And another thing…

I have to agree with Richard’s earlier post. “Are you sure you haven’t inadvertantly become a Conservative in your advancing years?”

However, I do agree with everything you say, except that Blair sacked Frank Field for coming to the same conclusions you have, (one of Labour’s worst decisions whilst in government, (and that’s saying something)).

I agree.

I help a charity (Dress for Success – http://www.dressforsuccess.org/affiliate.aspx?pageid=1&sisid=37) which aims to get women into the workplace. Anyone who needs a hand – whether because they’ve just come out of long term car, they have been ill in hospital, they have been unemployed for some time or never employed, they have been incarcerated, they are just out of school – can get in touch and get some free interview appropriate clothing, some free make up, and – more important than anything else – some help in building the confidence and gaining the knowledge needed to go into a job interview and come out thinking that you have a shot at getting the job.

We learn from those around us. When a 14 year old girl tells me she is spending the day (at the charity – getting advice) with her 16 year old friend because she’s been excluded from school and she only has a tutor twice a week, that’s sad. But when the same girl says that he mum is advising her to get pregnant as quickly as possible because then she’ll get a council flat (and follow her example) that’s just wrong.

Question is, where in the current social and education system is the space for the social re-education and confidence building required to turn these young girls lives around and give them something other than motherhood (worthy though it is, blah blah blah) to aspire to? And who is going to solve the problem of the parents – many of whom think they are doing right by their kids – when they begin to steer their offspring toward a lifetime of benefits or, at the best, a harder struggle than they might have had had they the benefit of a bit longer to grow up and learn about the world without he responsibilities of parenthood?

The challenge is how to provide hope and encourage aspiration.
Any real solution involves time and effort and is likely to be too costly for the public sphere to deliver.

Careful Tom, there’s also an army of teenage fathers out there. And if there isn’t then i think a different sort of discussion is needed about why grown men are sleeping with teenage girls … Yes, more education is needed and not just on how to protect yourself during sex but also on the importance of relationships.

A brave post Tom. You’ve simply said what a lot of us on the left have felt for some time, but we’ve been too timid to speak out. It’s morality that’s failed these kids, not the schools, not social workers and not government. These children need to know that it’s not normal to shag everything that moves, drink yourself into oblivion or do drugs. Most people don’t do these things. They also don’t get into as much trouble. Parenting classes for all is the next logical step?

I dont think anyone can disagree with your 3 main arguments, but once a girl has given birth, surely the best thing for society is provide it with a safe home, good education and healthcare.

If these mothers are raising a next generation, no matter what age, shouldn’t we do all we can to ensure that the children are going to be assets to society, and to ensure that the mothers aren’t automatically shut out of education or future employment.

We should do more for single and/or teenage mothers, the dolling out of money is in the interests of nobody, but the innovative solutions needed arent going to be cheap either.

Alice Dale at 2.40 pm: “Careful Tom, there’s also an army of teenage fathers out there.”

You’re right, of course, Alice. I don’t mean to absolve teenage dads of any responsibility – quite the opposite. But it’s a fact that it’s the girls who are left to look after the child and whose lives suffer more.

Good post.

You’ve alluded to the biggest problem with this issue – it’s a poor but commonly used proxy for a million other things (class, education etc.)

I’m reminded of an old quote about the right winning the economic arguments of the last 50 years and the left winning the social ones. What with the credit crisis breathing new life into old Karl & co. and your Damascene conversion to the values of the Daily Mail I’m wondering if that quote might turn out to be the wrong way round….

Your argument sucks.

You write, with nauseating repetition, statements like: “Very often they live with parents (or a parent) who have no jobs themselves, who are setting the example of benefit dependency for all their offspring.

and:

“But even they are nevertheless rearing the next generation in an environment where the main adult isn’t working, but claiming.”

Fine. But does it not strike you as extradordinarily circular to then go on and blame indidviduals? You blame the parents for creating benefit-culture environment for their kids, yet fail to recognise that – by your own reasoning – the environment was passed down to them from their parents.

It’s what those of us in liberal-land like to call a vicious cycle. And if you read just a little social history, you’d understand that its roots are political, not personal. The benefit trap and the decimation of the working class was the work of Thatcher.

Now get out of my bloody party.

Is there any room on the road to Damascus these days?

This is brave stuff Tom. I could write a thesis on where I do and do not agree, but nobody wants that, so I will try to be brief.

I have an innate mistrust and rejection of anybody espousing that their notions of right and wrong are somehow the correct ones. The irony of these abstract concepts is there can be no right ‘right’ and no wrong ‘wrong’. To seek to impose them on others is, therefore, to my mind, borderline fascistic, but all too commonplace.

That said, I don’t think many people with the courage to say what they believe and the wherewithal to back it up would disagree with you that such a state of affairs is unacceptable. My point is that you have to be careful as to precisely WHY you think it is unacceptable. I think it because it’s detrimental to society and the economy, i.e. to ME and to everyone else; not because I think I know what is right and wrong for people to be doing irrespective of whether or not it affects me and others. It’s a subtle but crucial difference that makes an argument with, I think, the right intentions, extremely vulnerable.

No doubt this is buried amongst an avalanche of comments of despair and praise in equal measure, but I hope it reasonates with you in some way should you get to read it.

Tom. I think you are right to speak out.

With all the birth control available there is just no need or excuse for it.

Government both this and the next Tory government needs to be very strong on this. I think it is what cameron refers to as tough love ( it was called strict when we had a real world ie before Home Sec Jenkins ).
But labour will fight against it and we will just carry on hoping it will just go away.

We all know what is wrong but just what are governments going to do about it.We are just a soft touch.

Blimey Tom, I’m beginning to think that you’re being paid piece work by the number of comments you publish. Write a ‘controversial’ post and watch them roll in.

Personally I agree with a lot of what you say, but the problem I have is I suspect had your post been written by Iain Dale, the Daily Mail or anyone else on the ‘right’, yours and no doubt other Labour MP’s reaction would have been different.

Are you able to confirm or deny reports that you are positioning yourself to outflank Harriet for the Labour Leadership? Because if you’re not, you bloody well should be.

What a fantastic post, and anyone with the balls to disagree with you i’ll gladly poke in the eye with a twiglet.

In this country we have created a system of dependency. The welfare system was never designed to be that way. No-one asked for it, and no-one wants it. The benefits system was designed to be a safety net to catch you when you fall, and a hand up to get back on your feet. Instead it’s become a legitimate lifestyle choice.

It’s a disgrace and all it does is create a cycle of dependency, as it has. We have teenage mothers being given accomodation and a living, and the children they raise are aspiring to the same. And around and around we go.

The solution for me seems simple. Why is it, that with immigration as it is, with free movement of workers as it is, that we still see children as a basic human right that the state should pay for? Do we need people to have as many children as possible? We did, but certainly not any more.

So it’s therefore time to recognise children for what they are – a lifestyle choice. No-one forces you to have them, you have a choice. Even the pregnant have the choice of a termination or adoption. Now, what happens with other lifestyle choices? We pay for them out bloody selves!

So pick an arbitary calendar date 12 months or more into the future (in order not to catch out anyone currently pregnant) and announce that anyone who wants kids has to be able to pay for them themselves. Essentially, destroy having kids and the associated benefits as a lifestyle choice.

THEN see how many teenage girls become baby making factories. See how many want kids when they will have to fund them themselves. It also has the added bonus of pretty much ensuring that the only people who then have kids are those that really really want them. That have a loving stable home who have actually planned for parenthood, and the associated costs. For one, I hope it will deter people like Baby P’s mother. It will also increase the number of adoptions for childless couples.

I really don’t see a downside. It will encourage the people of these currently cyclical communities into work, because they’ll have no way of living otherwise.

That’s why any such iniative MUST be accompanied by welfare reform. The welfare state MUST be there to help people into work and give them all the support they need, otherwise you just create abject poverty, which is equally unacceptable.

Seriously, children are a gift, not an automatic right, with you being able to do what you want to your poor kids.

As it stands there are wholley unsuitable, uncaring people having children, because there is absolutely no incentive for them not too. Children should be restricted to those with a genuine desire to raise a child and the ability to do so. It’s only fair to the child.

You can’t force people to do anything however, and I’d like to point out that I am definately NOT advocating any restriction on people. I’m advocating shifting responsibility away from the state and back to the individual.

Who are you, and what have you done with the Labour MP?

Fame awaits. You’ve made the green box on politics home.

Let’s hope it doesn’t prove as divisive an issue as your last “famous” post…

Clark:- ‘The irony of these abstract concepts is there can be no right ‘right’ and no wrong ‘wrong’.To seek to impose them on others is, therefore, to my mind, borderline fascistic

There’s nothing ironic about it and you don’t believe what you’ve written. a second’s thought and you’ll agree there are thousands of things that are just plain wrong.

I demand the return of the real Tom Harris immediately, this common sense post bears no relation to what I’m used to reading from a Labour MP.

Imposter I say!

John @3.21

I agree with you and suspect that most people do.
Governments past and present have just not done anything about it.
The problem is that MPs like Tom should have supported the Tories in the past when they tried to do something about it and shouted at their own party years ago. Labour now rely on these type of people to vote for them.Shocking.

Andrew F – perhaps you’d like to suggest a solution to the vicious cycle, rather than just bleat on that it was all Thatchers fault.

Or perhaps it started in America ?

I agree, and you one of the few Labour bloggers worth reading because you’re capable of honest, but:
1) Why should anyone vote for you guys if after 11 years you accept you haven’t started tackling this in earnest, even if you’re not prepared to accept the government is significantly responsible for the problem?
2) Why should anyone vote for your party when it has allowed its members to consistently slur any opposition MP who has brought this up as being against single mothers and pursuing the Daily Mail agenda? In fact isn’t this the reason that winning the argument is still an issue and politicians haven’t been prepared to make your point?

Must agree with a lot of what you say; teenage pregnancy is BAD.
Teenage sex, not so much. As long as all parties are teenagers and there’s no abuse going on, of course. In those situations the courts tend to either ignore it or it goes to the Children’s Panel who often get both parties to “wait” a few months till everyone’s over 16. Trying to stop teenagers having sex is a none-starter. Might as well try to turn back the tides.

On another matter entirely, do I detect the rumble-rumble-rumble of positioning here? Will you shortly be penning an “editorial” in one of the usual rags, declaring your position on various matters?
Are we to see a plethora of other mid-to-high level Labour MP’s and Ministers doing likewise, siding up to one side or the other, abandoning Gordon like the dead duck that he is?
Rumble…..
Rumble……..

Tom,

I am a Labour supporter, social democrat, working class, brought up in very poor single parent family etc.

Can I just say that I totally agree with you?

I admire your honesty and I hope such candid words will echo within the Labour Party. You are right about that the working poor are probably the biggest complainants when it comes to people playing the benefits system, rightly so; hearing left-wing, middle class intellectuals lambast the working poor for being reactionary for dare questioning the status of such cases gets my goat tremendously.

We cannot idly sit by and think there is nothing we can do about it, it is not right-wing, harsh, conservative or indeed not left wing to ask and promote social responsibility. It would be more callous to just sit by and allow such a situation to ferment, we need to be willing to promote the right thing, particularly as this resonates with the working people who we hope will vote labour in future elections.

Reform is needed, because such reform will have to be a major part of the solution regarding child poverty and the like. Social mobility is stifled by benefit dependency, people have poverty of ambition and no sense of what is important.

Perhaps the more interesting way of winning this argument is explaining how your mental processes arrived at such conclusions. The reactionary right have been banging on about this for decades to little avail. But if we can understand how someone on the left finally jumped aboard maybe more of them can be persuaded likewise.
It’s not as if the evidence hasn’t changed.
So, what took you so long?

I don’t really see why this is, in a wide perspective, a major problem.

18-21 is about the best age for a female physical body to have children. Women who wait until 27-32 are in any evolutionary sense “later mothers.”

Of course it’s true our society is out of step with our biology, but the biology remains.

As it is, almost every other country in Europe is facing a coming demographic disaster, with inverted population columns. As you note, many of these women don’t do a bad job as parents, so why not just pay them well?

[PS: My mother was 19 when she got married, in 195something, My grandmother was only 17 in 193something. The current "socially" acceptable age of marriage is absurd from a physical health perspective.]

I just noticed that I wasn’t particularly clear in my post. This paragraph should have contained what i’ve just added in bold.

“So pick an arbitary calendar date 12 months or more into the future (in order not to catch out anyone currently pregnant) and announce that for every child born after that date (as not to catch existing claimants) anyone who wants kids has to be able to pay for them themselves. Essentially, destroy having kids and the associated benefits as a lifestyle choice.”

Just in case it looked like I was advocating suddenly removing benefits from existing claimants, which i’m definately NOT advocating. I’m talking about a “withering on the vine” approach.

Crikey! I am not surprised about this post, but I am speechless. (In an impressed way)

Wow Tom. Well said Sir.

Great bit of no nonsense and tea/chocolate biscuits with Mr Field sounds like an excellent idea.

We’re forever being told of the importance of role models for young men but never of aspirational young mothers – which I was lucky to have.

I’m certain that if I’d be raised by a teenage mum on benefits and surrounded by more of the same, I’d be no different.

Of the girls I went to primary school with they frequently became mums at c16 as it was exactly as you say – a bit of self esteem, a place of their own, something that was just theirs and worst of all – completely OK.

I was fortunate enough to go to a good school where the concepts of a good job, strong qualifications and self-confidence were drummed into us every day.

And if you have become a Tory – so what. Frank’s been one for ages from what I can see!

Bravo, encore.

Tom,
Sometimes your posts are reasonable and well considered, this is one of those times.

Good luck in achieving some improvements.

I don’t know why people are surprised that a Labour MP would condemn the teen single parent/benefits culture. There seems to be a myth that Labour actually like the idea of people living on benefits.

The welfare state, as set up by the post-war govt, was only ever intended to be a safety net. The concept of going straight from school, onto benefits and never having a job was completely alien to them.

Andrew F – in his somewhat hysterical comment – does make the valid point that it was the destruction of industry and mass unemployment of the 80s that created the benefit dependency culture. That’s something that the Tories and their supporters consistently refuse to acknowledge. As far as Thatcher was concerned, mass employment was the solution to breaking the power of the unions. For all her professed veneration of the work ethic, she must bare the blame for the ‘Shameless’ generations.

People who claim to be on the Left often talk a load of rubbish on this issue. There was a comment in Guardian Talk recently from a woman (not herself a single parent) who said she stopped supporting Labour in the late 90s and switched to the LibDems – because she was disgusted by cuts to single parents’ benefits (did this actually happen or was it only suggested?). She said this proved that Labour could be just as nasty as the Tories. Shock horror. Didn’t seem to occur to her that Child Benefit has gone up considerably, not to mention the other improvements in children’s lives (Sure Start, better schools, etc).

Fine stuff, any unwed and unworking Teenage girl who falls pregnant should be asked, quite simply and with the father, if available – how do you propose to support this child? If they cannot answer in an acceptable form she/they should be given the choice: terminate or offer for adoption.
There are many people for whom benefits are the only recourse to struggle through life, the message has to be sent out that it’s over for the workless class, (it’s imaterial that the benefit culture is a Thatcher throwback) quite simply if you don’t contribute to society you don’t get to benefit from it.
Baby farms and eugenics anyone?

You are abolutely right. I think that one way to stop the high rate of teenage pregnancies is to pay no child benefit, no social housing plus payments for it. The child and her child should be the responsibility of her parents and those of the boy who got her pregnant. Make them responsible for their mistakes. This wouldn’t end the problem, but it would take away the inducements the state dangles in front of single mothers.

Well there you go Tom…upset generations of Labour orthodoxy in one fell swoop. Good post. Shame your party won’t back you on this, and even if they did it would just be lip service.

This is Tom Harris at his best.
Pity your timing is a bit adrift as we mire in recession and many more teenagers look for easy benefits.

Well done Tom. The universe is based on exchange, that is why getting something for nothing is wrong, and actually demoralises the recipient as well as the enforced giver, ie the tax-payer.

Yes, there should be a safety-net, but only just. If we stop paying young girls to produce babies (£ 1500 for equipment + income virtually for life + own flat), then the demand for babies will suddenly dry up.

In fact, your ideas, when implemented across the whole of life, really are the end of socialism.

Alan Douglas

I agree. John, keep that twiglet away from me. Put John’s and Ronnie’s arguments together and you go a long way to doing something about this desperate problem. Parents, I mean ‘parents’, who have children they cannot support should expect to have them taken from them, to be given to familes who can support them, since they have disqualified themselves from parenthood by their evident irresponsibility.

Tom,

Some very good points and kudos for nailing your flag to the mast. I am no fanboy of yours either.

As to “Andrew F” for bringing in Thatcher? Pathetic excuses get you nowhere, mate.

The real problem here is a Welfare State that is arranged to encourage and reward this behaviour. The girls are being rational actors in all this. Change the incentives and most will change their behaviour.

I do not believe in retrospective withdrawal of benefits as that will do no good. Better to say that in 12 months time no more extra accommodation for those already on welfare if they have additional kids. Does not affect existing kids and does not affect existing benefits.

Simon wrote: “Andrew F – perhaps you’d like to suggest a solution to the vicious cycle, rather than just bleat on that it was all Thatchers fault.”

This post wasn’t about proposing solutions. You’ll note that Tom has none of his own. This was a post about assigning blame. And Tom, in a stunning betrayal of history and his constituency, has just summarily decided to shift the blame to the working class people trapped in this cycle. And what’s more, he made absolutely no sense.

It’s the parents fault! No, wait, it’s their parents fault! No, wait, it’s the previous generation’s fault!…Well, if you go back far enough, you find a generation of parents that actually had jobs. Then Thatcher came along.

Rock and Roll!

I’ll be back to comment later, God willing.

Labour will never support this train of thought – taking away the baby makers and the next generation of suckers on the welfare teat will rob them of their future voters.

On one side: Fair enough.

On the other: Bollocks.

This is my considered opinion.

Well said Tom. Hear Hear!

There is something far wrong with any welfare system that is seen as a career choice and not a safety net.

Why are we constantly told that the reason for all these problems is poverty? Is that not an insult to those people who are poor but trying hard to work, pay taxes and raise their families as decent people?

I’m glad that Frank Fields isn’t the only voice of reason in the Labour party. I hope you won’t now be discredited by your far left colleagues.

You’ll be on the Righteous’ watch list now…….watch your back.

Is this an up Balls Tom? or are you making a bid for Beverley Hughes job?

I’m not particularly alarmed by anything you write. Much of it amounts to too little to be able to disagree with it.

What alarms me is that you previously felt unable to articulate this view or that you think it might be challenging for the left. I thought we’d got rid of all that woolly thinking years ago?

Very, very, very well said sir. You don’t fancy a short walk do you?

Yes, teenage pregnancy is often not great. That we can probably all agree on.

Just please don’t start going down the usual Daily Mail route of saying that the way to deal with this is to put the mother and father in prison, or give them a criminal record or whatever. Whatever the negative effects of a child at that stage may sometimes be, the use of the criminal law in such circumstances will always have much worse consequences.

And its worth remembering that things don’t always work out bad. One of my closest friends was born when his mother was 16 and his father 15. He now has a first class degree and is doing a PhD. His parents are still together, married for over 20 years, and very happy. Which is more than can be said for many people who married and had kids in their 30s. His grandfather might not have been so proud of his daughter then, but he is certainly proud now. Sometimes people do just pull together and things work out okay.

Certainly nobody wishes he’d never been born.

Perhaps you should start by questioning your own assumption that having a child in your teens means that a decent education, followed by a decent job, becomes remote at best.

Why should having a baby make a decent education and a decent job out of reach? I suggest this is the issue that politicians should be looking at.

Tom, you do surprise me at times and this is one of them.

I’m wholehearted with John on this issue, there has to be a serious change rather than just a little tweak here and there.

Stop the benefits for girls who are unable to support a child. That would half the rate of teenage pregnancies right away. Our accepted culture of young people making a career from the benefit system has become ingrained.

When I was young unmarried mothers were frowned upon by society and treated miserably. They were few and far between in those days and most pregnancies were real mistakes. Of course we don’t want to return to such Victorian attitudes but we do need a happy medium. We can throw as much money as we like into sex education but that hasn’t helped one iota has it.

It will be most interesting to hear what Frank Field and yourself produce. You will let us know, won’t you?

Bottom Line

If you pay people to sit on their arses all day, they’ll travel half way round the world to grab the opportunity with both hands.

Mr Harris,

You can see how wrong you are by the comments supporting you.

Tom, well said.Nail hit on head. Almost worth moving to your constituency to vote for you.

Andrew F – Blaming Thatcher and “history” and attempting to clothe “the working class” in a victim jacket does nothing to address the central arguments. It’s just foot stamping. Is asserting that people have some personal responsibility for their actions, a bad idea? Is it wrong to assert that a society can judge behaviour right or wrong? Is morality even a valid concept or do we exist on some continuum of shades of grey where nothing is ever wrong, just not properly understood in the context of social history?

If you are citing the working class and history, do you really think that state supported single motherhood for young people even begins to fit in with traditional working class concepts of right and wrong, self reliance or standing within the community?

Outrageously sexist reactionary ranting. I expect this entry will end up with “wind-ups” in the tags, like the liberty one did (in fact, I see you’ve already put a self-congratulatory tweet up about how incendiary you are.)

Not a mention of the boys or men involved, plenty of unsupported assumptions about the motivations and the future prospects of teen mothers, and even more assumptions in your anecdote about the girls outside Tower Records. Basically, you saw two nicely dressed teenagers with a baby on a Saturday night. You don’t know where they’d been, where they were going, whether they had any plans to drink, or even if the baby was theirs, and yet you feel justified in alleging that they were off out to get drunk with their baby in tow.

Oh, and Tower shut down seven or eight years ago, anyway.

–a South Side constituent.

At last a labour MP is talking sense now you got to convince the rest.
The socialist government need to stop throwing these people a bone. If they know they will have to fork out their own money to look after these kids then they would be a bit more careful; but they are safe in the knowledge that they can pop these poor kids out till their hearts content and spunge off people like myself; a hard working tax payer. No, more money for lay-abouts BROWN, stop mugging tax payers off.

Caz Black: “Tower shut down seven or eight years ago, anyway.”

Your point being? The incident occurred long before I was an MP, so long before 2001.

I fear you may soon be out in the cold… ouside the tent p***ing in… etc etc with this post.

This is why you’re my favourite left(ish) blogger – such surprises when I log on!

Brave post. Now, what are you going to do about it?

1) What took you so long to say it?
2) The neutering and general removal of morality from political debate has been a disaster – yes Thatch played a part but The Reverend T.Blair kicked morality well into the long grass. Bizarre behaviour from his Holiness but there you are.
3) Morality has historically been strongest in working class communities. Problem is this not a working class problem. It’s an idle class problem. Remove the incentives, reintroduce morality, offer a vision of the alternative and Robert est ton oncle.
4) Go speak to Frank. He’s been saying this for years. The go speak to IDS, there’s more good in that man than in the rest of Parliament put together.

Sometimes people just want to help…

Your lot were elected in 1997. It’s now 2009. Are you seriously telling me you’ve only just noticed that there’s an issue with teenage pregnancy?

As for the rest of it, I’m not sure your position could be any more offensive or simplistic. Grow up and come back when you’ve got something other than the old faithful of demonise and castigate the mother to offer. While you’re away, go and ask some of your policy wonks what effect your policy would have on Labour’s child poverty targets.

About ruddy time a Labour MP wrote something like this, Why is it the Conservatives are the party of the “family” from what I remember Labour was the party of the family standing up for the working class hard working family unit, Children grow up better in a family unit with a father, mother and grandparents, this way of life has worked for generations, the current trend towards the break up of the family unit has resulted in a broken society. Everyone can see this apart from the the “progressives” who have shaped nuLabour family doctrine since coming to power. Well done Tom, now prepare for the backlash from those those in the Party that oppose this view.

It seems that you will only secure your time in the wilderness with statements like this.

Wasn’t it those nasty Tories… Peter Lilly (1992) and John Redwood (1993) who berated single mothers?

These girls are living a life of Riley on benefits, alone at home with small children, vulnerable to any male caller who is aware of her situation. I thought of them when reading about why you think your wife needs added protection not given against the IRA. Did you?

Gosh this post is so sensible I was tempted to comment on it with my real name! _nearly_

Your main point is valid and you would have to be pretty daft to disagree, however a couple of points if I may;

“Teenage girls shouldn’t be having underage sex. Why? Because it’s wrong.”

Why? I presume by wrong you mean morally wrong? It’s obviously illegal but is it immoral? Plenty of other countries allow people to have sex at a younger age than the 16 years we have arbitrarily chosen. Do you consider the Dutch or Spanish people immoral?

Also, even if you consider it is wrong, being purely pragmatic for a moment you should realise that it’s never going to stop. Girls were getting pregnant while at school 20 years ago, and I imagine long before that. You need to address the getting pregnant, not the shagging.

“But I can no longer pretend that the army of teenage mothers living off the state is anything other than a national catastrophe.”

I have to ask, for how long have you been pretending so while realising the opposite?

“Parents shouldn’t teach their children that a lifetime on benefits is attractive or even acceptable. Why? Because it’s wrong.”

I don’t think the vast majority of them actively teach their children this, it’s just that the children SEE it from their circumstances. As another commenter has already mentioned this is a vicious circle.

It’s not primarily the parent’s fault, it is the governments for giving them the incentive to become parents…

James C said “I dont think anyone can disagree with your 3 main arguments, but once a girl has given birth, surely the best thing for society is provide it with a safe home, good education and healthcare.”

Hmm. Yes a safe home, education and healthcare is fine, the same _everybody_ should get.

However I would argue that they maybe get too much now? It’s obvious from plenty of stories in the press that a single mother with a few kids can earn enough on benefit to have a nice house with big plasma tv, playstation, sky tv etc, plenty of skunk to smoke, fags, beer, or E’s.

Heck they seem to have more spare cash than I do, and I work full time and earn a half decent wage.

Sorry that’s not right.

They should be provided with enough to live on but most definitely not enough to discourage them from going to work.

As things stand most people on benefits would suffer such a high marginal tax rate if they return to work that they could be considered clinically insane if they took that option.

Do the sums. If you currently get income support, child benefit, housing benefit, council tax rebate (or whatever it’s called), and you consider going back to work, the wage would have to add up to significantly more than the total of all the above benefits to make it worthwhile.

Or to put it more simply, if you earn £200 per week on benefit but would lose all that if you go back to work, then you are offered a full time job for £300 per week (from which you would have to subtract around 25% for tax and NI), then in effect you would earn £25 for a weeks work. As I said before most would consider you insane if you worked full time for £25 per week.

Hence most single parents would have to be offered a job as chief exec at RBS to make it worthwhile to give up their benefit.

Well said.

I’ve some experience of these matters with a local school and some local estates. Those who do not accept that there is a complete and thriving underclass are remarkably well insulated from the grim realities of many of our towns and cities.

But this goes back over many generations and despite the sloganising the New Labour Decade has signally failed to tackle the core issues. It’s about attitudes and aspirations. These children have very limited horizons. It is the parents who need education and motivation.

Saying ‘there’s a problem with teenagers becoming mothers’ but not suggesting any sort of solution is pretty pointless, Mr Harris. Of course there’s a problem with teenagers becoming mothers. I don’t agree that lots of them do so in order to get benefits, but I’m sure it factors into the equation for some of them.

But even given that: what are you going to do about it?

Take away the benefits, as has been suggested by numerous posters above? Do you think that will pretty much solve teenage pregnancy in one fell swoop?

Considering that
- The USA has a higher proportion of teenage mothers, despite providing less benefits
- The fact that so many of these teenage mothers are single would also seem to indicate they’ve not often sat down and planned to start a family
- Teenage pregnancies have been generally falling over the last few years, and then dramatically rose last year; that doesn’t seem to correlate with levels of benefits available
… it doesn’t seem likely that benefits are a major cause of teenage pregnancy. It’s certainly outweighed by social factors. Growing up in poverty may well be one of these; in fact, this pattern seems to fit fairly well with the last recession, as the last year’s worth of teenage mothers, assuming an average age of about 15/16, would have been born around the time of the last recession. (Disclaimer: this is a total back-of-the-envelope sort of idea. I’ve not looked at detailed figures or anything like that.)

If, on the other hand, you think drastically cutting or removing benefits would make some difference to the levels of teenage pregnancy but not solve it entirely – which I can believe – then by cutting benefits to the many remaining mothers, you’d be condemning these mothers’ *children*, who are already at a disadvantage, to lives of poverty; and thus REINFORCING the vicious circle, not breaking it.

That is what really needs to be remembered here: the benefits are for the sake of the children, not the mother. Unless you are prepared to take the draconian step of forced abortions or adoptions of any child born into poverty, you need to support the family – regardless of whether you think the mother’s behaviour was immoral. The sins of the parents should not be visited upon the children.

Andrew F
What are you on about? Why is everything Thatcher’s fault? I come from a working class background.
My mother brought 3 boys up by her self, she earned £14.00 a week cleaning a bank, the only other money she got was child benefit which didn’t amount to very much money.
Now my mothers 3 boys grew up and began working, they all now own there own houses (get to the point I hear you say). The point is, we grew up in the seventies, we left school between 1978 and 1981, (Thatcher’s time) we have done alright for ourselves, and Maggie’s policies have done us no damage whatsoever. So would you be so kind as to inform me why Thatcher’s policies from the early 80s are causing so much grief now, almost 25 years after she walked out the door of number 10.
And can you also tell me why you don’t agree with Tom Harris, as he seems to be making a lot of sense to me, and that’s saying something when you consider the low calibre of politicians in government.
P.S.
I would actually vote for Tom if he was to keep talking sense.

@Tom Harris Just that saying it happened “a few years back” gives a bit of a false impression, maybe.

I can’t be agreeing with Tom again? What the hell are they putting in the tea rooms tea these days?
Better stay away for a few days Tom while they have the water checked.

In the meantime let me recommend ‘Time Capsules’ from Boots. A slow release pill that airbrushes inconveniences like Iraq,Dot com bubble, Royal Mail remaining public, Cash for Peerages, Metronet etc completely from the memory.
Soon have you back to your old self.

Don’t take too many though or you end up like Andrew F, who hasn’t noticed that Thatcher has been out of Power now, for longer than she was actually in power.

Hi Tom
I agree with everything you say– but the elephant in the room is how do you tackle it?

Are you really going to remove these incentives– and reduce the incomes of single parent families? Or are you going to have the DSS judging who are deserving and undeserving widows. When you come back with your hard choices then we can talk.

About 15 or so years ago, i would have steadfastly dissagreed with you. Now, i am completely in agreement with you. Funny what living in a deprived area does to you. And funny how your perceptions can turn upside down living under the most irresponsable single mother imaginable. And I thought it was just me turning into Peter Lilley as well.

As for what to do’s and what not to do’s. How about looking at the culture which has propogated this problem. Stop benefits unless the parent’s are in work or are in education or are seeking help with furthering their own education would be a start. The benefits system sadly is at severe risk of abuse, this need’s to be rectified.

Of course this is only part of the problem, Scotland has the worst sex education in the world. I remember how awful and cringworthy Section 6 was in Stanley Green, with explicit pictures of flowers?!?, and I bet this was replicated across the land. How we teach sex education needs to be looked at, without the ignorance peddled by certain self interest groups (not mentioning catholic education… damn!).

Lastly, parents need to take more responsibility, this is something which isx applicable here as well as in the debate on teenage alcoholism. Not sure how to do this, prehaps one for the focus groups… maybe not.

LJB – one example – right to buy. It is the chronic shortage of affordable housing to rent which resulted from that policy which gives us the oft-quoted scenario (which Tom refers to) of young women getting pregnant in order to get priority points.

If we had not sold off most of our council housing at knock-down prices in order to artificially create a propety-owning, share-owning democracy more people might have a chance of getting a home of their own they could afford to pay for out of their salary.

Agree with you Tom.

But you are in a Party where the reaction is largely going to be “It’s OUR benefit and MY right”…

Nothing like a Government running out of money to see sense… No that they will…

Try persuading Harriet Harman and you will have achieved something…

My initial impulse after reading this post was to congratulate you on your common sense. Upon considering this for a further nanosecond I have decided not to.
You are just saying what most of us have known forever. You are part of the problem, your labour party has brought Britain to its knees and is the very reason the brightest and best leave for foreign shores.

Whatever you do about this Tom, please, no more finger wagging nanny legislation.

If your lot hadn’t perpetrated the double whammy of disestablishing the establishment when you were all young Marxist rebels and then ramming down our throats the Political Correctness which has stifled or distorted public debate once you had grown up and subverted the government we might not be in such a mess. The idea is that you change things to make them better. The 80/20 rule with Labour means destroying the 80% that worked perfectly well in the interests of ideology and introducing 20% of a change agenda of badly conceived, unworkable, doomed to fail nonsense – also on the basis of ideology. The leftobabble might work in the students union, the comprehensive staff room or the local council tea room but it’s been disastrous for government. You are now all so mixed up you don’t know whether to be socialist, national socialist or conservative. Time for a rest methinks.

So, back to what you can do. I know! Call a General Election.

Interesting stuff from a Labour MP.

The problem is – you can’t deal with the solution.

Remove benefits from anyone who hasn’t worked for them across the board. Youth, immigrants, work dodgers – everyone is equal! – however everyone is able to have emergency first aid for free.

That will mean that to get the council house, the teenage mother is going to have to work for a living prior to getting pregnant – for perhaps 4 years or so!

Harsh? I don’t think so. It is called incentives. If there isn’t an incentive to have a baby, the kids won’t be having a baby.

Ever wondered why rich girls don’t give birth at 16? They have abortions. There is no incentive for them to have a baby, and they make sure they don’t.

Sure, there will be those who complain that it isn’t a good thing – but then, neither is the life that most of these kids end up in – although there are obviously exceptions.

So, what do you think?

Andrew F is right about Thatch starting gthe dependency culture, but its the “Lazy Poor” who are still intent in getting all they can, and more from the benefits system. How do you propose getting the Lazy poor back to work? Being lazy, as far as im aware, is not Socialism.

^^^
me too.

Thank you for a sensible realistic view of a section of modern society. Well done for actually engaging with reality, for recognising the flaws in modern society, and for actually voicing them publicly, instead of pandering to the ideological agenda that many of your colleagues have become slaves to, and which does not reflect reality whatsoever.

Please send a large dose of your common sense to Labour HQ post haste..

Tom, from ConservativeHome today. (Sorry, the link won’t come up.)

Jonathan Isaby on CentreRight: “I can no longer pretend that the army of teenage mothers living off the state is anything other than a national catastrophe”

Some of the comments are suggesting you are turning into a Tory!

Totally agree with all you said, by the way. And I agree with a previous comment that distinguished between “working” and “idle” class.

My working class grandparents had huge aspirations for their children, hoping to keep them from working down the pit. Sacrifices were made. Same when I was teaching. Many parents, even if they themselves had had little education, wanted the world for their youngsters, and made sure they were hard working, well turned out and well behaved. They supported the school in every way they could, even though it was frequently a daunting place for them. Early pregnancy didn’t necessarily bring shame, but it brought huge disappointment.

But there were other youngsters, who could often be identified at quite a young age, who seemed almost destined to be young parents. Their own parents did not value education, offered few experiences or stimulation, saw school as the enemy. The children had no concept of the big world, of opportunity, they had no aspirations and looked forward only to a dead-end job. They were also frequently victims of low level abuse; poor nutrition, too little sleep, inappropriate TV, general neglect. So, they wanted love. First the boy and the sex, then the babe. You could see it coming. Some of the youngsters were not terribly bright, others were capable of anything.

But, I don’t know what you do about it! That’s where the real debate lies. It has to include education, but not just sex and relationship lessons. It has to start with self esteem at a young age, with finding success for all children with a more varied curriculum that helps the less academic, with helping bright youngsters from less advantaged backgrounds to an awareness of the possibilities, with parenting classes, with further education for single parents at a later time in their lives. It needs a huge, cross discipline, non party- political debate.

Sign me up!

This post raises a valid problem and it is true that the people who are rightly most concerned about entrenched unemployment are working class people with jobs who live in the same communities as the unemployed.

It’s nothing new for socialists to expect people to work – “from each as to his ability, to each as according to his need” after all. It’s also true that whilst in most areas in the UK teenage pregnancies have gone down under Labour, there remain a small number of areas of concentrated unemployment where this may not be the case. I suspect Glasgow might be one of those (or parts of Glasgow, at any rate).

There is an interesting post to be written on whether these areas need different approaches to the rest of the UK on welfare and jobs, perhaps even different systems.

It’s just a shame that instead of writing that post Tom has written this in a tone that appeals to the lowest common denominator and echoes anti-working class prejudice (“army of single mothers” “underclass”, etc).

Just a simple observation. I’m only a silly billy afterall.

71 comments and counting. Tom has hit a nerve and most of the comments appear to agree with him.

Assuming that we aren’t all Guido ‘window-licking racists’ then perhaps we have finally found a Labour man (ooh Harperson will be vexed) that will speak our weight for once.

Goodness me the Labour Party is not dead after all.

Well, that’s a shock, two in a week. First Brooker in The Graun and now this.

Just to show that not all Libertarians are from the tin-foil hat brigade (I’d maintain very few are), given that I disagree with soooooo much that is written on here, it is very nice to read something that it is almost impossible to pick issue with.

I’ll try anyway. . .

‘Parents shouldn’t teach their children that a lifetime on benefits is attractive or even acceptable. Why? Because it’s wrong.’

Not quite, it is the system that tells these people that a life on benefits is acceptable, it may be perpetuated by the parents, but the indoctrination comes from with the Benefits Agency, Social Services and central Government.

That aside, interesting to see you’ve labelled this ‘political suicide’. I really will have to disagree there, this is nothing of the sort. It may be suicide in the Labour party to speak your mind, but it has made you shoot up in my estimation. Feels good, being a bit naughty, doesn’t it? Try it more often Tom, it suits you and you’ll find that the little people think much more highly of you, sod them in the party office.

Stick to Frank Field like glue, he’s one of the few Labour MPs people outside the village really have proper respect for. In a circus of villains, he’s the stand out good guy.

Bloody well said.

Oli no it doesn’t. Even in Dickensian days girls got up the duff. In those days they got sent to the workhouse. In later times it was the Magdalene houses. If people want to bring back workhouses then say you want to bring back workhouses. But don’t pretend you will ever stop teenaged girls either having sex or giving birth.

Indy

I live in a labour controlled area, my brothers and myself decided to buy my mothers council house so she wouldnt have to pay rent, we contacted the council in 1999 they told us we could buy the flat for £14000, thats good we thought, so we saved the money and 2 years later we went back to the council and said “how much” and they wrote a letter to us asking for £175000. So even the councils regardless of which party they came from were looking to get every last penny they could. Also where I come from we have plenty empty council flats.

The more I read Tom Harris’s comment the more I think he will be looking for a new job, Browns not going to be happy with him.

@tim f

‘There is an interesting post to be written on whether these areas need different approaches to the rest of the UK on welfare and jobs, perhaps even different systems’

Do it then.

‘…appeals to the lowest common denominator and echoes anti-working class prejudice’

Is it just me or is there a paradox somewhere in your egalitarianism?

Mr. Harris, I think you are missing the plot here.

Welfare dependency creates client voters to help keep your party in power!

It is very simple indeed, surely you can grasp that this new mother is exactly conforming to your Government’s policy and is helping to make the next generation of client voters.

I can tell you that biggest asset of a failing Government is an ignorant, sick, dependent population. Well done New Labour in following my lead!

Nothing proper will change until people acknowledge the existence of TEENAGE FATHERS.

Honestly. No, a comment as afterthought doesn’t make up for it.

Tom: quite right. There needs to be a real cross-party effort on this.

Tom,

good post – probably the fist one of yours I have ever agreed with! I disagree with your view of causes, however. It’s the system: environment drives behaviour. Read some W.E.Deming on the issue of incentives.

For me the key is actually benefit withdrawal rates, for they make the benefit system a trap. Have a look at http://www.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd1/TBMT_2008.pdf to see how deep the benefit trap runs.

David Jones,

You miss my point. Of course if I thought about things for a moment I would settle upon what is right and what is wrong, but they would be MY right and wrong, not THE right and wrong. I would not then go about instigating legislation and laws constructed around my moral perspective.

I think the most shocking indictment of this post, Tom, is that Stewart Cowan really liked it.

A fine post Sir, may I purloin some of it please?

Right and wrong and morality seem to be flavour of the month in the Labour Party.

Your apology for the last 12 years is NOT accepted Tom.

Absolutely spot on Tom. I would have a damned sight more respect for labour MPs if they could all be so honest.

Clement Atlee would be proud.

Often the biggest problem with the left is that (like Gordon) they can never admit when they make a mistake.

If you actually look at the Beveridge report that set up the Welfare state in this country Sir William Beveridge talks about using it to tackle the problme of “idleness” there is also mention of the “undeserving poor”. Atlee and Beveridge far better represent the real WORKING class people of Britain than the NU Labour failures. You would never get Nu labour talking so plainly and so full of common sense.

Atlee and Beveridge would turn in their graves if they could see what the welfare state has become.

A recurring theme in the comments concerns what possible action can be taken to redress the problems.

What we first have to recognise is that there is a raging war between two worldviews – the Christian one and the Secular/Humanist one. Even if people don’t identify themselves with either, the battle lines were drawn decades ago for reasons beyond the scope of a brief comment.

I have detailed before how the government has been DELIBERATELY re-engineering families to be weak. Sex ‘education’ has been one means. When your ‘advisors’ are individuals with a vested interest in making people dysfunctional in order to boost their own ’sexual health’ and ‘abortion’ services, then their ‘advice’ is pretty predictable.

The truly shocking and unacceptable thing is that the government has been swayed so much by registered ‘charities’ like the FPA and Brook.

Tom, you wrote, “There is right and wrong and it is wrong for anyone to choose to have a child without knowing what’s involved in its upbringing, without being prepared to sacrifice your own lifestyle for it.”

Exactly right, but Labour has been ramming sex down children’s throats for many years. They call it ‘education’ and ‘health’ but it has obviously had the opposite effect, i.e. ignorance and disease.

The ‘education’ has been SO tragic that, as I have said before, some youngsters think their dilemma is whether to wear a condom rather than whether to have sex.

And another thing, Tom – at least the father of that 16 year old can be proud that his daughter carried on with the pregnancy and didn’t give in to ‘health’ workers et al who would no doubt have encouraged her to kill her child before it was born.

Teenagers ‘learn’ at school that it’s okay to have an abortion. Is it any wonder if they think life is cheap in this society?

I could go on ad infinitum on the subject, as you are aware. Suffice it to say for now that I am very glad you wrote this piece and hope you can help return Labour to the principles of its founders.

Just another reminder of what Labour used to mean:

“Keir Hardie was energised by an evangelical faith and values that stirred his passion for political life. Throughout, he saw his faith and politics as one: ‘the impetus which drove me first of all into the Labour movement and the inspiration which carried me on in it, has been derived more from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth than all other sources combined’ he once said.”

The great man who did so much for Labour would be labelled a Bible-bashing, right-wing hatemonger by the impostors who invented New “Labour”.

I agree broadly with what you’ve said, but this passage is also interesting from Bagehot:

“So here’s an inconvenient fact for the moral declinists: teenage pregnancy and births to teenage mothers were very much more common fifty years ago, before the invention of the pill and the legalisation of abortion, than they are today. Teenagers are rutting no more now than they ever have. What has changed is that teen pregnancies used frequently to result in shotgun marriages, and so the eventual infants were less of a burden on the state than those born to unwed mothers are today. In other words, the deterioration is fiscal rather than moral.

I have to congratulate you for this .As I am certain many others have pointed out it rings a bit hollow from soemone who is a memeber of a Party who have connived at increasing the problem and pretending it does not exist for most of adult life.

One cheer

Has April Fool’s Day come early this year?

Too many Labour MPs and ministers say what they are told, say what they know will get headlines, or never answer a straight question.

You have acted so much like the opposite to the notion of a “typical” MP that I must congratulate you.

The party has very, very few MPs willing to speak their mind (and indeed shine lights upon the truth).

This post deserves serious attention. And you, sir, require much congratulation for writing it.

My goddaughter is a teenage single mother, with a toddler child. She has a job in a major national chainstore. However social services has just advised her to give up work, because she will be £80 a month better off on benefits. Note the ACTIVE advice to give up work, not just giving the information!
She WANTS to work, but can’t really afford to as the store won’t give her more hours. Which brings me to another absurdity. If she could work 4 more hours, not only would she have the extra wages but she would qualify for another £100 of benefit under some rule or other. Why not give that to her now on the basis of her need?
What sort of gobsmackingly complex stupid edifice have you lot built with the endless tinkering and social engineering? Don’t get me wrong – I’m not for devil takes the hindmost. However in this case not only is there the classic socialist mistake of insulating individuals from any negative consequences of their own decisions, but there is positive reward for poor decisions. No wonder the economy is shot – combining all this with the disastrous macro-economic management.

In response to your latest twitters, remember the old addage, “fortune favours the bold”.

You have put your head above the parapet, and expressed a view that NO party has dared, but every voter wanted them to. Just look at the metaphorical standing ovation you’ve received from every corner from the political spectrum.

See, this is what i’ve been talking about, and this is what I was referring to about Question Time all those weeks ago. Tackling the issue head on, with a common sense view that the public can both agree with and get behind.

Far from being worried, you have every reason to be very proud of yourself. I’m certianly proud of you!

You are an example to follow, and I really really hope that you are thrust to the front lines of the Labour Party once again. The country needs people like you.

Head high Mr Harris! Very well done!

Are you trying your best to alienate a tranche of your core vote?

Good on you.

I’m sure you’ll lose your job for saying all that, but I have never agreed more strongly with a politician in my life.
I grew up in an impoverished South Wales town, when ever I go back to visit my family I just can’t believe the baby to job ratio among the people I was in school with.
Why do people keep having children when they have no chance of giving them anything except love and benefits?
It’s because that’s what people do when they have no hope.

I also agree with you; and yes, as many, many others, I’m horrified by the present state of affairs. There are many, however, who fight desperately to preserve the present state of affairs. Who are they and what is their hidden agenda?

What a welcome dose of common sense.

As someone from and of the working class (mining on one side, boilermaking on the other), but more importantly as a Wesleyan by both upbringing and conviction, the distinction between the working class and the idle poor is vital to make.

Could you and other like-minded Labour people do us all a favour and renounce the New Labour whip? It’s time for morality to return to politics, and the formation of a new party based on good working class Methodist values would attract support from all good Britons.

Thanks Tom, you’ve just doubled the number of Labour MPs I regard as worthy of respect.

Clark

I didn’t miss your point. I think your point is empty. Do you really think that the wrongness of, say, female genital mutilation or slavery, is only a matter of cultural relativism and the consequence of that is that we shouldn’t intervene to stop it?

You’re wrong to say that good and bad are just mere dispositions, fancies or tastes.

If our moral conceptions are partly inherent perhaps because of our evolutionary history, and/or have accreted over a long time of social history, they nevertheless exist in much the same way as the motor car exists. No universal law declares motor cars must exist, they are presumably contingent, but they are nevertheless real and denying their existence is utterly mad.

Andrew F, Harold Wilson was Prime Minister when I became a 15 year old single mother during the ‘Swinging 60s’. Alec Douglas Hume had preceded Wilson as PM, Eden and Supermac had preceded Hume. In the light of your illogical world view, which PM would you say was to blame for my pregnancy?

Good post. However I do have one comment to make. this is “Back to Basics”. This is what that was all about, and it was the media, largely the Daily Mail, that gave the impression that it wasn’t.

Tom, Both my parents worked, they each started their own small businesses, a junk shop and a commercial art studio, we had a reasonable standard of living, though we were by no means well off. My grandma brought me up while my mother worked. Bang goes the poverty thesis of teenage pregnancy?

My family were migrants to a traditional part of the East End of London where my lovely grandma was the centre of a sprawling, traditional working class extended family of uncles, aunts, cousins, friends and neighbours. We were in and out of each others’ ever open doors, socialising with and supporting each other daily. The East End was a dump riddled with gambling, tally men, alcoholism and poverty, yet it gave me a wonderful childhood – until we moved away.

My father loaned money to a relation which wasn’t repaid. We got into debt, lost our home and businesses and eventually ended up migrating away from our family to a lonely, over-controlled socialist experiment of a new town – our only means of getting rehoused. The worst decision my parents ever made. It took 30, 40, 50 years to begin to establish some sense of community in my town. My mother, like so many other women in the early days of new towns, suffered depression and had little energy for mothering, even when I had health problems and began going deaf. My grandma was just too far away to help.

One of my earliest memories of my town is of lines of women who missed their mums, queuing at telephone boxes to ring home – to mums who were also queuing at the one telephone in their neighbourhood.

In common with most pregnant teenage girls these days, I didn’t get pregnant because I wanted a house, or independence, or benefits. At 14, desperate for affection and with no interest in sex whatsoever (I didn’t even like it then) I fell in love with the first real boyfriend I had. I got pregnant for an illusion of love.

My mother told me that my pregnancy had ruined my life. She was wrong. I kept my baby and, there being no benefits or houses for single mums in those days, we lived with my parents until I was 16 and old enough to have the shotgun marriage my mother dictated. Later, I studied for a degree, had a challenging career and now run my own business…in partnership with that ‘baby’.

Chav mothers can, and do, make good, Tom, but not if the State takes over responsiblity for their lives and denies them the opportunity to do it for themselves.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1159425/Former-minister-slams-national-catastrophe-teenage-mothers-addicted-benefits.html

Well, you’ve prompted a first. The Daily Mail writing a positive article about a Labour MP. I never thought i’d see that in a million years.

No doubt there will be more coverage tomorrow. I’d be surprised if any media outlet has the balls to be anything other than positive. If they didn’t they’d be flying in the face of public opinion, and they’re not that brave.

One of the many sad and pathetic things about Tom Harris MP slagging off teenage parents on his blog is that he obviously believes he is being brave by making these arguments.

Harris is a Member of Parliament earning more than 60 grand a year, his argument repeats comments which Tony Blair made a decade ago and in content and tone it regurgitates the prejudices found in most national newspapers on a daily basis. So you can see why, with allies so few in number and powerless in influence, he congratulates himself for having the courage to take on the powerful lobby group that is 16 year old girls who have children.

Having devoted a previous blog post to hurling insults at a woman with learning disabilities whose two year old son had recently been murdered, he turned his attention to teenage parents. His argument, such as it is, is that there is ‘an army of teenage mothers living off the state’, that this is a ‘national catastrophe’ and that it is ‘morally wrong’ for teenage girls to have children. It’s not that he’s got any ideas about policy changes that he’d like to see, although he is going to have a coffee with Frank Field, which I guess is nice. Instead he argues that the priority is to get away from the idea that right and wrong are meaningless and make it clear that teenage girls having children is immoral. It’s an article with, by my count, two anecdotes and no facts.

He finishes by writing that, “it’s time to stop worrying about how people’s feelings might be hurt if we question the choices they’ve made. Because very often, those choices are wrong. And it’s about time we said so.”

Fine by me.

I think Harris is assuming that people who disagree with him are uncomfortable with the idea of morality, of right and wrong. Some people might be, I’m not.

It is morally wrong for a Labour MP to write this kind of garbage. I don’t know and I don’t care if it is a genuine reflection of deeply held views or if it is a way for him to suck up to the right-wing creeps who leave comments on his blog, but it is revolting.

There are several words for powerful, middle-aged men who choose to pick on teenage girls, but the one which best sums up Tom Harris is bully. You will never, ever read him use this kind of language about anyone who has any kind of power or influence, it’s always those who can’t answer back who he chooses to pick on.

Tom has been an MP for years, and he represents hundreds of teenage mums in Glasgow South. But it sounds like he’s never tried to get to know them, find out what the government could do to help them, or anything like that. Again, that’s morally wrong.

And perhaps most depressing of all, there’s the total lack of any kind of intellectual curiosity, or any sense that he might be interested in the research and evidence on this subject. Five minutes with Google would reveal that Tony Blair was talking about teenage pregnancies being ‘a shameful record’ ten years ago, that most teenage parents stay at home rather than getting a council flat and that most have little or no knowledge about the benefits that they’ll be entitled to when they get pregnant.

He doesn’t seem to know that a majority of lone parents work, that 60% of young women felt more positive about education after they became pregnant than before or that 79% said that motherhood had increased their determination to get a good job. He could have found all this, and much more, out if instead of writing his uninformed article, he had typed http://www.ywca-gb.org.uk into his browser and read the articles on their website. He does, after all, get given tens of thousands of pounds to hire researchers who could help him find this sort of stuff out.

Tom Harris chooses to bully those who are weaker than him; chooses not to find out about how he could help his constituents; and chooses to remain ignorant about important issues like this one and so many others. Those choices are wrong, and it is indeed time that we said so.

I headlined Tom’s piece on my blog earlier today, and an informed and intelligent commenter said,

“if you let your government do your thinking for you and take for granted the majority of laws, never questioning if they are right or wrong but just that they ‘are’, you become morally enfeebled”

Never a truer word.

One of the most cowardly, confused, and poorly worded posts that Tom has ever come up with — and that’s saying something. Another attack on the weak dressed up as concern, give us a break… I bet Tom lies awake at night worrying about those poor teenage mums and how they’ve scuppered their futures. Or is he merely concerned with the cost of feeding them??? Hard to tell. But I wouldn’t knock claiming benefits right now if I was a Labour MP; a lot of you are going to be claiming soon enough. “So Mr. Harris, what have you being doing to find employment this week?”

The Guardian are being equally supportive:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2009/mar/04/tom-harris-teenage-mothers

An honest MP whats the world coming to? Unfortunately one is not enough.

Don Paskini at 12.36 am: “You will never, ever read him use this kind of language about anyone who has kind of power or influence.”

But I attack David Cameron all the time- … oh, I see what you mean…

You’ve upset the faithful a bit. “Tom doesn’t have the answers.”

No.He doesn’t. But he has realised that the situation as it is, isn’t benefiting anyone. So he opens a debate that seeks to examine the issues and explore some of the associated problems. Well, better late than never.

It took the Tories eight years before they noticed no one was listening as they were talking bollocks. Tom might be able to shave a few years off that for you.
The alternative seems to be wrap yourself in the red flag, call him a traitor, say everything is fine and anything that isn’t was Thatcher’s fault.

So after circa 3.5 billion spent on Sex education classes, sexual foreplay lessons and bebifits advice your sayingthe Labour party has not brought this situation to a head?

3.5 Billion well spent.NOT.

I am more concerend your parties trying to ditch evidence from an official involved in the jchr hearings. When you get your way you can just send them all to a gas chamber on trumped up charges. New Labour, Old tories.

Good post. The language of morals has been absent for too long, for fear of being judgemental. No! We need to be judgemental, otherwise society falls apart; it’s precisely the judgements of society which step in where the state cannot.

Excuse me butting in. I don’t come around here often , but visited a while back after you were reported as being “nauseated” by left wing anti-capitalist greenies.
Now this.
Sir, this could become a serious relationship between us if this sort of clear headed stuff keeps coming up…
Cranmer might get some competition…

Some fair comments and I do a bit of work with ‘these kind of kids’ and can see the steady growth of this benefits mentality. However, you represent(ed) a party whose leader does not know right from wrong either on so many levels and he is the rather large, visual Head of the country, (aside from Queenie). He, like his predecessor, appears to have no moral fortitude and has been abusing the system himself for so long (for which he takes no responsibility), and basically represents a great role model for the young ‘ins.

I think sorting him out first would be a great starting point.

Google “Failure has no father” and you’ll find an article that states:

“Seventy per cent of young offenders are from single-parent families. Being raised by your mother on her own is not the strongest predictor of ending up as a criminal: having a father who is himself a criminal is the top of that list. But not far behind is being raised without a father at all.”

So it’s not that they’re teenage mothers that’s the problem. The point is, they’re becoming mothers by men who aren’t their husbands.

So here are a few points you might want to discuss with Frank Field.

Social security benefits and other fiscal advantages should, for future cases, be paid only to:

(1) Single persons who are not cohabiting as though married;

(2) Married couples who, at the time of the marriage, are in good faith that they will be able to support themselves without recourse to public funds (Jobseeker’s Allowance and Housing Benefit);

(3) With respect to child benefits, married couples who, at the time of conception or adoption, are in good faith that they will be able to support themselves and the child without recourse to public funds (Jobseeker’s Allowance and Housing Benefit).

Well done Tom Your in The Daily Mail.

You have said what you feel and think, well done but your party will not like this, as it is the truth.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1159425/Ex-minister-slams-national-catastrophe-teenage-mothers-addicted-benefits.html

Tom this “return of morality”: how are you going to get it past the doors of Parliament?

Oh my, Tom, where to start with this.

“Teenage girls should not be having sex.”

You don’t seem to be acknowledge the fact that teenage girls generally don’t have sex alone. How come it’s the girls’ fault and not the boys?

I did a post on this a couple of weeks ago and rather than focus on taking away benefits from these families, I looked at parenting classes, issues such as the way premature sexualisation of young women tolerated and encouraged by our media and society and education.

And don’t assume teenagers all know the mechanics. You can say there’s loads of sex education, but that assumes that all the kids have been in school and not bunking off at the time, and if they’re there that they understand what’s being said to them.

Also remember the teenage assumption that it will never happen to them….

I saw a youth worker on Question Time the other week say that some of the kids she’d come across were using things like cling film and crisp packets for contraception. You would think that couldn’t happen in this day and age.

If young people hope and young women in particular had confidence and self esteem, I expect that would help reduce the level of teenage pregnancy somewhat.

Oh,and Tom, someone very close to me had her first child as a teenager. The baby was born prematurely. Of course when we saw her in hospital in her little incubator for the first time we fell in love with her. We were also incredibly proud of her mother who handled the whole thing fantastically and spent weeks in the hospital expressing milk round the clock and being a wonderfully sensitive and responsive mother.

That mother has herself established a career, had other children and the baby is now almost the same age her mother was when she fell pregnant and she has a very sensible attitude to life.

If my daughter got pregnant as a teenager, and you had better believe that I would do everything I possibly could to stop that happening, I would love her and support her. What would you want me to do? Throw her and her child out on the streets?

I suppose I should give him credit for putting this into print. Whether he is genuine in what he writes is another matter.

I now expect many more Labour types to write what the rest of the country have been saying for years. There’s something distinctly unpleasant about faux mea-culpas.

To their shame all Labour MPs supported this smoke and mirrors government in the lobbies like sheep running through a sheep dip.

They fiddle with multi-culti-inclusion politics. They appear to have purposefully forgotten the majority of the population.

Not for much longer. They will not be allowed to forget what their meddling has created.

… At the going down of the sun, And in the morning, We will remember them.

At last, someone brave enough to say it out loud.I’m fed up with working and struggling to pay my bills whilst those who have no intention of working get everything for free.

Labour is a complete failure.

If Labour worked then noone would ever mention margret thatcher, they would be too busy celebrating labours great achievements.

But there are no great labour achievements to celebrate, Labour have implemented all the socialist polices they thought would deliver a ‘wonderful’ society — but those polices did nothing of the kind, they failed. Instead of a new socialist paradise, the policies delivered the disaster zone that we now see all around us.

Eventually the stupid labour supporters will realise that their whole project is fundamentally flawed, and instead of keeping going will stop, recognise their error and instead support free markets, small government, self determination, individual freedom instead of the failed socialist model.

If you pay people to have babies at 16 – not only pay them, but pay them more than their cohort can earn by working – then (surprise, surprise) they will have babies at 16 and not work. Not rocket science is it?

Political suicide this may be, but I suspect the Labour Party may be better advised to pay attention to the vast numbers of their supporters (and supporters of other parties) who are sick to the back teeth of paying tax to support people who don’t want to work, and are being advised not to work in order to maximise the benefits they can receive.

In my opinion, your only error is paying too much attention on teenage pregnancy. There are many, many other areas of the benefit system that also need reform in order to make them less attractive propositions.

I read with great pleasure the online Daily Mail article of Tom Harris and ‘the return to morality’. I am so pleased someone is at last brave enough to talk about the disintegration of morals, resposibility etc etc. Surprising, I am only a mid 40s person who has chosen to live in Italy where respect for the family (and oneself) is of the highest importance, and I am not forced any longer to pay tax on a situation I highly disagree with.

Good luck to you Mr Harris!

It’s rather prescient how the article about this story in the Daily Record appears above a photo of Brandon Muir’s mother (the one who was out whoring herself for heroin while her little boy was dying of internal injuries inflicted by her boyfriend.) Like it or not, she’s the face of teenage single parenting in Scotland – and perhaps she should be.

Excellent well thought out post Tom.

For those who attack Tom on this issue consider this, we are now seeing families with upwards of three generations who have never worked and yes in the main this after the wholesale destruction of our industrial base in the Thatcher era.

By breaking the viscious circle of life on benefits, Labour (and yes I am a lifelong Labour supporter) would be doing both these individuals and the country a great service, by unlocking the talents and potential of those caught in the benefits trap.

Good analysis of the problem.
Unfortunately no acknowledgement of the failed policies that got us here or any suggestion of how we can correct the situation. Very NuLab.

Hold on a minute!

“Teenage girls should not be having sex”

I really don’t get that. The law says people under the age of 16 should not be having sex. Are you advocating a change in the age of consent to 20?

Otherwise, plenty, if not MOST teenage girls should absolutely be having sex if they want to.

Don Paskini

Your piece is as full of supposition and lack of intellectual rigour as that you accuse Tom of. It is also an ignorant rant, albeit a fairly articulate one.

You mention bullying. You are the one who is doing the bullying with a standard tactic of throwing out accusations, most very wide of the mark, with the sole intention of shutting down the debate.

You are the kind of person who trots out “homophobic” if someone has the temerity to criticise gay lifestyles, or “racist” if somebody wants to discuss immigration.

Well, Bully boy, it cuts no ice with me.

The discussion will go on regardless of your neo fascist rant.

To those who’ve been foaming at the mouth at Tom for being a ‘bully’ and a traitor to the Labour cause, may I draw your attention to a phrase that was used when the Labour party was in its infancy: ‘The curse of the working class is the fewness of their wants, the poverty of their desires.’ This was from a 1902 pamphlet by John Burns, who later became a Labour MP. Bevan and Bevin also paraphrased this in their day as ‘the poverty of ambition’. What they were fighting for was for people to strive for better things for themselves, to have a sense of what was right and what was wrong, which is exactly what Tom was saying.

Other criticisms of Tom’s post come from people who seem to think that Labour actually like and promote the idea of people being dependent on benefits, because they think that this is some sort of bribe for them to vote Labour. This is absurd, quite apart from the fact, people on benefits are often too apathetic to vote.

During the 80s and 90s, the choice facing a lot of young girls was getting a job which was very poorly paid (no minimum wage then). If the alternative was having a cute tot to show off who would also guarantee an income and possibly housing as well, then having the kid seemed definitely the more attractive option. The Tory government, in its aim of breaking the unions, created high unemployment and low prospects – and unintentionally nurtured the benefits culture, now so ingrained it will take years to put right.

I’ve got an example from my own extended family of the differing attitudes towards teen parent culture. At a family gathering, the subject of babies was mentioned and my cousin (a father with teenage children) was saying that he liked babies but he didn’t think he and his wife would have any more. Then he said, ‘Katie could have one though,’ Katie being his teenage daughter. He seriously didn’t think this was a bad idea. However, this was met with a chorus of disapproval from most of the rest of the family – my mum in particular was shocked that he’d said it. Some time later he got his wish when Katie did become a single teen mum.

Alasdair at 9.36: “Teenage girls should not be having sex.”

Please don’t misquote me, Alasdair. I actually wrote: “Teenage girls should not be having underagedsex.” Or do you disagree with that also?

So, Frank Field, now yourself. At this rate there might be a majority in the labour party who get it at some point before next millenium. I won’t hold my breath waiting though.

Well done for having the courage to speak up on it.

I completely agree with this post Tom.

One of the fundamental problems with Labour has been the willingness to continual pour support for single mothers and the unemployed, unfortunately they have dealt with treating this support as a safety net and not a lifestyle.

Nicky.

Labour like and promote the idea of people being dependent upon government, fullstop.

The Tory goverment didn’t create high unemployment in the 80’s. It was the legacy of the failed policies of the Wilson, Heath and Calaghan governments. In the same way that the high unemployment of the next decade of Conservative government will be the result of the failed policies of this current Labour government.

BTW in five years of watching the political blogs I have not come across a commenter called “Don Paskini”. Strangely, he gets a mention on Bickerstaffe, who is now banning comments he does not like. He wouldn’t be one of those party attack dogs who hide behind ad hoc identities, so beloved of the Derek Draper school of rebuttal would he?

Tom,

Its a good post. Good luck on the road you’ve just started down, but be aware that morality (and often reality) and the current Labour administration are strangers and at some point soon you may have to decide if you want your soul back and leave that party.

But what you’ve said has the chance to genuinely help a lot of people. You should also add Iain Duncan Smith to your coffee list, if you’re serious.

Actions are better than words. Just take a look at Tom Harris’s voting record on socio-moral issues in the Commons. It speaks for itself!!
http://www.christian.org.uk/mpvotes.php?selection=&value1=259&submit1=SHOW&value2=1

CamR.

No, it was not the product of the Callaghan and Wilson governments. Unemployment in the Conservative years occurred in two great spikes, the second occurring 11 years after they were elected. Those years saw a different type of unemployment that no Government since Baldwin’s has managed to replicate. The consequence of Thatcherism was to concentrate unemployment in small pockets across the inner cities of Britain, particularly in the North. This unemployment became long term, leaving thousands completely detached from the Labour market for years on end. That is what created the ‘benefits culture’ you are so derisive about. If anything, when Labour came to power, the New Deal forced people into regular contact with the Labour market in order to be able to ’sign on’. This has gone a long way to eradicate the problems of long term unemployment, and consequently, undermined the problem of serial benefit claimants.

Moreover, if you are trying to claim that the great swathes of unemployed were actually the fault of the previous Labour administrations, then please allow me to indulge in that game too. The devaluation crisis at the end of the 1960s, which was a partial cause of the malaise of the 1970s, was the consequence of irresponsible Tory economic stewardship under Eden, Macmillan and Home. These three continually manipulated Keynesian ‘Stop-Go’ economics in order to promote their electoral cause. The cuts in tax and spending increases months before elections at a time when aggregate demand should have been cooled, plunged Britain into a deep, deep current account deficit that she never recovered from (read Samuel Brittain).

Tom, I am self-employed. My daughter is 26 months old. She has spent over half of her life on the waiting list for the only nursery in my town, which is a council run “family centre”. My attempts to get her into the nursery for a measly two afternoons a week have been met with the most degrading reverse class discrimination that Labour can muster. In sum, I am not on benefits, I am not on heroin, I am not on file with social work, I am not a single mother, and I am not a teenage mother, so my daughter must remain at the bottom of the waiting list. They have advised me that given my social position, there is no chance of her getting in at all, so I have to wait until she is three and gets her guaranteed place elsewhere. Because of that, I have had to tear up my business plan for 2009.

I used to phone the family centre every month to see where the waiting list was. Their only question: “Are you still not a single mum? No? Then we can’t put her on the priority list”. I stopped phoning a long time ago. Our council’s childcare hotline actually suggested to me that if I want her to get a nursery place, I need to *get on file with social work*. In their words, “nurseries aren’t for working parents”.

Am I angry? Damn right. Why should my child be punished because I have *failed* to be dependent, stupid, or selfish enough to meet the system’s approval? In order for your argument to have any merit, you need to acknowledge that the system your party has created actively punishes parents for failing to be dependent on the state, while escorting junkies, teenage mothers, and people who aren’t fit to be parents right to the front of the queue.

@Don Paskini,

I love the quality your the argument. Tom sucking up to the right wing creeps on his blog. Great stuff. Tom’s sycophancy is well-known to his regulars. He never gainsays any of us for fear that we will withdraw our love.

Let’s see, three weeks ago I was an obvious Tory, last week I was a ‘lefty (sic) arse’. Now I’m a right wing creep.

Funny old world. Arse and creep I can accept. Those are certainly stable factors in what passes for my nature.

@wrinkled weasel

Noted.

LJB I live in Glasgow – the same as Tom Harris. Most of Glasgow’s decent housing stock has been sold off and much of it at a 70% discount. If you are a young couple looking to get a council house in a decent area (it would be GHA now as the stock has been transferred) you have absolutely no chance of getting one. Literally no chance at all. If you cannot afford to buy – and most people in low or even average paid jobs can’t – then you have the choice to rent in the private sector. For many people even that is unaffordable if they are on a low wage. They can get their rent paid if they are on housing benefit though. They will get higher priority on the waiting list if they have a baby. That’s the way it works. In order to change things you have to look at the whole system and what is wrong with it, there’s no point just blaming individuals or saying that it is a matter of morality. It’s as much about the workings of the tax and benefit systems as it is about morality. People in any walk of life will do what they have to do to get by.

Come to think of benefits culture, it seems to me that Karen Matthews and Sir Fred Goodwin are two of a kind.

Feckless, irresponsible and greedy.

One’s just a little more socially destructive than the other.

If a desire for benefits and a home is a primary factor explaining teenage pregnancy, explain why the evidence suggests that the primary factor is coercion on the part of the male.

“Studies have found that between 11 and 20 percent of pregnancies in teenagers are a direct result of rape.”

Some “60 percent of teenage mothers had unwanted sexual experiences preceding their pregnancy.”

“Before age 15, a majority of first-intercourse experiences among females are reported to be non-voluntary.”

“The Guttmacher Institute found that 60 percent of girls who had sex before age 15 were coerced by males who on average were six years their senior. One in five teenage fathers admitted to forcing girls to have sex with them.”

“Multiple studies have indicated a strong link between early childhood sexual abuse and subsequent teenage pregnancy in industrialized countries.”

“Up to 70 percent of women who gave birth in their teens were molested as young girls; by contrast, 25 percent for women who did not give birth as teens were molested.” (Wikipedia)

I’ve been saying for the past year that you pander to the Daily Fail brigade, and now you’ve gone and got yourself a nice little write up in it. You’re a traitor. You’re a Judas. And while your blog will doutblessly continue to entertain, your posts in the last few days have complete abandoned any notion that you’re a man of the Labour party. You simply are not.

It’s so sweet and touching when MPs catch up with the rest of us.

Spot on Tom.

I get confused by some of the comments on this blog. I thought the ‘destruction of our industrial base’ was caused by the unions pricing British industry out of world markets combined with heavy state subsidies for compeing nations (Korean shipbuilding et al) – but apparently it was all down to Margaret Thatcher.

Blow me.

Back to topic – absolutely what Tom said has to be said. Shamefully, this situation has been encouraged for the last decade.

This is where I don’t get political wings – Tom has mentioned a severe problem (our sick-role of 2.7 million is another one) – so why is any attempt to do anything about this always badged as politics of the right or Daily Mail politics?

Would someone like to tell me what the left-wing solution is, or the centre-left/ centre-right solution is, or the third way /Blairite soluion is? (Let’s pretend for the minute that ‘Blairite’ is a political philosophy).

I’ll be surprised if you can.

@ wrinkled weasel

Hello, I’m from the Bickerstaffe Record.

At what point did I say I was banning comments I don’t like? What I said was that I was likely to delete ‘troll’ comments, a term which I did not bother to define in my post, but do here, as comments which I (because I’m the one doing the moderating) decide are not worth engaging with, either because they are simply abuse (complex abuse may be fine), because they are too incoherent actually to get to grips with, or because they in no way relate to the matter at hand.

The key rationale for this is not that I don’t like abuse – I’m a Labour councillor for gawd’s sake – but because my blog is small enough to allow me to engage with almost all comments, whether or not I agree with them, with a decent level of courtesy.

A large number of comments with which I would find it difficult or impossible to engage, for the reasons set out above, would get in the way of that.

If I happen to become the world’s most-read blogger because I have taken issue with Tom Harris, then this may change, but this will be set out in any reviewed comments moderation policy.

Please feel free to try it out, to see if you are a ‘troll’ (though I’ll try not to judge your whole trolldom or not on a single comment.

On the matter of Don Paskini, are you suggesting that because you have not seen a comment or post from said blogger before, he is therefor not worthy of any attention? A strange conclusion, I must say.

Yes, it is a pseudonym, but then I’m not convinced that you are actually called Mr/Ms/Mrs/Dr/Prof/Princess etc Wrinkled Weasel. Many apologies in advance if I’m wrong on that.

@ Tom Harris – sorry to have taken up your valuable comments space with my own insignificant matters.

Yet more moralising from another man in the Labour Party – wouldn’t that be the party guilty of the what the Nuremberg trials considered the “supreme war crime” – a war of agression? You remember, the one based on lies? And exactly who are these “teenage girls” having sex with? Are there any males involved or is this asexual reproduction?

@Michael Petek AT 11:09 am

Come to think of benefits culture, it seems to me that Karen Matthews and Sir Fred Goodwin are two of a kind.

Feckless, irresponsible and greedy.

One’s just a little more socially destructive than the other
————————————–

Careful. For all Goodwin’s faults, we should note.

1. He was just doing what everyone else was doing in the City. Only he was better at it.

2. Karen Matthews, as well as having her own daughter held against her will, had been medicating the kid for some weeks with Valium; to keep her quiet and malleable.

I think I know who poses the most danger to society of Matthews and Goodwin.

Brave comment Tom, I just hope you’ve got an alternative career lined up because I’m sure some in your party will want your head on a plate for this.
You will be under pressure to recognise that it takes two to make a baby. You’ll also be under pressure to make constructive comments about how girls can be helped not to get pregnant by improving self esteem and so on.
Over the coming days you may seek to “clarrify” what you meant, and I think the emphasis might change to reflect the pressures you will be under.
But if your message becomes that we must stop boys putting girls in this situation, it will undermine your initial message that girls have a moral choice themselves. And if your “critisism”, as many will portray it, transmutes into a “positive” message about the need to improve these girls self esteem, you will have introduced the sort of excuse that got us into this mess in the first place.
It’s easy for me to hope you hold firm to your initial instinct – I’m not the one taking the flak – but I hope you can avoid being put on the defensive like this.
Your comment is valuable because so few people are prepared to speak out and the damage this is doing our society is so great. So please, do not allow others to force you into a reinterpretation of your message, you will know in your heart that you meant it as you said it. And draw strength from the knowledge that many others share your view.

I agree with you 100%. And I don’t care which party takes up on this – I will be voting for them

Bold assertions based on anecdotal evidence and assumption?

I fear you’ve been hanging around Iain Dale and Nadine Dorries too much, Mr Harris.

Here’s a prediction for you all. Pundit-watch time. I’m the pundit (lefty, right wing, Tory… it’s the name calling that hurts). Andrew F will be voting Conservative within fifteen years.

Arse Creep (that’s me, not Andrew F.

Andrew F – why is Tom being a traitor to the Labour Party ? Because he’s talking sense ?

Why is he a Judas for believing that a teenager’s ambitions should go beyond a free flat and a career in collecting benefits ?

@ Darrell Norfolk

The Christian Institute’s voting files reveal that practically every single Labour and Lib Dem MP fails to understand cause and effect.

If you undermine marriage and decent standards by giving kudos to people with ‘alternative’ living arrangements, then society will fail.

That’s why morals (at least for the masses) are very important, even when the government is as tyrannical as the current Chinese one, for example. They know that to be strong and successful as a nation, the people need strong morals and a good work ethic.

They know that if the people fail to adhere to strict standards, the whole country will collapse. I am sure that the social engineers in our country and the EU are destroying us for a purpose.

@ Andrew F

Do you imagine for a second that the founders of the Labour Party (rather than the traitors of New Labour) would have engineered a society like we have today?

The real traitors are those people who are re-engineering our society to be a godless, grey, degenerate mess – in order to enslave us to become a low wage, low self-esteem people who have no power or influence or ability to resist the tyranny.

People should not judge others negatively without learning of their circumstances. Why? Because it’s wrong.

Making these kinds of pronouncements, about teenage sex, about having children young, is all rather pointless. Surely what’s actually wrong is that children should not be told that they will amount to nothing and needn’t bother trying as they are worthless and will never get a job. Reform of the system has to include removing stigma and prejudice, not entrenching it through punitive conditionality without related, meaningful, consistent statements of support, empathy and solidarity from the privileged few who hold the power and the purse strings in this country.

That includes you, Tom Harris, and I urge you to reflect on your current privilege and take responsibility for your role in promoting prejudice towards those less privileged than yourself.

Hit, nail and head come to mind. Spot on, but you are in danger of coming under the wrath of your fellow Labour MP’s for daring to speak the truth.

RECOMMENDED ACTION

Obviously, it would be impractical to prosecute every teenager who has sex while below the age of consent, but it would NOT be impractical to

(a) deprive a single mother of child benefit if she cannot produce a marriage certificate
(b) fine the single mother for producing an illegitimate baby, say £1000, if she does not name the father
(c) require her parent(s) to pay this sum if she cannot or will not
(d) fine the father of an illegitimate child a sum of money, say £1000
(e) require the parent(s) of that father to pay this sum if he cannot pay it himself
(f) require that the mother give up the child for adoption before more lives are ruined

Vote: Should the measures proposed in (a) to (f) be adopted to purge the scourge of family breakdown?

The most interesting thing about all this is how, despite being heralded by everyone (pop over to the daily mail comments on your story, and you will see how the few that disagree with you have been downvoted to oblivion), you have been totally ignored by both the Lib Dems and your own party.

Shameful. I was hoping this would spark a much needed debate on the issue, particularly as the politicians have been deliberately ignoring the issue for a long time now, only rising when forced, and even then only to offer some inane platitute at how benefits are a good thing before they turn their backs again. (Therefore, patently not addressing the issue at all).

The sole exception has been DraperList, who have posted your blog post word for word as one of their blog posts. Well done Dolly! Did you authorise that though, or did Dolly do it off his own back?

Well said. Mothers like Fiona McKeown (10 children by 5 fathers, receives £500 pw in benefits)who let their under-age daughters have sex and take drugs; or Shannon Matthews (8 children, by 5 fathers)who actually drug and kidnap their own children for financial benefit, are the dregs of society. Whatever happenned to the concept of the ‘fit mother’?

Children born to mothers under the age of 17 (16, plus 9-10 months)should be put up for adoption, with the first claim going to the grandparents.Once the teenage mothers are in a job or have obtained a minimum of qualifications, the adoption could be transferred to them from the grandparents. Mothers who are drug addicts or alcoholics should be separated from their children at birth and the babies given up for adoption with no future rights to their children.

It is time the rights of the child to a decent future took over from the rights of a teenage mother to welfare ‘independence’.

When children are raised in such unpromising circumstances they are destined for a life of crime and under-achievement with attendent costs for the education, criminal justice, health and welfare services. Not only is it unjust on the children, but for the rest of capable society that has to pay for such fecklessness.

For the first time I hear a labour M P showing a little common sense about the profligate waste of taxpayers money on young uderaged unmarried mothers. When I was young such mothers were either looked after by their family or had the child adopted. If you were such an offspring would you rather be brought up by such a mother or be adopted by carring “parents” who would almost certainly see that you had a proper education, the desire to be a responsible citizen (sorry for that awefull word) and not a burden on others. Every single person I speak to on this matter agrees with your viewpoint, even my 18 year old grandaughter. Under age sex should be rewarded with a criminal record, not taxzpayers money. And, should not further increases in child numbers of such parents NOT be rewarded with more money)

its ok for you to slag off all young teenage or single mums. fair enough there are a few out there hat do not take their responsabilities seriously, but for teenage mums it is a struggle. I was 17 when i got pregnant and i thought it would be a walk in the park but pregnancy isnt even eas. It’s hard especially when you open the papers everyday to see things about teenage mums being a disgrace to socioty.

This country is an awful state and itstime to do something about the more important things, instead of you worrying about loosing a couple of pounds in your pension!!!

there are kids being aandoned or abused by there parents. 3 different stories in the past 6months.

you look back to these stories of children dying at the hands of their parents or parents partners have any of them been teenagers?????

i din;t think so!!

Finally, one single member of the Government for the past decade has realised what a mess part of this country is in. For a Labour member, saying this will provoke endless fury but I’m glad someone is willing to tell the intelligent hard working tax payers the truth in exchange for their money.

To read this letter gives hope that MPs aren’t all heads in the sand. Good luck for the future.

What a load of old link baiting drivel Tom. You truly are Labour’s Iain Dale.

This is a deliberate provocation. It is part of your audience building strategy learned at the feet of Iain Dale, the blogging expert. It is “Morality” and it is “Anecdote” but like Iain Dale’s outpourings it is also very wrong. Immoral almost. Shame on you. And all for a quick blog behind the bike sheds.

Dear Mr Harris, l was a teenage mother in 1985, for 90% of my daughter’s life l have worked, and not claimed benefits but by your reasoning she is part of an “underclass” let me just say that l, and l’m sure an awful lot of other single PARENTS will be very insulted by this. in my case my daughter is a very intelligent girl, she is at university, doing a NURSING DEGREE, so l’m sure even you will realise that you should never generalise about any group of people, and just so you’re fully aware l, and l’m still a single parent, work full time in a very physically demanding job. I should also point out that l live in a very working class area in the East End of Glasgow and l am surrounded by people in the same position who again are doing the best they can in very difficult circumstances. As for the father being proud of his daughter, he should be, that girl may or may not live on benefits, but l’m sure her father was making the best of a situation l’m sure he realises is far from ideal.

Angela – to be fair to Tom, he did say “many, but not all, do not become pregnant by accident”. I don’t think this is generalising.

And the point is, whilst some people start of more disadvantaged than others, no-one should see a life on benefits as a career choice.

You are right, the army of teenage mothers is a catastrophe, there will come a day in a few years time, could be 20-30 years, but that those who are dependant on the state outnumber those of us who support it, what will we do then? Your government’s policies have made it possible for this to occur don’t you think? The welfare system is wide open to abuse, far too leniant (correct spelling?), and almost encourages this underclass to reproduce. Why aren’t these people forced out to work to pay for their children?

The people we should be blaming are the liberals, do-gooders and the PC brigade.

By having no means to effectively punish, teach or communicate with our children (and adults) they go about life thinking they can do what the hell they like.

These people are all so blind that all I can do is laugh at their stupidity.

Well said.
Young single unempolyed mothers are not something to celebrate. Nor are young absent fathers.
We as a nation need to stop being afraid to call it what it is.

I thank you for your comment. Nothing wrong with teenage pregnancy as such, however when it is done with the expectation that the state will provide I think we have a right to say whether or not we are happy to provide. I am not. What a waste of a life it is to aim so low for yourself or your offspring. Some do not have the gifts/intelligence to aim higher but at leat we should be signalling strongly as a society that there is a better way.
Better to support the needy than to support a system that encourages you to be needy.

This isn’t about left or right wing politics. This is about a serious social issue that no-one seems to be confronting because they are too scared of the reaction of others.

I am tired of politicians saying the “right thing” all the time just to look good to the electorate.

Its about time politicians, let alone your average punter on the street, actually said what they were thinking. I can’t wait for the adundance of attempted point scoring by opposition MPs/MSPs – this is a PR dream ticket.

I say good job Mr Harris for saying what you think. If only more us had to guts to do it.

Sir, you have my full support for your comments. Yeah people always shout about their hurt feelings when serious problems like this are addressed but you know, tough on them. The likes of me and other hard working people are paying for these people to spit out unneeded children into poverty. You can be pretty much assured that they will grow up to be the next generation of thugs, footballers and drop-outs. I am completely against child benefit in its current form. If you can’t afford a child…tough.

because of idiotic opinions like yours, i get dirty looks in the street. i’m 23 and have a 5 year old son. i had him when i was 17, straight out of school, and i looked much younger. when my son was 9 months old i began a BSc, which i completed last july. i’ve been in work as well as university since 2005, and have just been accepted to a postgraduate. yes, i’m a single mum. yes, i DO get help from benefits. but because of comments like yours being published, i get disparaging comments thrown at me for receiving ANY benefits. totally stupid.

I’d just like to say that whilst I disagree with much of what Tom Harris (and New Labour) has to say, he should be commended for having the honesty to make public his views on issues such as this, rather than simply adopting the ‘offence-minimising’ stance which almost all of our cardboard cutout representatives adopt in this day and age.

How refreshing to have a politician who says what’s on his mind, as opposed to what’s on the spin doctor’s list of media-friendly vacuities.

Gosh – brave and welcome. True that you should be including teenage fathers as thoughtless selfish stupid contributors to the problem. Ignore Hervie Green – there will always be those spineless apologists with their idealist heads buried in the sand. As for the person who said that once it has happened the poor dears should be looked after and supported, but that’s like telling little Johnny how bad it is to burn someone’s house down, then give them counselling when they have done. If these girls knew that society will regard them for the stupid little idiots they are and never let them forget the next generation might think twice. At the moment they know they will merely be “forgiven” and consoled – that’s no reward for what they’ve done to themselves and society.

Arrived via a link to this piece at the BBC News website.

Having become completely disenfranchised from the New Labour experiment (being an Old Labour voter), I find myself in violent agreement with you Tom.

This is a classic Rights vs Responsibilities argument and once again we see Rights triumphing. These children are not old enough to even comprehend the magnitude of parental responsibility that they now face for the next 16+ years.

Commendable of you to vocalise what many people have long thought.

I once read that people who want to be politicians are the worst people to be tasked with running a country. This sort of blog posting is proof of the truth of that comment. Where do you start with this? The thinking and philosophy behind such ill informed, ignorant, downright stupid but sadly popular comments are an explanation why as to Western Europe’s way of life has become a shambles, it’s why capitalism has totally failed as a workable political system and it’s why the Labour Party means nothing to anyone other than self seeking egotists now. Thankfully, the voting figures and electoral participation rates speak for themselves. Fewer and fewer people engage with politics and politicians because this kind of nonsense demonstrates how out of touch with real life, and the challenges faced in getting through real life, politicians actually are. Cheers for demonstrating why you don’t speak for me, why you and your kind will never represent me and my opinions and why I exercise my human right not to vote for people like you, whether you call yourself Labour, Tory, Liberal, Nationalist, Green or whatever.

It is not often I find myself agreeing with anything that a Labour MP has to say, but well done for speaking out on this important issue. No one is looking to victimise young single mothers, they ought to be given all the help in the world, but lets not pretend that having lots of young single mothers is a good thing. Everyone wants to telll you about their rights these days, but no body talks about responsibilities. I have the right to have 12 kids if I want and then expect the state to house and feed me, but I don’t do it because it is not the responsible thing to do. I work hard and pay my taxes and try to live within my means. If others did likewise, perhaps there would be fewr social problems in this country

Dear All

We have had Gordon Brown whine about how is it is the fault of Fred Goodwin.

Now we have Tom Harris scream it is the fault of single mothers.

Is Mr. Harris shocked at how society is collapsing under New Labour?

He should be, in the Labour fiefdom of Glasgow, parts of the city are wastelands, gerrymandered Labour ghettos.

I stayed in the Pollok ghetto most of my adult life and saw how Labour policies killed it.

The Labour ghettos of Glasgow are like open prisons with their designated Labour overseers called MP’s who are supposed to be there to help their voters.

What has Mr. Harris done for his voters?

Where is Tom Harris’ office?

Mr. Harris became an MP 7 June 2001.

It is now the 5th of March 2009, is he waiting for the good weather before looking for premises?

John Mason, SNP MP immediately set up an office with staff to help the people of Glasgow East.

Why didn’t Tom Harris?

Tom Harris it seems is too busy to help the “underclass” he despises so much.

He talks about the return of morality, under the Labour Party surely a joke?

The myth of Labour being about equality and justice died a long time of ago.

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University

George – not sure why you want to know, but my constituency office is at Queen’s Park FC in Somerville Drive in Mount Florida. Previously it was at the Couper Institute in Cathcart. Do you have a problem with that?

“John Mason, SNP MP immediately set up an office with staff to help the people of Glasgow East. Why didn’t Tom Harris?”

Er… because I don’t represent Glasgow East, perhaps?

PS: You’re a member of the Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University? Is there a problem with human rights at Glasgow University then?

I agree with your sentiments but surely you must now realise that the cause of all this lack of self respect is your very own Welfare State!!!

Dial a cliche!!

Teenage mums feel the wrath of Tom’s bombast. What did this poor girl or her family do or say to offend Herr Harris’s crypto-fascist sensibilities.

Once again this buffoon lamely attempts to court controversy by venting his spleen agains another section of the population least able to defend themselves. Isn’t it time this mealy- mouthed social inadequate was invited to “fess-up” to his unhealthy obsession with the sexual and moral proclivities of young teenage girls?

I wonder if the illegitimate son of Mary Keir(I believe his name was Keir Hardie) would subscribe to Tom’s inimitable brand of casual contempt?

Just been down to the hospital to throw things at those teenage mothers breeding their armies of benefit claimants. I hate them so much.

And that father who said he was proud of his daughters baby, the least he could do was disown the child. I hate him so much.

That less than 1% of people on lone parent allowances are to blame for everything. Vote Tom Harris!

Sorry, less than 1% of people in the country that are teenagers claiming lone parent allowance… sorry

Hi Tom,

If you are interested in this issue and want to find out more, then I’d suggest starting with Antonia Bance’s excellent response to your post – http://www.antoniabance.org.uk/2009/03/05/the-strange-case-of-tom-harris-mp-and-the-teenage-mums/

and also arranging to meet up with people from the Poverty Alliance – http://povertyalliance.org/index.html They are based in Glasgow on Buchanan Street, and they will be able to put you in touch with people who you would learn a lot from, some of whom are probably your constituents.

Well, Tom, that’s another vote you’ve lost at the next general election. As a constituent and party member – I will never vote for you again – ever.
You’ve proved, what I always suspected, that you’re further right than the tories.

“Loathsome moralising” someone called this and,having read it, I think that’s a pretty fair description.

Now you mention it you’re right.

There will naturally be something wrong with the work ethic of any parent who raises their child on benefits, we all know the effect the home environment has upon children. It’s only naturally that these poor children will grow up to have a non-existent work ethic, they’ll have been socially programed since birth to be drains upon society. Nothing more than resource-sucking, hoodie-wearing felons in the making.

Maybe we should have social services take away these children to save them from such a fate?

Don’t get me wrong, I love my mother but clearly my life would have been so much better had I been taken from her benefit-loving care. After all, I never realised it until now but having been enlightened by the wisdom of the Rt Honourable Tom Harris, I am nothing more than a part of this terrible, terrible culture.

Even now at the age of 21 I am still mooching from the state, just as my mother taught me, claiming money for food and rent and tuition fees to fund four years of university. Just think how much better my life could have been if my mother had been forced to go to work instead of spend time teaching and supporting me. Those straight A’s at Higher? Just think what that could have been if instead of being raised by a benefit-sucking hag I was raised by someone with a work ethic! Just think what my life could have been like if she’d waited a few more years to give birth to me.

Thank God for you Mr Harris, come, lead us back on a path to morality so that no child like me will ever suffer through such a supportive and loving environment as I did. And indeed all of my childhood peers who were in the same situation. If only you’d been there for us…

You sound exactly like my dad.

Cheers about saying what you think but you just generalise it so much.

But to be honest you are scapegoating a significant minority :/

I just lost a fair amount of respect for mr. harris…

Massively increased benefit dependency and general moral chaos go back to which decade, do you think?

I’m sorry, but I really cannot see how “Labour MP Condemns Thatcherism” is any sort of story.

See that the BBC has suddenly decided to run with the story.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7926662.stm

The rent-a-quote’s they’ve gotten to oppose you are quite frankly HILARIOUS.

Sue Robertson, director of One Parent Families Scotland, said the comments were an example of the stigmatisation of single parents.

“Research has shown that what’s effectively happening is that young parents have their children young, the children grow up and then the young parents go back into education and then into employment.”

You have GOT to be kidding me? Does anyone on this green earth believe that absolute nonsense?

Green MSP Patrick Harvie criticised the MP’s views as “loathsome moralising”.

“Not a word about sex education. Not a word about the rights of the women Tom is so keen to judge,” he added.

The rights of the women? How about the rights of the bloody children you ignorant mouthpiece?

Some opposition to your views shows me just how pathetic this country has become.

‘yes, i’m a single mum. yes, i DO get help from benefits. but because of comments like yours being published, i get disparaging comments thrown at me for receiving ANY benefits. totally stupid.’

Not totally stupid. You don’t know anything about my personal circumstances but you insist that I pay tax to support your lifestyle choice. Why should you expect that?

You have my full agreement with regards to your views expressed in this article.

Stoning’s too good for them.

I had that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the back of my cab the other day. E’s a clever bloke, just like that Tom Harris…

Hi Tom,

I was one of these teenage mothers you speak about. However rather than staying on state benefits I went on to university. I gained a first class honours degree (top of my year in a very good university). I now work for a popular internet search company in a very good position.

I am also the proud mother of my 12 year old son.

It is unfair to make comments about all teenage mothers when often we are able to come off benefits and work as hard as any member of our society. Moreover I was not just a teenage mother but a single one (even worse I would guess in your books Tom!)

The other point I wanted to make is that sometimes people look younger than they are. I was 18 when I had my son however I was frequently mistaken for a 14 year old. Even now people most often assume I am my son´s sister as I look so young for my age.

Whilst it is great to express opinions no matter how controversal, it is good to take care in not offending others by wide generalisations.

Regards,

EM

A useful contribution, simply because it illustrates the extent to which New Labour have completely lost their moral compass, and it allowed us to have a good square go at you in the Record, BBC etc.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7926662.stm

Tom

I agree with all your comments made in the Mail today, 4.3.09 regarding the unmarried mother issue. It is refreshing to see an MP stick his neck out this way and I think you should be supported by all fair minded people. I am not a traditional Labour supporter, but you would get my vote.

So much of what you say is what I feel. Why do we encourage children to have children? Adulthood lasts for long enough, we should be encouraging children to be children for longer not making childhood shorter. The carefree time and innocence of childhood should be encouraged not destroyed by those who wish to make children become adults before they are emotionally ready for it. Having a baby is an enormous responsibility. It is not a selfish right just to meet your needs and to attain benefits and housing. Teaching sex education at a younger and younger age is just not working. It is not preventing children having children. By offering contraception you are encouraging and condoning children to experiment and fall pregnant without a thought for the consequences. We have made it so acceptable that for them there are no consequences. Nowadays teaching right from wrong is seen as judgmental. In in a civilised responsible society we all need to abide by certain rules otherwise we have anarchy. Being responsible for yourself is the first step to being responsible for someone else. The selfishness of those who see nothing wrong with being dependent on the state is breathtaking. I hope your article instigates more open debate and that the pendulum will swing into encouraging a more responsible attitude towards teenage pregnancies as well as debate on the welfare system as a whole.

Well done Tom, you have raised an issue that needs to find greater political priority. Scotland is blighted by a dependency culture that despite the best intentions of the welfare system has trapped a significant minority in perpetual poverty and removed aspiration. Only massive social engineering initiatives will address this worsening blight and I very much doubt there is any appetite to fully address this problem in Holyrood. Any initiatives thus far have merely put a sticking plaster over the problem indeed attempts to reduce child poverty have merely perpetuated the issue you raise by incentivising the birthrate.
Can any parent realy beleive that he/she has the best interests of their child at heart by bringing it into a life of perpetual grinding poverty. One of the most dangerous and costly freedoms we possess is freedom of the womb.

Hooray, someone telling it like it is. Sorry some of you do not like to hear the truth. Sir, you have no idea how many think like you, political affiliations aside. But of course this country is dictated to by a very vocal minority.

Well said. I applaud every word.

We need to introduce forced labour!

I, like many other baby boomers are rapidly approaching retirement age, we need all these children to pay for our pensions.

Scrap sex education and ban contraception

Thanks Tom for publically expressing views which will be held by many in our society although few articulate them. You observations are not judgement but people do have to take responsibility for their own lives and the lives of those that they bring into this world. It’s good to hear common sense being spoken.

Well done.

For once, someone says what we are all thinking.

What makes me laugh in this current financial crisis is that the majority of people are not effected… why? because they are on the dole living of my taxes.

Once again, well done sir, hopfully the state this country finds itself in, where people are rewarded for not working, having 100’s of babies and generaly being selfish and self centred is starting to change.

I salute you.

This arguement has nothing whatsoever to do with being right wing or tory – it’s plain common sense.
Anyone who disputes the blindingly obvious fact that single teenage mums are making the wrong choice and the country is picking up the bill, frankly is on another planet!
As for the twits who spout about rights – do the poor poor kids not have rights too?
Tom – your arguement is sound in all but one way – why do you feel the need to divorce it from morality? Morality is the corner stone of a properly functioning society and the determination of our “enlightened” age to reject morality is the primary reason for the chaos we now endure.

A return to morality- whose morality Mr Harris? This is the Jeremy Kyle school of morality talking, some of us are busy trying to change lives, to give choices, swimming against the tide of waves of government quick fix policies. Put your money where your mouth is, get out in the community with your local health visiting team, put your judgements away and learn a little about the real world.

Amazed noone has mentioned that it is David Cameron who is opposing conditionality in the welfare system around single mums, and the Labour government trying to introduce it.

Credit where credit is due.

You were totally lost on the 1984 issue, but you have redeemed yourself on this one.

You are 100% spot on to point out, that choosing a lifestyle of state dependency is wrong. Of course there are those who end up there, through no fault of their own. No one is saying they should be vilified.

But there are many in this country that are simply reckless with their lives, because they know that the good old taxpayer funded state will look after them.

A true Socialist would know how much that kind of attitude hurts their cause, so I applaud Mr Harris on this stance.

I just hope it makes him think of the whole affect a Nanny State can have on society as a whole.

Mr Harris

I think Don Paskini (6.01pm) has offered you a very reasonable opportunity to carry forward your point of view, in the company of the Glasgow-based Poverty Alliance, where you will, I am sure, have the oppporunity to set forward your views on morality to those whom you accuse of immorality, or at least those who support them in their hour of need.

Woud you confirm that you will be able to attend such a meeting, if it could be arranged, at a time which suits your diary?

It is refreshing to read an article which directly addresses a serious problem in this country, and avoids pussy-footing around the issue at hand.

The problem is deep-rooted in our society and is a direct result of the terrible parents within out Cities and towns. By the age of 4 the damage is done. I see it everyday in Glasgow – smack-head mothers and their sheep-like children copying their every move. It really is disgusting.

And before you assume that i have had a private school, well to do upbringing you are wrong. My parents divorced when i was 5,20 years ago, my mother was and still is a sponger claiming benefits and milking my father dry of maintainence money week-in week-out. My 16 year old step-sister has a child. I despise their choice of lifestyle and outlook on life.

I went to Uni, got a good degree, qualified as a Chartered Accountant and now have a good job. Teenagers in poor areas of the country need to have aspirations and dreams. They need to fight for better and they need role models to get these points across. If teenagers do not realise they have opportunities, talents and skills then this problem will continue to exist into the next generation and the generation after that.

At last! Someone brave enough to tackle this subject! I am a Daily Mail reading Tory so you may not want me to agree with you.

With free contraception and abortion the tax payer should not have to pick up the tab for countless teenage pregnancies.

There is another very sad, often overlooked cost to this state sponsored teenage parenthood. That is, the offsping themselves. Many teeneagers can barely look after themsleves, let alone a baby.

I worked in different schools in the run up to Christmas. One school, in an area with a large intake from social housing, was full of pale, grey ill looking children. I was shocked by their appearance.

I met a lady who worked in a smilar school and she had many shocking stories of neglectto tell. Often the schools provide the only normality these children have.

I urge you to pursue this – visit the schools, talk to the staff and find out the human cost!

If this problem is approached from this angle it may gain even more support.

I never thought I’d see a post like this from a Labour MP.

Well said and thanks.
Maybe there is some hope after all.

My grandfather – born in Scotland – was a lifelong Labour voter and Co-Op Party member. He would have agreed with most of what you’ve said.

I live in England and will never vote NuLabour. But good to know that there are still some real socialists in the party.
Yes – some things are simply – WRONG – and it needs stating.

With respect,

I am currently in the second year of my doctorate and have been the project lead to an international project, as a software engineer, have worked in a world class research department and have won awards at University. My daughter is a member of youth parliament at 15, and hopes to eventually become a lawyer and my son is on the gifted and talented register at school. The stereotyping and victimising of teenage mothers is at best disgracefull. It is of no wonder the children grow up believing they are part of some underclass (which they are not), and perhaps betray thay sentiment!!!!!!!

As a parent yourself, i beg you to imagine having your child’s mother portrayed to them in that way.

Yours sincerely,

A Young Mother.

From a purely physical point of view, the earlier a woman had children the better – we are designed to have had our kids before we enter our twenties. Society, however, won’t accept that nature knows best. \Hence remarks like these.

Not all teenage mums are single mums. And not all single mums are hereditary spongers. But they are easy targets for otherwise anonymous MPs wanting to get their names in the papers.

I should also have said – to all you Nazis demanding that the children of unmarried mothers are taken away from them – are you listening to yourselves?? Of all the suggestions on this page, those are the most monstrous. Shame on you. And that includes the poster who suggested that the grandparents should have first dibs on such a stolen child – not all grandparents want to bring up more children once their own are no longer children. And can you imagine the scenes that would ensue in a family if the grandparents said ‘no’?? Or worse, by your standards – what if the grandparents are the kind of people who have brought up children to live their lives on the dole? Do they still get the offer of keeping their grandchild?

Didn’t think it through, did you?

This is all well and good – but what are you, as a Labour MP, going to do to change the benefits culture you have presided over for so long?

Mr Harris – this is one of the few times I think we largely agree on something. Congratulations on saying something that breaks the Labour Party mould.

Well, it’s about time that an MP had the balls to comment positively on a serious social issue and for it to come from a Labour MP should make the Tories hang their heads in shame.

I am a major landlord to many of these people you are talking about and people who have criticised you for your comments should get out into the real world and actually look for themselves at what is going on. Having many properties in run down areas I have often heard mothers encouraging their young daughters to get pregnant so that they will be entitled to a state paid for property of their own – mainly because the mother herself is expecting another child and will need the room! The woman who states that these young mothers eventually go on to further education and jobs is nothing but a naive idiot. Sadly, a new class has emerged in society – an ‘under class’. These are unintelligent and selfish parasites living off the rest of society. Personally, I think they should all be rounded up and placed in camps, away from decent society to send out a clear message that to behave as they do is socially unnaceptable. They should also be told that any children that they have that they cannot support themselves will be taken from them for adoption. That alone would immediately cause a decline in teenage pregnancies.

@Stewart: “The real traitors are those people who are re-engineering our society to be a godless, grey, degenerate mess – in order to enslave us to become a low wage, low self-esteem people who have no power or influence or ability to resist the tyranny.”

♥

Stewart, you do make me giggle.

But we’ve been through this (on Tom’s blog, on your blog, and via email). We live ina pluralistic society. You can’t impose God on people who don’t want it, and neither can you impose your own arbitrary moral values on people who don’t want them. Most of the western world fought wars to end that kind of oppressive, moralistic governance; and in the middle east, we’re stil fighting wars to end it.

It’s not about engineering anything: it’s about allowing people to live out their lives – and providing societal support for the needy as they do so. THAT is what the Labour movement is about.

The soundest report I’ve seen from a Labour party member ever.

Got a difficult path ahead convincing others of this problem and then attempting to rectify it.

Good luck on the quest.

And, all I can say to those who themselves are moralising about this “outrageous post” – prove him wrong.

Channel 4 (Louise Liversey) reported a study of sexual attitudes amongst 14-16 year olds. Key findings were that:

Boys thought it was acceptable to pressure girls into sex and to use alcohol to get them into bed.

Boys often used aggressive language about relationships

The boys suggested that a girlfriend who slept around would probably pay a physical price

In one of the boys’ focus groups there was even a suggestion that it was OK for a boy to force his girlfriend to have sex and the group started trying to differentiate between ‘just a bit of pressure’ and ‘proper rape’.

Sexual coercion of teenage girls, often by slightly to much older males is, in my experience, a key contributory factor underlying many under age pregnancies. The extent of this problem may not be appreciated because teenage mothers often cover up for boys or men who coerced them into having sex.

If I was developing a strategy for reducing teenage pregnancies, this would be top of my list of factors to focus on.

Completely agree.

Great, about time some one spoke out about what we have known to be going on for years and years. ( now the 3rd and 4th generation) Stop the benefits and housing

Auntie Flo is right. And comments like those made by Tom Harris only exacerbate the problem. Yet again, feckless, sexually aggressive young men cause problems and young girls get the blame. Is Tom Harris really fit to be a Parliamentarian? Not by this latest ill-informed, sexist tirade he isn’t. All he is doing is adding to the problem.

Annis : ‘From a purely physical point of view, the earlier a woman had children the better – we are designed to have had our kids before we enter our twenties. Society, however, won’t accept that nature knows best’

1) Women aren’t ‘designed’

2) The naturalistic fallacy won’t wash. By your lights you’re designed to be dead before you’re forty.

@ Andrew F

I wasn’t intending on commenting further, but you’ve got everything topsy-turvy.

Yes, we have been thro’ this on blogs and via email, so I hoped you might have learned something by now.

When you talk about “arbitrary moral values”, you mean the ones that worked fine for centuries, yes?

Have you stopped to think about what type of people don’t want a moral code?

I would rather have one, thanks. One that was tried and tested and not made up by mad politicians who want to know what we are up to every minute of the day.

“Most of the western world fought wars to end that kind of oppressive, moralistic governance; and in the middle east, we’re stil fighting wars to end it.”

Where do you come up with this stuff, Andrew? “We” fought wars against the Nazis, Napoleon and others because they threatened our country.

We won because we had right on our side.

Iraq and Afghanistan were no threat to us whatsoever. “We” are the ones imposing our “oppressive, moralistic governance” on them. (Without the morals, obviously). And stealing their resources – well US companies, mainly.

Now stop winding me up because what you said is not what the Labour Party is meant to be about.

As for your opposition to the Almighty – it seems to me that you are just trying to rebel against your religious family.

I’m sure they’re as impressed as I am. Why not really shock them and talk some sense.

This is the first time that I read your blog, and am impressed as you have shown the guts to state that underage kids having sex is wrong.Having come from a different culture, where moral values are the core of social structure, I’ve found Britons vociferously lauding an Extreme ‘anti-moralising’ stance, especially the Government and the health sector. That in itself is a moral standpoint-like a commandment–thou shalt not tell young girls and boys that they shalt not have sex! But thou should always encourage by the backhand these underage activities by peddling lollipop flavoured condoms and morning after pills at school doors.Thou should also teach them how to have’safe sex’ as opposed to teaching them, no sex if not married.–Even in these times of Evidenced based practice, and tons of evidence showing that the best outcomes for children and society as a whole,comes from progeny of loving and stable marriages, the ‘non-moralising’ moralising brigade goes on preaching their gospel and inculturating a society fit for the —fill in the blanks with the most appropriate word – your choice–as thats the in thing nowadays–choice, choice and more choice.

‘Yet again, feckless, sexually aggressive young men cause problems and young girls get the blame’

Oh right, it’s all the fault of the boys.

Can’t have it both ways. Either girls are sweet little empty-headed things hardly responsible for themselves and certainly not capable of being responsible for their babies; or they’re not. Which are you claiming to be the case?

Well, all I can say Mr Harris is that you and others like you are the very reason people like myself have left the Labour Party in their droves after a lifetime of supporting the Party.

You are simply an utter disgrace to not only Labour, but to society in general.

You clearly have a distinct lack of knowledge or understanding of the real issues out there. As a single mother myself, I put myself through school, university (two degrees) and I now have a very successful business – all done without the help or assistance of government benifts and I have to say the help or support of a man. I have raised three fantastic kids during that time, all of whom excel academically. So, you see when you make vast generalisations, you don’t recognise that many of us out there actually in reality prove you wrong.

It is extremely sad that you, as a middle-class married family man believe that you even remotely understand about the challenges people in the real world have to face up to.

I personally, will be campaiging against you at the next general election pureley on the basis of your disgraceful comments on this issue. Indeed, I may even STAND against you – then you will see who is the better person – the middle classed attention seeking idiot or the single mother of three who has two university degrees, worked to build a successful and prosperous career and business without the help of hand-out!

I would say, ‘watch this space’ – in the meantime, perhaps you would like some of my professional reputaion management advice and support? Somethin tells me that you may need it? Although, I have to say I tend to be somewhat choosey of which individuals I take on as clients!

And what the hell would you know about morality? you are in the Labour Party backer of Bush and his insane murders of hundreds of thousands of men women and children in an illegal war.

I hope your words choke you at the next election as you won’t win.

This is the first time I’ve read your blog, or, to be honest, even heard of you… you’re the MP for Glasgow south? I see, very important post of course – you’ll be discussing these matters with Gordon soon, no doubt…

Time to get off the high horse and stop staring at that army of teenage girls and look at your city. It’s the most poverty stricken in the United Kingdom, and I’ll be willing to bet the South is almost as bad as the East.

Get off the blog and do your job. You weren’t elected to generalise and persecute thousands of young parents. I was one of them. I’m in my twenties and highly successful, as is my wife – 16 when she gave birth. How many of these teenage mothers have you met at your surgery? Would you meet them, and discuss your outrageously (BNP nevermind Conservative) opinion of a group of people who’ve taken the hardest challenge they ever could? What about offering them some HELP to work, instead of casting your poisonous judgments on them.

Abortion is WRONG. Murder is WRONG. Keeping an innocent life and trying to give it the best possible chance at all the wonderful things this world has to offer (certainly NOT the mindlessly stupid opinion that life is in a qualification). On that opinion, I wonder how many young teenagers go straight to University for the security of accommodation (paid by parents) and drug/ drinking money provided by student loans? I know a lot, and my life in my flat with my wife and baby and now puppy (oh no, have I just done something WRONG by taking on another responsibility?!) is worth tenfold of their hungover education (to fill those stock market/ civil servant roles SO well as they have over the last decade!).

Your politics are archaic. They remind me exactly why I appreciate my relatively poor upbringing, and seeing a retired father with his principals intact. A founder of the East Mains Labour seat – the one the esteemed Sir (ha!) Ken Collins used (operative word) for his rise to glory – and the first to leave upon it’s corruption.

Leave Scotland alone Labour, you’ve raped it long enough. And do us all a favour Tom, start fixing your part of the city, get rid of the drug dealers, murderers and rapists, then maybe we can get delusions of grandeur and save the teenage army…. so worth saving as it is.

Jack Affleck

Excellent! Yet more faux-indignation and embarrassingly shallow pretend outrage from someone who realises that his gravy train is rapidly approaching its terminus.

Everyone has known this for ages, Tom. Yet you and your ilk actively encouraged it.

It is too late to try and woo us Serfs with “oh, isn’t it terrible? I agree with you, decent normal working people…”. It’s too late to patronise yourself out of it, you’ve had 8 years to make your stance clear and do something about it. You’ve not.

The games up Tommy.

Totally agree…

Actually, not totally, but I think the sentiments are there. Kudos for having the gumption to actually speak out about one of the biggest social disasters of our time.

The state of the nation is now one in which people believe they have a *right* to get knocked and have the State take care of things. Well I’m part of that State and my wife and I work damn hard to keep one child and a home, and yet I find myself paying for these freeloading members of society to have multiple kids from different fathers (and yes I do have family ties to that situation, so I can speak about it) and have a very comfortable existence.

Do I feel hard done to….you’re damn right I do.

Sod the bleeding hearted liberals with the “won’t someone think of the children” attitude. Our society has gone to the dogs and it’s the hug a hoodie attitude that has brought about the demise of this nation.

You can’t blame politics for some parent(s) not giving a rats about what their kids are upto, you blame the parents. Some of the comments here seems to be sidestepping that.

Game’s up… Sorry.

I disagree with pretty much all that Mr Affleck said (and I was brought up by a single mother) except for the bit about “get rid of the drug dealers, murderers and rapists”.

Trouble is that there is a huge tax-funded class of people who depend on the existence of crime, single-parenthood and other such issues for a living. You will make yourself their enemy. Good luck to you. I thought Frank Field was the only sane person in the PLP – there now appear to be two.

Well said.

The only people in the UK who will disagree with you are those that didn’t complete an education themselves, and those who stand to profit from the PC bollocks that comes out of your party, the party that allowed and even encouraged this mess to arise.

There is not problem with underage sex, I was 11 my girl friend was 13.
Its the parents, who make talking about sex a nono, so the kids have no edjucation about it and do everything wrong.
For example, the father of my gf, when she got the first period he talked with her about, that from now on, if she have sex, use a condom. I remember, in school, a girl got her period and begun to cry and paniced because she did not know why she is bleeding.

Then, I aggree, there should be a law with abortion and women under 18 no children only if, maybe her family is financial healthy. Sorry, but I think poor people should not have children, people with no jobs, should not have children – I don’t talk about marriage, it is nothing wrong being not married, my parents are not married.
Then there is an other think what worries me, excluding children from school, its backfireing, more should they be forced to get edjucation then excluding them…

Well said Jack Affleck, Tom get the southside in order you know the area you were voted in to help. Generalised comments about groups arent big or clever ( really would you generalise about an ethnic group and expect no backlash?). I was born to a young mum, that has nothing to do with how i live today or how she lives, its to do with support from society and fellow family members, sticks dont work very well. Those who will scrounge will find a way around it all the time.

I’ve added my tuppence worth here. Regardless of whether or not you agree with Mr Harris, I think that the way he went about advancing his case made change less, not more likely:

http://blog.matthewcain.co.uk/the-folly-of-tom-harris-mp/

Thank goodness for a Labour MP who speaks his mind at last on teenage pregnancies.
If there were more openness like this in the Labour party, I might vote for them again.

I knew I should have invested in batten-down hatches last week Tom!

I agree with everything you say. Being a teenager myself, at the age of 18, seeing girls I went to school with pushing prams, I can’t hide my shock when walking past. However, should these young mothers, who clearly are expecting to live off the state, be allowed to? Just because I’m choosing an education over a child at the moment I’m
not being given benefits and a house? It’s an absoulute joke!

“I can no longer pretend that the army of teenage mothers living off the state is anything other than a national catastrophe”

Spot.On.

The scary thing is, I’ts not just the children that have come from a household where the paretns are living off the state benefits, children that have come from respectable homes are now becoming pregnant.

Children are being brought up into a world where their mothers are living off the state, with no intent of finding a job.

No matter what anyone says, they will not go back into education. Why would they when they’re being given money for doing nothing? I mean, what chance do we have for the next generation?

I can sit and say all this but cannot think of a solution to the problem. But then again, that’s not my job. This situation needs to stop being seen as acceptable, simply because it is not. I would be mortified to tell those that I know that I am pregnant. Knowing that they would be thinking just as do,

‘That’s a disgrace’

Maybe I’m one of the rare teenagers who is old fashioned and wants to have a life, get married and actually have money to bring up a child, other than relying on the taxpayer.

One final thing. A friend of mine has a friend who is a typical tennage mother, living off the state and in her own house. I know how expensive driving lessons are plus the costs of tests so this really got my blood boiling. The thing that got me was that her driving lessons were getting paid for! Why? Because she said she needed to drive to be able to get from A to B with her child. And is she going to buy a car? Or will that come out of my hard working Mum and Dad’s pockets as well?

Sorry Tom, I was quoting Caron’s misquote of you. Consider it retracted…

One final thing – this like everything is another of Labour’s diversions away from the matters at hand – they’re losing OUR country one economic and social step at a time, so roll Tom to insult masses of the community with his ‘outrageous views’, to distract the very same mass from the real problems at hand – like how the millions who’ve lost their jobs can find another to support their families… their not teenagers, but they’re now in exactly the same WRONG situation you’ve tyrannized, Tom, and it’s actually a situation your government’s mismanagement has landed them in.

I wonder if the unemployed army will be so forgiving next election….

Oh well, it’s not like the Tories don’t feel the same about state-mum’s, but I know they’ll do a better (and far more diplomatic) job of helping these people make the most of their lives – not tell them it’s over because they don’t have (an increasingly easy to get … 94 PERCENT in England!) set of meaningless qualifications followed by a completely pointless and unrewarding career in… no doubt teaching or accountancy.

We know you want that for the country you’ve screwed up for 10 years Tom, so everyone is ignorantly blissful with their student loans and condoms and droves of drugs and alcohol.

I won’t indulge another of the member of the corrupt Labour web by continuing to debate issues he’s clearly never encountered on his blog. Get out onto Pollockshields road and yell out your views…. I’ll meet you there in 20 minutes (from the West End…. because that’s where all teenage families end up don’t you know…. not quite Easterhouse is it?)

PS. Very pleased Meredith validated my point so well by getting himself arrested today.

Jack Affleck

Hi Tom,

I happen to be a teenage mother but i work always have since i have been able to infact, i work for a council i have been to college i have my own house and have excepted no hand out’s from anyone. its not only teenage mothers that live off benefits but people of all ages and diffrences. i do think your discrimanating against a group or people because you do not understand people circumstance’s. maybe you should go out there and meet teenage mum’s and find out then you could at least have the right to give a in dept comment like you have. i have done well for myself there is no diffrence from me and someone with children double my age and thats all it is ‘age’, i am 19. i work, i pay my own rent, my own council tax my nursery fees, and most of all my children are well cared for and loved.

Ok, honestly my last PS. I’ll quote a man who knew when to adapt and accept, and changed the world like you want to for the better, Tom, so go and listen to him, and see if you can help these people instead of hating them :

“Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.”

Jack Affleck.

Spot on, Tom. Followed a link from another blog and read your post and I couldn’t agree more. It’s unusual to see a Labour MP nailing his colours to the mast like this, so more power to your pen for having the guts.

I’ve got relatives in exactly the position you write about, none of them have *ever* worked and none of them have the slightest inclination to change. And they think people who don’t live life on ‘The Nash’ are mugs. There’s 4 girls in the family, and they’re all been sprogged up by the time they’re 19…..not a father in sight, either..

Mugs who get up in the morning, go to work, provide for their own kids and pay taxes so those who don’t bother can get by. It stinks.

Good luck in the future, I for one will read more of your stuff.

@Jack Affleck

Sheer brilliance. I couldn’t have parodied a certain sort of person and sentiment any better than by quoting early Dylan if I’d had a lifetime to think about it.

Good post Tom, but you forget any talk of getting people off benefits is right wing chat and guaranteed to get nuLabour heckers out. People like you and Frank talking plain common sense don’t cut it anymore. This I think is a lost cause until a future generation, perhaps not so liberal as our pick it up.
I notice you got a few hecklers in these comments, one even raised Thacher..!! For goodness how much longer are people going to blame her… that was 20 – 30 years ago…!! When are we going to admit that we are all big boys now and can sometimes change what “Mama” did 25 years ago. Labour has been in power for 12 years, for Christ sake.

Sums it up through, no aspiration in NuLabour or its supporters… cant even reverse the so called hated things that Thatcher did.. just blame her!!

Support for hard work (high taxes, Browns pension grab), decent values (rates for savers), fairness, (Troughing, bankers,) seems to to be side lined in modern Britain.

I once supported Labour but I will stand by as this shower are wiped out in the next election…

I think you raise a very valid point Tom!

The govt should scrap benefits for all under 18 moms, may be that will force these kids to have safe sex (if not stop having it all together).

Oh Yes, your comment is extremely ignorant, this would cause a rise in abortions these girl are doing the best thing rather than having there babies aborted if it happens it happens we should try to make teenages more aware instead of taking money away from them, they need supported and helped.

“Fear not the path of truth for the lack of people walking on it.” RFK 1968

The working class are not going to stand back and pay high taxes for hordes of benefits scroungers, greedy bankers, fat cats, rich tax havens.. there will be a day of reckoning.

Andrew F
Thursday 5 March 2009 at 11:40 am
…. You’re a traitor. You’re a Judas.——————————————

Ouch – when good love goes bad.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.

Nice post, mind. Perhaps you could do a series of posts on Nulabour failures.

ps did you or your co-conspirators do a press release of your piece? I can’t believe Fleet Street picked up on it at the same time off their own backs.

Wow a labour MP talking sense.

The moral duty of society or individuals to care for people who cannot care for themselves lasts only until people start to deliberatly place themselves in positions where they cannot look after themselves.

Having a child when you have no ability to support it is just such an action. The commentor John has made the point that no future children should receive these benefits and he is right.

However this removal of future benefits should also be combined with new benefits that are given in the short term to people who could look after themselves when they fell pregnant but now cannot. e.g. because of divorce, sickness, unemployment etc.

Benefits are supposed to be an insurance against things going wrong in the future. All benefits should have a time limit on them and almost all benefits should require a minimum level of contribution prior to claiming (e.g four years paying tax)

Hi Tom, I’m an avid follower of your tweets and don’t think I fall on either side of the political spectrum. I like straight talking and this post is certainly that. But two things struck me when I read it:

One, you are kind of stating the obvious.
Two, some of the reaction in the subsequent comments is pretty over-the-top. Perhaps I need to read more MPs’ blogs to see what they are comparing this post to. Words like ‘brave’ and ‘controversial’ have been used when really, it’s just common sense.

Good on you for dispensing some but what really would’ve been ‘brave’ and ‘controversial’ would’ve been to propose an actual solution or policy to counter the problem.

Simply highlighting the problem, no matter how articulately it is done, is the easy bit. What can be done / will be done to fix it?

Completely agree with comments re young girls choosing a baby, (not motherhood with the responsibilities attached)over actually contributing to society. It is an easy route to have a baby then sit back and let the benfits roll in. As someone who is currently expecting their first child I know I can care for my child and adequately provide for their future without relying on state handouts.

I agree with your comment. The hostility towards such people is another matter. Government statistics indicate that teenage pregnancies are higher in poorer and deprived sectors of society (Index of Local Deprivation) with poverty as a cause. It is disappointing that the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy prepared by the government is failing as births in this age group are on the rise again. I think myself that we permit too many opt outs for parents regarding sex education in schools. All research indicates that the level of ignorance about sexual health, contraception etc is high in this country. Other countries in Europe have a much more open attitude towards sex education and providing contraception and consequentially a lower teenage birth rate.

There is a debate to be had about whether welfare payments influences teenage pregnancy. Bill Clinton stopped welfare payments to those under 18 years and, indeed powers to withold benefit for those under 21 years. As a result America is reducing teenage pregnancy and this is mostly through a high abortion rate. There seems little doubt that the lack of welfare payments has been influential as well as a much more harsh system to ensure fathers pay child support. France too has stricter benefits for single mothers- payment is for one year or until youngest child reaches 3. When the government recently discussed mothers on benefit working when their children reached a specific (and generous age) all the specific interest groups were up in arms. The debate about this issue failed to take into account the view of the middle road people. Those of us who believe that we must help when the need arises but also believe that those able should work and provide for themselves.

It is easy for some people to enter into welfare supported existence particularly if all those around you are doing the same. It seems to me that this culture must be broken and I have to believe that it can be and indeed should be if we are to raise the aspirations of these young people. We have tried all the bribes – paying poorer children to remain in education etc. Sadly, I think that the only way we can influence the high teenage birth rate is to tighten rules regarding state help.

I think that the government has always aspired to lift children out of poverty. The introduction of tax credits and investment in skills training etc ensured that those in low paid employment gained financially to move them on from benefits. We have a responsibility to all – even teenage mothers. However, this does not remove parental responsibility and if the same parents were financially responsible then teenage pregancy would fall. The parents would ensure that contraception was used by their offspring. The State’s responsibility is to ensure that teenagers complete their education and provide childcare to ensure this occurs. We should not provide independent accommodation nor benefits to these young people.

Well done for raising this issue Tom. I find the whole subject very sad. It is symptomatic of how our society is developing. Too many people believe that the state will provide and personal responsibility for ones living is unimportant. Perhaps now that we are in economic decline that decisions will be made to ensure that the government uses the taxpayer’s money more wisely.

Do you support your colleague who suggested the introduction of contraceptive to methadone prescriptions?

I heard you being interviewed on Radio Scotland and thought could this be the beginning of something, with someone who can take politics in Scotland in a new direction?

There are many who cannot subscribe to the narrow parameters of the SNP/Labour in Scotland, perhaps of centre-right persuasion but not exclusively and who do not have a credible choice…..step forward Tom

@jane ‘Government statistics indicate that teenage pregnancies are higher in poorer and deprived sectors of society (Index of Local Deprivation) with poverty as a cause’

Now there’s a misuse of stats. Explain, please, which statistics established a that poverty was a ’cause’ of teenage pregnacies? What was the methodology?

Good lord, the first time I’ve ever agreed with a Labour MP!

I was unemployed for a time last year, and it was the most guilt-filled and depressing time I’ve had for a while. I find it incredibly sad that so many people will quite happily live their lives on benefits and even think they are entitled to them without ever having lifted a finger to help themselves.

Having children deliberately to get benefits is disgusting.

And another thing…. (chortle!)

I agree with you about people branding this “right wing”. It most certainly isn’t.

The ideal is obviously to have everyone in employment, earning money, paying tax, and producing an output for the economy.

However, there are whole communities trapped in this country in a cycle of dependency, where they are not producing an output, and who up until now have been allowed to stagnate through being prevented from falling into poverty through the government policy of simply handing over enough cash so that they don’t fall under the poverty line.

As these communities swell through large families encouraged and paid for by the government, who equally then turn around and have large families of their own due to the benefits system, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realise that we have a serious problem here. One that is not only totally unsustainable, but one that will only cause increasing civil unrest and social problems.

So if it really is “right wing”, for people to call for the abolition of child related benefits for all children born after say March 2010 (so as not to catch currently pregnant women), and for people to pay for their own families and their own living, and the renovation of the welfare state so that these communites HAVE to work to live, no more free rides, and that they are given all the support they need to get them to work. If that’s all right wing, then the left wing really is in serious trouble.

What the government and the politians fail to understand is that people aren’t radical. We all have reasonable expectations. We expect to have to work to live and to pay tax. We expect to have to pay benefits to those with severe disabilities and who legitimately can’t work so that they don’t fall into abject poverty. What we don’t expect, and will no longer tolerate is people openly taking the piss.

Here’s an example of what i’m talking about: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/article1620607.ece

People have had enough. There are people in Britain right now who can work, but aren’t because they don’t need to because the state is happy to give them a living. It’s a disgrace.

The benefits system is such that for some couples, they will be WORSE off should they get jobs.

How did we get to this? How did we get to the point where the benefits system is a living rather than a safety net? Who asked for this? No-one! The benefits system was never designed to be that, and it’s about time it was returned to what it was always intended to be.

If all that really is a “right wing” philosophy, then the left wing is totally unfit for purpose, unfit to govern, and should be rightly buried in favour of a two party right wing system like the American’s have.

Pleased to read your comments in my Metro this morning. Time something was done to end this benefit culture. It would greatly reduce the teenage pregnancy numbers.

@ No Place To Call Home

Are they seriously planning to add contraceptive to methadone?

So even less personal responsibility will be required, and the natural outcome will be even greater problems.

We have to encourage people to be more responsible for themselves rather than the state controlling their bodies via drugs! It’s obscene.

The answers lie in God, goodness, justice, hope and love.

Who wants my vote?

The fact that this is a controversial opinion amongst Labour supporters is extremely alarming. To most of us it’s just common sense. It’s beginning to dawn on me just how much the people running the country for the last ten years have been lunatic ideologues.

“Do you support your colleague who suggested the introduction of contraceptive to methadone prescriptions?”

This sounds like an excellent idea and I’ve no idea why it’s already being done.

Also, you could make the glue on the back of envelopes in the dole office out of crushed contraceptive pills mixed with prozac…

Surely it should be one of the priorities for us on the left to get as many individuals off benefit and into work as is possible.

Whereas the Tory right would look upon welfare reform as a vehicle for reducing the size of the welfare state so they can save money in order to pay for tax cuts for the rich, the left should use welfare reform as a platform to end that viscous circle known as the benefits trap, though expensive for the state in monetary terms, more importantly the benefits trap is devastating for society and especially for those caught in it. Surely it cant be right that we are now seeing upwards of three generations of the same families who have never worked and surely nobody in their right mind can agree that this is acceptable.

Yes as has been illustrated on a number of occasions in this thread there are those young mothers who make a great success of bringing up their children single handedly who then go on to be successful in their own right, of course these families should be supported and encouraged by both the state and society, but equally there are those young people who are born into the benefits trap get no encouragement from their parents and yes there are those young girls who will get themselves pregnant either by design or through ignorance who see this as the only way to get themselves a home and an income. Likewise there are young men who are likely to disappear when they get a girl pregnant because they have no respect for themselves or others. And so the cycle continues.

Kudos to Tom for having the courage to stick his head above the parapets to raise this issue, and I think that some of the comments that have been directed at him are as well as being unfair, do both Tom and the debate a great disservice.

What needs to be done to end this is the million dollar question and hopefully by Tom entering the debate and raising the profile of this issue we are at least moving in the right direction.

er, Richard;

Do you really think it’s wrong to prevent opiate addicts from having children?

Standby for the “Many smackheads make excellent mothers….” routine.

Ahem… teenage mothers living off the state? I’m sorry Tom, but wasn’t it the Labour Party who established the Welfare State?

Oh and not to mention that there are many teenage mothers out there who do a fine job.

There may be some teenage mothers out there who don’t go on to lead a ‘prosperous’ life like yours, but don’t go slapping a label on to people whose circumstances you are not even aware of.

For all of you congratulating Tom on voicing his opinion, get a grip. Get off your blogs, out your seats and go and look at the world. There are far more serious issues – even in a local context. Teenagers binge drinking in the street, drug abuse, knife crime, etc. THESE ARE REAL PROBLEMS.

Stop being so right wing, Tom.

I am human and I need to be loved…just like everybody else does.

The Smiths

Mr. Harris,

I have reached this post after 275 other commentors, so you must excuse me if someone has made this point before.

There are those who might consider this post to be an extremely cynical attempt to project an image of its author as a populist social conservative, of a type for whom the parishioners of Christ the King might cast their vote in the forthcoming General Election.

But you’re an MP, and of course wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing.

How does it feel, Mr Harris, to have been part of a government that has systematically attacked marriage and the family?

How does it feel, Mr Harris, to have stood on the same side of the house as a government that passed the SOD legislation, the Civil Partnership Act, welfare reform that makes no distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children, between married couples and cohabiting people?

How does it feel, Mr Harris, to have been part of a government that abolished spouses and replaced them with “partners”.

If I was you, I’d be feeling sick to my stomach. And if I was one of the founders of the Labour party, I’d be spinning in my grave.

Furthermore, please let’s stop talking about “single mums”. My father died when I was a child, leaving my mother to bring up three children. She was a single mum.

What is really meant is “unmarried mum” – a person who conceives a child without the permanent commitment of a husband.

@ Hibbo.

“Do you really think it’s wrong to prevent opiate addicts from having children?”

No. I actually think that it should be compulsory for drug addicts to be temporarily sterilised.

‘Do you really think it’s wrong to prevent opiate addicts from having children’

I’d rather they didn’t and I don’t see why i would be expected to pay for their choice.

Sorry, Tom. I just want to suggest to pesky Richard and David Jones that they do some research on eugenics.

Google “Georgia Guidestones” while you’re at it.

You thought the Nazis were bad?

We already have 200,000 abortions pa in this country.

We now have legalised forms of euthanasia and aiding suicide.

The sperm count is well down across the western world (how and by whom?)

And you two now want to decide who gets to even reproduce? What next: contraceptive in alcohol?

What else would you suggest? A Logan’s Run scenario and be done with it?

A lot of science ‘fiction’ has already come true. That’s what happens when lunatics are in control. What’s your excuse? Selfishness? Pride at how wonderful you are compared to others?

Do you think the ’system’ gives two hoots about you?

I feel that a lot of you are being a little harsh on Mr. Harris – better late than never and at least he is ’standing up to be counted’ at last. Who knows, perhaps more Labour MP’s will join him with support and eventually all say ‘Sorry, we got it dreadfully wrong. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and all the other cronies have destroyed everything good about this country and we few are going to try to right the wrongs’. I won’t hold my breath though ha ha.

I have a problem with the situation that we now have whereas idiots who have no experience and little intelligence let alone common sense, set themselves up as ‘experts’ and voice strong opinions in support of the break down of our society – they are very dangerous people and are clones of so many leading Labour MP’s. Question: How many Cabinet Ministers have ever had a real job? Answer: Probably none! Yet, these people are systematically dismantling our social structure and the code by which it runs. Who can blame the teenage mother for following the path of total state dependancy? She’s human, probably working class and not very intelligent so it’s in her nature. It is the system that is wrong, not the benefactors. The sooner that this social cancer that the Labour Party has nutured is cut out, the better. Before things get better people need to have pride – total state dependancy destroys pride, it doe not instill it.

Off topic – “Logan’s Run” was a great film. I’ve heard that they’re doing a remake which is bound to be crappy.

@ Mark Taylor – “How many Cabinet Ministers have ever had a real job?”

If you exclude positions within the media sector and paid consultancy within industry then the answer is basically none (I think one of them was a teacher once?).

In fairness that probably explains why the country’s going to hell in a rocket-powered handcart.

-=-=-

On a more positive note there’s only 460 days until Polling Day so how much damage can Labour possibly do in that little time?

@Stewart Cowan – I’ll raise you on the patronisng stakes and suggest you haven’t thought through your the attitude to young single ppor teenages you’ve just revealed.

You think my wishing there would be fewer single teenage pregnancies and wondering why I should be expected to pay for someone else’s choices is something to do with eugenics. A little reminder for you: eugenics attempted to improve the common gene pool by limiting the reproductive success of those with bad genes.

So you think that the single teenage mums are genetically inferior then? Because my position has nothing to do with eugenics, does it, unless you think that’s the case.

Did you even suspect you were letting us know how you think of the poor?

Richard.
Quite a lot of damage actually!

Unfortunately they are out of control – unchecked by the wishey-washey liberal David Cameron. 460 days is a hell of a long time in politics, labour have severely damaged my industry in a lot less than this by simply rewriting the law. I’ll explain how: For years, people on benefits could have their rental benefit payments made directly to the landlord. This was fine because these people could not manage money very well and a lot of them had drug and alcohol addiction problems too however, the government, in what could only possibly be an attempt to destroy the private rental sector, took away this option, forcibly making payments direct to the tenants!!!! I have heard of some areas in Lancashire where severe rent arrears are running at 80%. The result – landlords en-masse refusing to let properties to DSS tenants (what does anyone expect?) and these people being labelled as scum that should be in the gutter. This does not benefit society in any way and the introduction of the LHA should be immediately reversed. I could go on but won’t because this is not the place.

Mr. Harris, if you have had the wake up call I think you have, you have many, many issues to examine before you realise just what damage has been done over the past decade.

If this had come from anyone else, other than a politician I would probably have said fair point but given Labour’s expenses dealings (the Home Secretary and Chancellor spring immediately to mind), I really think that no member of your party is in a position to lecture anyone on morality. £24,000 a year for the “main residence” in Ms Smith’s sister’s spare room? We believe you, not! Plus would any party that supports the odious George Bush be regarded as ‘moral’.

Onto the point, welfare to work is hare brained. Is it too much like hard work to get people into real jobs, paying the going rate. Once you do this, I think you’ll find that the need for the likes of housing and council tax benefit will no longer be required, or to a lesser degree. Under ‘welfare to work’ all this is still needed. But then again, your government has never tackled problem areas head on, instead punishing those who abide by the rules.

While it might sound cruel, perhaps the time has come to stop free housing to the teenage ‘parents’. You can offer free contraception etc. all you like but the carrot of a free house will render any preventative measures meaningless.

@ David Jones

What are you going on about? I was summarising what I thought YOUR position looked like, not mine, you wilf.

What I was saying is that when you start deciding who is and who is not allowed to ‘breed’ then we are in trouble, yet this is exactly what you favour.

As for the poor – I was one of them for many years, but then you were not to know before you started sounding off, were you? I decided it was up to me, not anyone else, to improve my own conditions.

So I don’t think single teenage mums are ‘genetically inferior’ in the slightest. I think you might be.

@Stewart Cowan – try to follow. You suggested my reluctance to fund the lifestyle choices of pregnant teenagers was akin to eugenics.

Eugenicists tried to improve the gene pool by reducing the reproductive success of those with less desirable genes.

So your analogy can only make sense even in your confused mind if you believe that the poor have less desirable genes.

Is that in fact your view?

Sorry Tom,

@ David Jones,

“You suggested my reluctance to fund the lifestyle choices of pregnant teenagers was akin to eugenics.”

That’s not what I meant. Perhaps I misunderstood your comment at 11:08 am:

“I’d rather they didn’t (i.e. opiate addicts have children) and I don’t see why i would be expected to pay for their choice.”

I’d rather not pay for their choice either. Who would? I presumed you were agreeing with Richard, who said “I actually think that it should be compulsory for drug addicts to be temporarily sterilised.”

Perhaps I was presumptuous in associating you with Richard, in which case, I apologise – it is quite an insult!

If you followed my views over my blogging history, you’ll see I am certainly not into eugenics in any way, including sterilisation and abortion.

I do not presume to be any better a person than a single mum on benefits. I believe they should be lifted out of poverty and hopelessness through empowering them to develop and use their talents and to allow them to value themselves as human beings.

In the classroom, they need to be taught self-respect and self-esteem and the benefits of family life and ditch this evil, destructive political correctness which has brought us to this situation.

‘In the classroom, they need to be taught self-respect and self-esteem’

In the classroom they need to be taught Maths and English and Physics and Chemistry and Biology and History and Geography…

I find they have more than enough self-esteem, usually with precious little achievement, promise, talent, imagination, curiosity, independence or strength of character to justify the remarkably high regard in which they hold themselves.

@ David Jones,

If they had more self-respect and self-esteem, they wouldn’t be satisfied with a life on benefits. Don’t confuse bravado with self-esteem, it is often a guise to camouflage the lack of it and clearly any girl who gets pregnant to jump the council housing queue, doesn’t have the biggest amount of self-respect in the world.

I’m not attacking anyone, just stating the facts. People need more hope and more opportunity. It does the poor no good to pretend everything’s just fine. Give benefits to those who really need them, but there should be a lot more to folks’ lives than knowing where the next meal’s coming from.

@Stewart Cowan : You most certainly are not just stating facts.

So the problem isn’t education, sex education, or poverty? It’s lack of self-esteem?

And self-esteem has plummeted in recent times because…?

@David Jones

Statistics as you are aware also have a narrative explanation. That is what I used in my comment. I have a particular interest in this subject and read extensively. To assist, I will provide a few studies which indicate economic factors influence teenage pregnancy.

- Joseph Rowntree Foundation (individual interviews)
- Social Exclusion Unit using a raft of government data

- Childhood Poverty, Early Motherhood and Adult Social exclusion by LSE etc

- There are also reviews by academics into the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy

- Also many European Academic Studies comparing other countries welfare systems, sex education, contraceptive availability and the gap between rich and poor.

I read a report which compared teenage pregancy against the index of local deprivation. (This tool compares income, employment, health, education etc within a geographical area to assess deprivation and direct resources). The clear view was that teenage pregnancy was far greater in the areas that were deprived. For example, in the NE area teenage pregancy was at some 57% as compared to 12% in areas that were not deprived. Scotland has also undertaken similar studies.

I would have thought that using information gained from councils, schools, employment offices, health authorities etc are excellent in providing raw data to determine deprivation. Combine this with the percentage of young people becoming pregnant and test the hypothesis that poverty and deprivation are major influences seems a pretty convincing methodology to me. The academic study persuaded me.

@jane

You asserted a cause, not a correlation. You said:

‘…with poverty as a cause…’

which is what I correctly termed a misuse of stats. You seem not to understand that a correlation is not a cause and that the research you cite doesn’t prove a cause.

‘The academic study persuaded me’

Apparently it persuaded you of something it can’t possibly demonstrate.

@ David Jones

You’re not pesky Richard in disguise are you?

“And self-esteem has plummeted in recent times because…”

Among other things: family breakdown; failing to live up to images in magazines and films; teaching children that they are nothing but mutated pond slime AND THE CULTURE OF BENEFITS DEPENDENCY.

Well said. Labour need to get this sort of thinking into their mainstream. If the Tories have the sense (God forbid) to nail these colours to their mast, we’ll be stuffed next election. Mr & Mrs Working Class are rightly tired of bankrolling social meltdown.

So will Tom be made harriet’s assistant in planning labour’s agenda for the euro elections?

Mr and Mrs Working Class are rightly tired of bankrolling social breakdown, Sylvie says.

Perhaps if David Davis had been elected leader, the Tories might stand a better chance of stealing Labour´s core voters.

At present, though – in a few places at least – it does seem as though the BNP is successfully connecting with traditional Labour voters.

Voters becoming tired of policies which undermine the traditional family, reward useless people and destroy this country´s economy have found somewhere else to go.

It is fortunate for Labour that the BNP is only a very small party.

How terribly typical for women to be blamed by teh menz for all the world ills – conventiently ignoring the menz role in most of them.

Dissapointing that it should be from a Labour MP, though.

@Sal

>be blamed by teh menz for all the world ills

Nobody did that.

However, if you wish to touch upon responsibility, what do you think of teenagers getting pregnant without the means of supporting their children? The girls are not at all responsible are they? Poor little put-upon empty-headed flibbertigibbets, easily led astray? That’s your view of women, is it?

if not then you have to acknowledge that they are to some extent culpable. Don’t they.

Excellent post which shows that you fill the gap between PC and normality. Another conundrum; why are the unemployed entitled to free child care? Surely such entitlement should be directed to low income families allowing them to continue in employment.

So, we have debated the situation, we all seem to admit that there is a real problem on a huge scale. We all feel we know what needs to be done to reverse the erosion of society, yet does any one of us know a single person in the whole of the UK who is going to actually do something about it??????????????

NOT FROM WHERE I’M STANDING, COMRADES!

Yes there are people out there who will try to work the system – but that is not confined to single teenage mothers. We all know that many politicians from across the political divide have worked the system themselves.

This situation is made worse by Mr Harris’s colleagues at Westminster – having dealt with the Child Support Agency to actually get them to obtain money owed to me by my ex-husband for a number of years (he earns around £60k) the bottom line is the incompetencies of that department force more families to struggle than any other government agency – my example is just one of thousands – he is allowed to avoid paying what he should be to me as the sole carer of his children, the CSA just don’t bother to use the extended powers they have to pursue money that belongs to my children. It is much easier for them to blame the single mothers, rather than actually making fathers take responsibility – see today’s observer article and you wil see that the government are taking hundreds of staff away from agencies like the CSA to deal with the unemployed in order to make their unemployment figures look better.

If i was on benefits, the CSA would chase my ex for the money as it would be in their interests to do this as they would have to pay less benefits to me.

Instead, because i choose to work long hours, to build up a young business aftern being made redundant from the NHS, my children suffer. Having nearly lost my house because of being made redundant (and never once having claimed benefits, my children REALLY have suffered because of the government’s hypocracy all for the sake of helping it to save face!!

Of course, right and wrong are a matter of opinion. And I, for one, would hesitate to make value judgements about another’s choices without first knowing the intimate details of their lives, their circumstances, etc. I’m not a moral relativist but I do feel that this is a lot more complicated than just black and white.

But whether I agree with your list of “because it’s wrong” statements isn’t really the point.

The point is that right or wrong, no matter how good an example the Labour Party or any other party set for society, isn’t going to make any difference in the lives of our young people. We have moved past the time when there were firm “rights and wrongs” dictated to us by society. Society used to have a strict moral code that was upheld by a strict religious code. That can’t be the case anymore and I don’t think that you can go back to the one without the other. The choices you mentioned might still be wrong, but not as wrong today as they were 50 years ago and not everyone will agree.

If you want to stop our young people from getting pregnant or getting other young people pregnant we need to work on two things 1) Sex and relationships education (with emphasis on relationships) from an early age, because unfortunately way too many teenage pregnancies are the result of ignorance or lack of education and most importantly 2) raising these young people’s aspirations so that they want more for themselves. Girls who are economically deprived but achieving well at school are far, far less likely to become pregnant than girls of the same ecnomic background with low academic attainment. The girls who do well in school know that there will be serious consequences to their future if they don’t take precautions when they have sex. Girls who don’t think they have a future don’t think that far ahead when they have sex.

Making a firm stand on “right and wrong” is not going to help our young people want to achieve more. It’s not going to help them believe that there is more for them out there.

How are you going to achieve that? Because that is the real issue.

I’m sorry but just posting on your blog that we need to make a stand on right and wrong in order that parents and by extension their children know which choices are right and which are wrong just won’t make a difference.

What WILL make a difference is helping young people who aren’t achieving well to build hopes and dreams for their future.

That is the best contraceptive.

@Arianne:

Of course, right and wrong are a matter of opinion

No, they’re not.

One thing that has also been sidestepped in all of this debate is very much about the role of the fathers in all of this. All too often, and very sadly, many young women (and girls) grow up to believe that they will be provided for by the father. I am certainly no raving feminist, nor am I a traditionalist, but it is an added complication in the way society percieves things. We are all too often caught between the tradition way of thinking (sometimes reinforced by the government with its emphasis on family values etc) yet, on the other hand that way of thinking does not often lend itself to the realities of modern society.

Arianne made very valid points and was absolutely spot on when she said that girls who do not achieve well at school tend to look no further than the short term and have few aspirations beyond having children.

Teenage pregnancy is not a new thing nor is it restricted to those from lower socio economic backgrounds. Until only recently, the general train of thought throughout society was that drug problems were mainly concentrated around those young people who came from less well off backgrounds and who were low achievers at school. Not so, according to yesterday’s Observer http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/mar/15/drugs-skunk-family

One of the problems associated with teenage pregnancy is that sex education has been directed very much as putting the onus of responsibility on girls – the feminist relvolution brought (and quite rightly so) a shift towards giving women more control over their own bodies particularly with the introduction of the contraceptive pill. But with it I suspect, it played an underlying role in men and boys being less concerned about taking their share of the responsibility in the whole scenario. It became all too easy for young people to have sex and for the boys to refuse to wear a condom putting the onus on the girl to take oral or other contraceptives. Indeed this scenario has also demonstrated a seriously worrying increase in STDs throughout the young.

It is about education, but not just about physical sex education. Relationships do break down, it is a fact of life, and i’m sure that most of us would not want to return to the days of our grandparents where couples were forced to live miserable lives because they were not happy with the person they were married to. But because a relationship no longer exists between two parents of any age, there does need to be much more recognition and acceptance that both still need to play a responsible role in the care and well being of a child – in every sense.

It is this that is lacking in the education system and wider society of today. Governments have consistently failed to provide support and education that helps parents who are not living together to actually work together and to jointly face up to their responsibilites as parents irrespective of their own differences.

Until governements place as much emphasis on this aspect of things, then the increasing problems associated with teenage pregnancies will continue.

The bottom line is, there’s no point in condeming one aspect of society, when the rest of us have failed to address the real problems associated with their situation.

‘when the rest of us have failed to address the real problems associated with their situation.’

Unless the association’s causal, why must we address such problems first?

Its simple, because unless you pro-actively change attitudes generally in society through educating people in a way that is suited to modern life, then people will just continue to carry on in the same way…. its not about condemning people or criticising them, its about providing them from a very early age with the tools they need to make realistica and well informed decisions.

The desired outcome is the same, yet the way we achieve that holds the key. Simply ostrasising sections of the community is not the way to do it – let’s face it – the majority of those girls that DELIBERATELY fall pregnant at an early age, do it either as a means of escape from a pretty awful existance, or they have an incredible urge to love and be loved.

I think both say alot about the society in which we live.

‘unless you pro-actively change attitudes generally in society through educating people in a way that is suited to modern life’

er…the whole point, I thought, is that we are educating people that the State will support irresponsible decisions.

‘its not about condemning people or criticising them’

Yes. It. Is. I damn well will criticise anyone who gets pregnant through not using contraception and then expecting me to pay to support their lifestyle choice. Absolutely I damn well will criticise them.

‘its about providing them from a very early age with the tools they need to make realistica and well informed decisions’

Gobbledegook aside, what do you think schools and parents are not doing at the moment?

I’m a left winger and like to see everyone given opportunities. However, welfare should be an assistance and not n income stream. I grew up in a Council flat as did my 2 brothars and 2 sisters; not one of us had pre marital children, not one of us is a single parent and all of us are professionals with high end wages. My mother and father worked for living and we never asked for too much. My parents didn’t earn much but their own self respect mechanism dictated that work was better than benefit.

If it is illegal to have sex before the age of 16 then there should be no assistnce from the state for these law breakers.

Re: David Jones

Oh get real, if you had any idea about the education system you would know that they do not learn anything about life experiences there aside from how to survive in a cut throat society – if they’re lucky.

I note that the ones supporting Tom Harris’s views, including yourself, are all men – why then do we not make the father’s more responsible??? As I said in a previous comment, the CSA is failing families all the time – quite honestly, it would pay me more to be on benefits than earn a wage at the moment because the CSA just don’t bother to collect the money my ex owes for the upkeep of his three children.

Let’s look at this as a possibility – why don’t we just teach father’s to be more responsible – yes, a novel idea for some men I am sure, not as easy as blaming the women who have been left holding the baby so to speak.

Or is it in your view and Tom Harris’s view that actually instead of living in a democratic society where we pay by our means we instead just heard all the single mothers into a room and lock them away from the world or worse and let them starve to death….

I suspect you are one of those individuals who says on every issue, I don’t see why my money should pay for this or pay for that – well, actually, unless you earn the same salary as a government minister or Chairman of a high street bank, I’m actually quite sure that you get more out of the state by using the roads, subsidised public transport, health services, education than you actually pay in taxes each year….. so in reality that argument doesn’t wash. It is a smokescreen for biggotry and selfishness.

@Caroline

‘Oh get real, if you had any idea about the education system you would know that they do not learn anything about life experiences’

I’ve been a teacher, in the State sector. My partner’s a very successful tracher, again in State sector.

Still, you carry on trying to patronise me.

Re: David Jones

‘patronise’????? Actually, you are the one who is patronising me….. and others who live in the real world.

I am after all a single parent….. I think the fact that YOU are telling me, and others like me who have experienced the actuality of the situation says it all.

You clearly have no idea what the reality is being in the position that I and many thousands of others find themselves in. Your attitude and that of Tom Harris is typical of New Labour.

To spell it out to you…. middle class do gooders TELLING the rest of us what to do, and what is best for us without actually knowing or understanding the reality of what our lives and situations are like on a daily basis and what we actually need to help change the direction this society has pushed us into.

As for the education system, whilst I have absolute admiration for all teachers – and I mean that genuinely, I do know that the curriculum is so centered around academic achievement rather than placing more embphasis on social awareness and responsibility than perhaps it should.

@Caroline – so do you see a problem or don’t you? And if you do where do you see the remedy?

‘middle class do gooders TELLING the rest of us what to do, and what is best for us ‘

I have no desire to tell you what’s best for you. Unfortunately you insist I pay you my money to support your choices. That’s where you necessarily engage my interest.

If you don’t want my money, fine, off you go and enjoy your life.

Healthy writing MP Tom.

Though I think several generations of Law Makers and those who apply them in the Western World have to take a major portion of blame here.

Generations of Law and Social Policy have Spin Doctored our young ones to be who they are in their early years anyway.

Once trapped they either accept the status they find themselves in or fight their way out of it.

We older ones need to take responsibility for the world we have given them.

A good start would be to take serious measures to Re-Build the **Whole Natural Biological FAMILY**.

Enshrining **Equal Parenting** into FAMILY Law and Social Policy would eventually lead to strong FAMILIES residing together or not and a whole different and more hopeful outlook on life.

May I invite you to visit my website and contemplate signing the World-Wide **Equal Parenting** Petition.

Onward – Jim

Re: David Jones

I have NEVER taken any state benefit despite being jobless at one stage and on the brink of losing my home – pride got in the way. So, in relation to your misguided comment (again) I have never asked for your or anyone else’s money. Had you read my previous comments you would have seen that was indeed clearly stated.

Perhaps, given your lack of willingness or ability to read the facts, it is fortunate for our children that you are no longer teaching!!

You may wish to listen to yesterday’s interview with Tom Harris on the Jeremy Vine show (see link below) – he takes an interesting stance – quite a comparison to those views expressed on here. Perhaps he has started to realise that his views and comments on this subject were utterly disgraceful and wholey unnacceptable …… actually, more likely that they are not vote winners!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00j5gxf/Jeremy_Vine_18_03_2009/

What did Tom Harris say on the Jeremy Vine show, Caroline?

@Caroline – as I said, If you don’t want my money, fine, off you go and enjoy your life.

No child benefit, state education, etc?

remarkable

Excellent post Tom. This is indeed a very difficult topic to address although something that many of us unfortunately have known personally young children to fall into.

I really do believe in traditional family values and most certainly am for stricter parenting if it helps prevent this sort of behavior.

Unfortunately in today’s society anyone who seems to be speaking against a more free and so called liberal society can easily be accused of being old fashioned or whatever. So be it!

Hmmm.. I found this site while researching a Uni project. I would just like to say a few things. NOT all teenage parent live off of others taxes. I fell pregnant at 16 and had my daughter at 17. Since I have had her I have spent 3 years in employment and the rest of the time studying. I am now one year away from qualifying as a Primary School teacher.

I am NOT in favour of teenage pregnancy, in fact if my daughter fell pregnant in her teens I would be crushed – it is HARD!

I am aware there are people(unfortunately) who fit the stereotype – but not all of us do. I just wanted people to be aware that some of us are out there working hard to support our own children and to provide them with a good role model – a well educated, employed parent.

I would just like to comment on this post about “young teenage mums” i myself was a teenage mother im 20 years old and i have 3 very well behaved, polite children , and im disapointed in the fact that all young mums are being put into the same catagory here!
My fiance works very very hard to support us , i have been given a lot of great feedback from our health visitor on how well my children behave and that im a great mother , not all young mums live of the state and neglect their children so i think this is wrong to put us all in the same group, i chose to have children as that is what i want to do with my life, i strive to have a perfect family , we do not live off benefits as my dad has done for many years i want what is best for my children , i get told how clever my three year old boy is because i have spent so much time sitting with him reading stories, counting, drawing pictures etc.
I know that i am a good mum and im not willing to stand by and be fitted into the steareotypical box which you are trying to fit us young mums into!

i think as in the beginning of your statement you say you ‘guess’ this girl is about 16 maybe you should have asked to make sure! at 22 im happily married with an education and i have a baby but i do only look 14/15. i have a one year old child but i finished my a levels 2 years before she was born and am returning to university this year to further my education.
while statments like yours are well within reason sometimes (it is a minority who are like this) its because of statements like yours that i get judged so easily for having a child just because i look like a child myself.
please think before you judge and give some of us the benefit of the doubt.
oh and by the way as to the other misconceptions- im not on benefits and we dont live in a council property

[...] a quite breathtaking move, she removed from the glare of public opprobrium many teenage mothers, through the disarmingly simple tactic of writing a  mildly controversial piece of slightly [...]

[...] policy, and await the loving embraces of his trolls, blissfully forgetful of the fact that the post in which he told us so is simply an attack on the immorality, and actually states: ‘This [...]

[...] Uncle Tom Over in the red sector of the blogosphere “Shame On You” is being called on Tom Harris the Labour  MP for Glasgow South. Basically, as  I am sure many of the readers here will be aware, Tom made a post on his personal blog “And Another Thing” about teenage mothers. Tom has given his opinion that teenage mothers are not a good thing.  For those of you that don’t know about the post or haven’t read it,  this is it. [...]

As a teenage mum myself I feel very angry about your unwelcome comments on the subject. Let me tell you that I dont and have never fitted into any of your little boxes you would like to put me in. I am about to finish my degree as a registered nurse, I have a wonderful home and a complete son!! Your rash judgements have done nothing but upset and as i am part of that statistic I would like to tell you, you got it completely wrong!!!

What an absolute disgrace to flout such hurtful comments about something you probably have little lived experience of. Let’s make one thing clear here, a bit of balance is required: women do not get pregnant alone YET they are constantly accused and berated for everything bad in society that men do not take responsibility for. You are evidently representing the wrong party. Also contraceptives have a failure rate. They actually do fail sometimes: then what is your opinion? Abortion should be prescriptive across the country if you don’t pass a ‘good citizen test’? Bring back compulsory adoptions and send children off to the middle classes? Why not have a homogenized Island, hey?

* What is the difference between your opinion and this opinion here?

http://thebattlefieldoflove.blogspot.com/2009/10/single-mother-on-verge-by-maria-roberts.html

You wear a suit.

T’is the only difference, sir.

It’s a lot easier to blame these young mothers than the true culprits – low pay, no pay and poor conditions. Put your own House in order before blaming the victims of your shirking. If people knew that there were plenty of decent properly paid jobs out there, they would make different choices.

mharii witt
Friday 29 May 2009 at 9:49 am

I would just like to comment on this post about “young teenage mums” i myself was a teenage mother im 20 years old and i have 3 very well behaved, polite children , and im disapointed in the fact that all young mums are being put into the same catagory here!
My fiance works very very hard to support us , i have been given a lot of great feedback from our health visitor on how well my children behave and that im a great mother , not all young mums live of the state and neglect their children so i think this is wrong to put us all in the same group, i chose to have children as that is what i want to do with my life, i strive to have a perfect family , we do not live off benefits as my dad has done for many years i want what is best for my children , i get told how clever my three year old boy is because i have spent so much time sitting with him reading stories, counting, drawing pictures etc.
I know that i am a good mum and im not willing to stand by and be fitted into the steareotypical box which you are trying to fit us young mums into!

In answer to this i am Mharii’s dad.I worked untill her mother left me when Mharii was 4 and her sister was 2,I had to pack in my job to look after them and not recieving a penny from her mother in child benefit!
By nthe age of 20 Mharii had 1 abortion her mother made her have at 16 and another three children all different fathers!!
She would go with a guy just to get pregnant!!!
Then expect other people to pick up the pieces.!!

Stop having sex. Stop having unprotected sex. Stop losing your judgement skills during sex. Teenage/single parent/immature pregnancy is NOT something to desire. If it does happen and is handled well, kudos to the parent(s)/mother/grandparents who see to it as such. BUT, young women need not be in such a hurry to ‘grow up’. Children are PEOPLE, not accessories!