LATER on tomorrow, I’ll post the slightly longer, original article I wrote for this week’s Mail on Sunday. In the meantime, you can read the published version here.

UPDATE at 9.05 pm: Most of you who are interested enough will have already read the version at the MoS’s site, but. as promised, here’s the full, original, slightly longer version of the article:

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A PROMINENT Labour politician in Glasgow once told me of a family he knew, every member of which was claiming incapacity benefit. When one of the sons managed to get a job, he was pressured by the rest of the family into giving it up, since an adult in the household gaining employment put the family at risk of being deprived of other benefits, including council tax.

The benefits culture remains Glasgow’s shame, and it is not confined to my city; many other post-industrial areas of Britain suffer the same malaise of second and third generations of families being brought up to believe a life on benefits is acceptable.

It isn’t, as I said a few days ago on my blog. I was not just trying to make the point that young women’s lives are wasted by early pregnancy and a subsequent life dependent on benefits. I was also seeking to reverse what I see as a culture of tolerance, where we are now expected to accept everyone else’s choices without criticism or judgment, even when those choices have a negative effect on the wider community.

This has led us to a place where children are giving birth to children. There is no criticism of 16, 15 or even 14-year-old girls (and boys) who become parents. Yet why is it so difficult for us to admit that when a 14-year-old becomes pregnant, or gets his girlfriend pregnant, it is a personal tragedy and a social failure?

This is where politicians are completely out of step with the public. I have been taken aback by the number of people who have told me how relieved they are that I have come out and said what to most people has been blindingly obvious for years.

Politicians are not expected to talk about moral absolutes. Raising questions about other people’s choices, after all, could offend someone and nothing is less acceptable these days than causing someone offence.

I certainly seem to have offended a lot of people in the last few days. I was severely criticised by some on the Left and a number of women have contacted me to say they felt insulted, pointing out that since becoming single parents at a young age, they had gone on to further and higher education and made a success of their lives. Which is brilliant. I have nothing but admiration for them.

And if there are some, albeit a minority, of young men and women who can overcome such a huge disadvantage inflicted at such an early age, does that mean the issue doesn’t have to be addressed at all, that we simply assume that if some can succeed, then all can?

I was very specifically criticising our acceptance of those young women who lose all their educational and career opportunities because of their pregnancies and who spend the rest of their lives on benefit.

So why are so many on the Left angry at me? For some it is because they don’t feel it is a problem; they believe that, as a rich society, we can afford to fund this ‘lifestyle choice’.

Others are uneasy at a Labour politician making judgments about other people’s choices; I have ‘no right’ to put greater value on one person’s choices than on another’s, it seems.

Still others fear I am adopting the rhetoric of the Right-wing by ‘doing a Peter Lilley’, the Social Security Secretary who caused controversy by lampooning benefits cheats with his ‘I have a little list…’ Gilbert and Sullivan pastiche at the 1992 Tory conference – and by attacking vulnerable young women.

But I’m attacking no one. I am pointing out that we have an unacceptably high level of teenage pregnancies. I am stating a fact that for many of these young women (and far fewer young men), parenthood will mean fewer opportunities and a higher chance of life on benefits.

There is no doubt that raising yet another generation of young men in fatherless homes is a recipe for social disaster. Yes, I’m generalising and yes, there are plenty of homes where the absence of a violent, abusive father is a blessing to the mother and children. But common sense dictates that, in general, children benefit from having the love of a mother and a father.

Yet what kind of society have we created when the above paragraph will inevitably be seen by some as offensive, narrow-minded and intolerable?

AS FOR the accusation of giving comfort to the ‘Right-wing’, when did it become ‘Left-wing’ to tolerate such a colossal waste of lives? Why is it ‘Left-wing’ to allow millions of people to remain on benefits instead of working? When did ‘Labour’ stop meaning ‘work’ and start to mean ‘benefits’?

There are many others who believe the gradualist approach to moving people off benefits and into work is the right way to go. But my instinct tells me more radical measures will have to be introduced to see the step-change needed to make a real difference to the number of claimants. I know of some Ministers who would prefer this issue not to be raised, who would rather be able to get on with quietly and doggedly chipping away at the mountain of claimants, encouraging here, facilitating there, empowering here…

But if more extreme measures, such as financial penalties for long-term claimants, need to be taken in future, they will need public support. That means being absolutely honest about the scale of the problem and the devastation that long-term benefit dependency can cause. I have written before about the responsibility the Thatcher Government bears for initiating the benefits dependency culture in the 1980s, when millions of redundant workers with no hope of further employment were encouraged to claim invalidity benefits to keep the headline jobless figures at a ‘politically acceptable’ level.

That argument is still valid. But I don’t care which government or politician was responsible for the problem 25 years ago. I don’t want to know who is to blame for the fact that the problem has barely receded since then.

The only thing that matters is that children are still getting each other pregnant and that their children will grow up without the life chances I think they deserve. And another generation is about to be lost to the benefits culture.

No matter who wins the arguments in the TV newsrooms and the Commons about who should accept the blame, our society will remain hobbled by benefits dependency.

No single party, I’m convinced, has all the answers. James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has proposed some of the most radical changes yet to the welfare state. But just because Labour is in government does not give us a monopoly on solutions. Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith and Theresa May, the Shadow Work and  Pensions Secretary, have much to add to this debate, as has Frank Field, the Labour MP who was asked by Tony Blair to ‘think the unthinkable’ back in 1997, who did – and was sacked for his efforts.

It has taken nearly three decades of failure to get to this point. It could take us a similar time to repair the damage. So the sooner we start, the better. 

Instead of our political leaders blaming each other for our past failures, far better, surely, for them in years to come to be able to share the credit for their success by giving back hope and ambition to our young people.