A product of the welfare state

Latest post from The Welfare State We're In. It concerns Karen Matthews and some of the 'opinion' she has provoked. I will assume you already know who she is. (My own brief comment appears at the end);

Karen Matthews 'a one-woman advertisement for urgent welfare reform. '

It is astonishing the way that news and opinion work in Britain. Today, suddenly there is a focus on the idea that the welfare state created Karen Matthews, the woman who arranged for the kidnap of her own daughter.

The key to this seems to be that one of her lovers asserted that she had given birth to more babies to increase her welfare benefits.

In my book, I put the argument that the welfare state had undermined the morality of those most affected by it, namely those at the poorer end of society. I suggested it had damaged our culture and caused misery on a massive scale.

It is fascinating to see the arguments I put very carefully and with as much relevant evidence that I could muster put now in a really pugnacious and blunt way.

I don't want to associate myself with all the views expressed in the Sun today but they certainly overlap with mine. I agree that Karen Matthews is a creation of the welfare state. I certainly agree with the Sun that the need for reform is urgent. Sadly, the beneficial effects of reform would take a generation to come through. When views such as these are expressed in the Guardian and by presenters of the Today programme on Radio 4 or on Newsnight, then there will be a chance of reform actually happening.

From the Sun editorial:

If ever there was a story to make you hold your head in disbelief, this is it.

How could a MOTHER have her own little girl drugged, kidnapped, tethered like an animal and stuffed in a drawer under a bed?

Vile Karen Matthews is a product of the sink-estate underclass of chaotic families that loaf away their days on easy welfare benefits.

She is a one-woman advertisement for urgent welfare reform.

Slumped in front of her big TV, chain-smoking 60 a day and stuffing herself with pizza, Matthews didn’t give a damn for her kids.

By 30 she’d had seven children by five fathers and was raking in £360 a week in handouts.

One of her grubby lovers said: “She used us just to get pregnant so she could grab more child benefit.”

From John Gaunt's column:

The tragedy is that — just as there will be another Baby P case — there are plenty more Shannons being dragged up in a life of grime that leads to a life of crime.

To blame are the feral parents who couldn’t spell the word parenthood, let alone know the meaning of it.

Whole estates are infested by this underclass. They are not working class — the clue is in the title — they don’t and won’t work.

They have no pride in their homes or areas. They have no respect for themselves, let alone their neighbours or children. They have a moral code that would make an alley cat blush.

They have a lawyer’s expert knowledge of their rights but, sadly, no idea of their responsibilities to their kids or society in general. This is an underclass that New Labour have allowed to fester with their lax “non-judgmental, all kinds of family are equal” social engineering attitude.

But these people aren’t equal to you and me, and they need to be told so before they are allowed to breed another generation that will only be more irresponsible and useless.

Welfare

We have a sickening situation where those of us who actually work spend more than £170billion of our taxes on social security. That is in addition to the £16billion spent on incapacity benefit.

It’s ironic that Matthews was convicted one day after Labour promised ANOTHER crackdown on welfare dependency.

Scrape beneath the surface of this new “get tough on benefit fraud” policy and you see it is the same old Labour spin. The depressing reality is that, even if the Government were serious, they have left it too late to crack down on the feral, feckless and long-term useless.

In large parts of the country people like Karen Matthews have won, and TV programmes like Shameless aren’t fiction but documentaries of their lives.

The welfare state was set up to be a safety net, not a lifestyle choice, and it is time to return to those principles.

Only those who have paid into the system through NI or tax contributions should be allowed to claim anything out of the pot. If this were applied, it would soon rule out junkies, new arrivals or people like Karen Matthews.

We should also time-limit benefits, as they have done in the US, to force the shirkers back to work.

We need to break the cycle.

These people have chosen a life of benefit dependency because they have been allowed to do so.

Never before, with the world in economic crisis, has there been such a need for urgent reform.

With hard-working people facing the prospect of losing their homes and their savings, I don’t see why the decent majority of Brits should shoulder the responsibility of the bone idle any longer.

Just as the death of Baby P must signal a complete change in social services, so must the conviction of Karen Matthews lead to a change in our Benefits R Us society.

If you have read this through it is pretty tough stuff. It goes without saying that there are deserving instances of welfare receipt. People like me would support them willingly through taxes or charity.

But every year in New Zealand around 5,000 babies are added to existing benefits. Try as I might I can't find any excuse for this or any reason to condone it. The idea that it should be stopped is only now just starting to seep into the collective consciousness. Writing like the above may be quite unpalatable to some but it is absolutely vital these ideas are expressed.