(They Want to) Live in a House, a Very Big House in the Country...

This will be a quick one as I've already spelled out my thought on this subject before (here and most particularly here). You may have noticed yesterday an article about a particularly large family wanting "a bigger house in the countryside". I found a snippet in the Torygraph, but unsurprisingly the Daily Hate Mail also covered it among others.

Have a read (here) - it's genuinely astounding.

Two things here. First off, council houses or those which one rents and pays for with housing benefit should be sanitary. This is perhaps not true of the house in question. I don't, nor should any sane person, think families should live in squalor. People deserve to be put in safe housing, just not palaces. Thought I'd park that before I get onto the main point. Which is…

WTF!?

I find the idea genuinely incredible that you can just keep squeezing out kids and demand someone else pays for them. Amazing. We are such a sodding soft touch. If you think I'm being mean cast your eyes over these stats:

£12,000 family income from paid work (the boyfriend and perhaps father to some or all children)
£30,000 in benefits and allowances (albeit including disability allowance for an epileptic child which will and should go untouched under new reforms)
9 children, 10th arriving in 6 months

So, that's an income of £42,000. What do they do with it - let's ask mum…

"Money is not tight; we survive well on what we have. As soon as we come back from our summer holiday, we start putting money away for Christmas"

Brilliant. Of course my and your taxes should pay for summer holidays for super-sized families. That's what welfare is for - enough to get by, as long as by 'get by' you mean go on fucking holidays and have a sodding massive collection of toys (see pics with Hate Mail link).

What does mum think about the situation? "I want a bigger house with somewhere for the kids to play; somewhere with a garden. This house isn't big enough for us." Well stop having fucking kids you can't fucking afford you feckless scrounger. I think we'd all like a bigger house but some of us in this country still think you have to earn them. And having a functioning uterus is not 'earning'.

We as a society perpetuate this ridiculous situation. Because there will always be support for people like this there is no disincentive. It's like giving aid to India's poor children because its Government prefers to have a space programme than deal with its widespread poverty. As long as you take care of the essentials, you teach people they don't need to. What is required is tough love. Unfortunately the problem is only getting worse and the world is getting poorer per capita with an increasing population.

A robust welfare and social services system might be deeply unpopular (or the lefty media would portray it as if it was unpopular in the eyes of all - like the generally supported welfare cap) but make total sense. You cap benefits and say crack on. Have as many kids as you like, but we're only paying up to a certain amount. As mum says "it's not about getting more money; if we didn't cope we wouldn't have kids". Or more to the point, I will keep having kids because I will always be able to cope due to the ever increasing handouts correlative to children produced...

The ability to have children is not a blank cheque. You will have to share rooms - most people did as children at some point and don't consider they were in 'poverty'. You'll probably have to cut down on holidays, or shock, horror, not go on holiday. That's your choice. Kids are expensive. If you want more, earn more, like the rest of us. If it gets to the point where you cannot support your children on your capped income, they get taken away from you. The children do not suffer.

Remaining in a house of such negativity and greed will cause them to suffer far more. Odds on most of those children will be jobless for most or all of their lives. They will mimic the life they have seen their parents have and society accept (I appreciate the boyfriend does have a job which is certainly better than the situation in many totally workless houses in similar situations). That is unfortunately the way it goes - check your stats; worklessness breeds worklessness. Patronising them just perpetuates the cycle and reinforces it as a viable way of life. Society has to change. This has to be an unacceptable way of living, as it was viewed not 50 years ago. How did we come to this?

Thank You For Giving (Did You Realise You Were?)

Well it has been a couple of days since I blogged so I shall ease myself back into it with what I consider a pretty simple topic - overseas aid. Britain's overseas aid programme ran at a shade under £8 billion in 2009/10. The Coalition has pledged to keep increasing that to £11.5 billion over the next four years. Now the concept of aid, domestic or international, is a good one - nobody should dispute this. It is, however, true that some pretty large chunks of world international aid does not end up in the right hands. So there is the ongoing issue of implementation of aid programmes, but that's not what I'm going to concentrate on today.

Today, I'm going to talk about where our aid goes, specifically considering the richer recipient countries. The big ones are probably well known, because they've received a bit of attention already on precisely this topic. On 2009/10 figures, Britain gave India some £330 million, China £35 million in international aid. I think this is wrong.

Now there are a couple of obvious canned responses; "but there are still very poor people in those countries" being the most obvious. How do we counter this then? There are some very poor people in the UK too. So why don't we get international aid? In my mind it is because the very concept of aid is not being adhered to when you give money to a country who have a space programme. Likewise, you don't give aid to a country that runs a surplus year on year, especially not when everyone else (including the donor countries) are running deficits.

Those who beat the drum of international aid would do well to realise examples like these go a long way to discrediting the whole system. It is hard to explain to the man on the street in the UK why the NHS is having to make billions of savings yet Britain is giving nearly £60 million in aid to India, the world's eleventh largest economy to pay for health services. Or why we are having to look for savings in education when we are giving China, the world's second largest economy, nearly £10 million to bolster their education spending.

I have no doubt that the poor of China and India can well do with an extra £30 million combined spend on HIV/AIDS treatment, prevention and education, but that is not the point. They are incredibly rich countries who are choosing to use their resources not to help their own poor but to widen the gap between rich and poor. It is as simple as that. The philosophy of giving money to someone who refuses to spend what they have on the right things is without a doubt one of the reasons behind our cripplingly expensive yet utterly ineffective welfare system. The international community should be pressuring these countries to spend their money more wisely - clearly it is not working to simply make up for their basic shortfalls whilst allowing them to grandstand with not just strong economies and nuclear weapons, but the temerity even of an international aid programme of their own.

The problem comes when you remove money and the previous recipient country refuses to fill the gap. This is made all the more difficult when dealing with non-interactive Governments (say, North Korea). So we are left with a moral dilemma. Do you remove the aid and hope for the best, or continue to pour money into rich countries with interesting moral compasses? The answer probably lies somewhere in between, with the onus being on the international community to exert pressure on these countries to wean themselves off aid. This will only begin to happen, though, if we are willing to look at the situation as it is and realise it is wrong. I wonder if anyone is brave enough to stand up and say it in Government though, knowing the predictable backlash that awaits anyone who asks for entrance into a dialogue over anything the liberal left hold dear, no matter how deludedly. The Coalition pledge suggests not in this Parliament - we'll have to see who wins the next election to find out if the Tories don't understand this one, don't care, or are just picking their fights. I hope the latter, but there's probably more chance of India putting a man on the moon. Oh, wait...