackeys.

So - apart from me - cui bono?

Perhaps they and he might get together and come up with better ideas of how he might support himself in the future. They might do it best if they went off on some outdoor pursuits event together, to provide themselves with lots of healthy fresh air, inspiring countryside and the bracing exercise that comes with taking part in extreme sports.






Might I suggest wireless bungee jumping?

Eve of Destruction

Call her Eve.

She phones my office in where I do the bidding of the Department of Hurt and Awful Nuisances and I take the call. She’s ringing to report some minor change in her circumstances that she fears may affect her Social Security benefits. She’s wrong – it doesn’t affect her at all.

She’s on Income Support which means that she’s exempt from even thinking about looking for work and is only interviewed occasionally about her circumstances.

She sounds like a nice woman: friendly; polite; articulate; and our distinctive local accent is smoothed in her voice by intelligence and (I would guess) education. She sounds in fact as switched-on, bright, self-controlled and worthy of trust and as capable of employment as any of scores of women I’ve worked with over the years: teachers, corporate trainers, university and college lecturers, HR managers and entrepreneurs. In short, given my chequered (varied, diverse, disastrous) career, she sounded as if I would be working for her if only the Fates had spun their cloth a thread or too differently.

But she’s exempt from even thinking about looking for work.

I reassure her that she need not worry about her change of circumstances, and she thanks me. In passing, she mentions she’s expecting another baby in the next few weeks. She sounds very happy, and I offer her my congratulations for which she thanks me again and she promises to call us as soon as she can after the baby’s born so we can advise her about any changes in her benefits. We say goodbye, and she’s off the line.

In anticipation of the happy day when that call comes, and in case missed something and need to call her back, I check her background files to see what, if any effect this will have on her income stream.

Here’s the bio.

Born in 1976, she had her first child sixteen years later and then one at seventeen and then another at nineteen. Now all these kids have the same surname (not the same as hers, so let’s call it Anonymous) so she may just about have been married to or cohabiting with Mister Anonymous for a few years and the both of them trying to make their way in life and make a living the old-fashioned way.

Somehow I doubt it. Living together would jeopardize the Income Support unless one or both of them can prove they are ‘disabled’. We’re not talking white stick and Labrador here or a wheelchair. We can be talking ‘depression’ or ‘panic attacks’ with the right care worker and the right doctor working together for the good of us all.

Income Support means an income for a single parent in addition to the following goodies: free dental care, prescriptions, school meals, Housing Benefits, and Council Tax Benefits. The latter two meaning she gets paid 100% of whatever proportion of a private rent that the Rent Service has allowed for her particular family in her particular dwelling (roughly, the more children there are, the more rooms she’ll ‘need’) and all her Council Tax bill. If she rents from her Council Housing Department then she’ll get 100% of her rent as council housing is assumed not to be overpriced, and the same for Housing Association lettings. God only knows how much taxation – local and national – goes to keeping this ‘social housing’ ‘affordable.’

Child Benefit is £20 per week for the first child plus £13.20 for each of the next up until sixteen, or up to twenty if they are in further education or training.

And because she is a single ‘mum’ she doesn’t have to look for work [ i.e., go onto the same amount of income but Income Support is replaced with Job Seeker’s Allowance and you have to sign on fortnightly and show that you’ve been looking at the jobs papers, visiting the library, etc] until her youngest reaches twelve years old. That’s changing to seven years old from October 2010. No rush. It’ll not affect her even when Septimus is born. Let’s assume that goes to plan and calls to delay this ‘cut ‘don’t succeed. Oh, and enterprising single mums can work up to 16 hours without loss of benefits, so there can even be a rewarding extra income on the side, if you can be bothered. But it looks like she may not have been too bothered as it happens because…

Did I mention the three other kids, surnamed, um, Beneficiary, born 2001, 2002, and 2004? No? Three lots of more of all of the above. And guess who’s paying to have them all ‘educated?’ Guess whose children are putting up with, and losing valuable learning time to their disruptive behaviour assuming that Eve isn't always effective as a cross between Maria and Baron Von Trapp

So let’s tot that up, shall we?

As things stand now, Eve has been exempt from the rat race; from listening to any boss at all tell her to bloody well get on with it - but has been housed and provided for and at all times taking into account and adding ever more income for the growing size of her ‘family’ - all her legal cigarette-buying life. And this will go on until 2021.

That’s 1992 to 2121.

A thirty-one year holiday, on your credit card, with no work-seeking requirement at all.

Am I repeating myself about that dull old not-needing-to work thing?

Sorry, but if someone was having a go at you in a thoroughly Spartan way with a Napoleonic Age ramrod and a hedgehog you might feel the need to repeat yourself too.

Today her Child Benefit alone amounts to £99.20 per week, every week. That’s £5158.40 per year. (Call it half a classroom attendant in the provinces.) Plus Income Support, Housing Benefit, Council Tax Benefit, NHS dentistry, lunches for the kids on schooldays and all the prescriptions she’ll need, poor lamb, and Job Seeker’s Allowance at the same rate until 2029 when Septimus’ Child Benefit finally ends and all she’s left with is her wages or her Jobseekers’ Allowance if by some ill turn of Fate she doesn’t find a job that makes benefits unnecessary. And she’ll be pretty much near the top of the Council’s housing list due to the large size of her ‘family.’ So that’s a home for life.

On your tab.

By 2021 she’ll be 54 and expected to fend entirely for herself in a rugged, get-up-and-go frontierswoman Thatcherite sort of way until 2041, by which time, after maybe twenty years of exhausting labour (that’s the waged kind of labour, not the ’Push, push, you’re doing fine I can see the head’ paid-for-from-general-taxation kind) the State will step in to help this particular hard-working family to the State Pension and maybe Pension Credit as well to top up any retirement income shortfalls due to, oh I don’t know, temporary absences from the workforce? and hence gaps in paying her national Insurance payments and occupational pension contributions.

Do not, under any circumstances, get me started on people who say ‘I can’t afford to pay into a pension.’

Just don’t.

As I said, she’s a sweet-sounding girl, and I’m pro-life, and my suggestion is going to have to take both factors into account.

How about we stop paying benefits for further children after her third child? Make her work or seek work part-time after the last child’s reached five – say 9.30 am to 2.30 PM between the two school rushes? And no more child-related tax credits, premiums, allowances or payments after that third child has been taken into account. Ever.

Mrs. Northwester, a hippy-type Lefty, feels much the same about what needs to be done, but she thinks that it is a right-wing myth that women have children just to get welfare benefits.

It makes no difference if a bad thing's happening for right-wing reasons or for not right-wing reasons. It doesn't really matter if you're being hurt by the Dialectic of the Dodo or on the orders of Sir Rupert, King of the Pixies; when a Bad Man's waist-deep in another chap’s alimentary canal it's still going to sting like hell and make the chap want to use the cubicles and sit down to do Number Ones for the rest of his life.

But make her responsible for funding her life choices after that third child – and what politician seeking re-election would dare to stand on anything ‘meaner’ than help up to replacement-plus-one? – and maybe her life choices won’t include Quartus, Quintus, Sextus and Septimus.

Maybe she won’t take the decisions that lead to the lifestyles and drinking at the tax-wells that gave us the sylvan peace of Biff Malcolm‘s rich family life or the almost idealised tranquillity of Karen Matthews’ Walton’s Mountain-style home.

She might even choose Mister Anonymous a little more carefully in the first place. She might choose one she thinks will stay around, and try and make it work. She might insist on getting married, or something. She might just control her fertility.

This is not a right-wing myth, nor is it a rare exception. Without even trying to I encountered a couple more bios for two more ‘mums’ in the next day after this call, as colleagues mentioned them or paperwork crossed my desk.

‘Embla’:

Born 1980, issue 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006 (twins).

‘Pyrhha’

Born 1975, issue 1992, 1993, 1997, 2000, 2006, 2008 and 2008 (more twins).

I meet hundreds of ‘families’ like this per year.

Now if I was, say, a British Prime Minister hoping to do some lasting good for Britain that would temper history’s otherwise unanimous verdict of ‘The biggest Number Twos at Number Ten ever,’ and if I therefore wanted to find some money to help reduce the national debt in order to do so because I had, for example, put the whole economy on the nose of a horse who came in second, I might think of something like the above modest suggestion.

Except that Labour’s political culture will never allow ‘targetting the most vulnerable in society who need the most help.’

That’s why Frank Field is out.

Pity, really.

Home