And another thing…

If I HAD said something like this, I would’ve been excoriated:

And I do think it’s time to address a problem that for too long has gone unspoken, the number of children having children. For it cannot be right, for a girl of sixteen, to get pregnant, be given the keys to a council flat and be left on her own.

From now on all 16 and 17 year old parents who get support from the taxpayer will be placed in a network of supervised homes. These shared homes will offer not just a roof over their heads, but a new start in life where they learn responsibility and how to raise their children properly. That’s better for them, better for their babies and better for us all in the long run.

Oh, I’ve just remembered – I did. And I was.

THERESA May says there is “a real risk of worklessness being passed on from generation to generation.”

No sh**, Sherlock…

Here is a woman who is either entirely unaware of her own party’s shameful record in government when it comes to benefits, or is trying deliberately to mislead the nation about her party’s history in power.

Today’s news that one in six households in the UK now has no adult at work is truly discouraging. But (and yes, there is a “but”) today, when the number of those dependent on benefits, particularly incapacity benefits, rises, that is a failure of government and, more specifically, of the economy.

When the number of people on long-term benefits rose under the Conservatives, it was a fulfillment of policy, and ministers ticked a box for every additional million chucked on the scrapheap and congratulated themselves on a job well done.

To Labour, long-term benefit dependency is anathema. To the Tories it was a price worth paying to get re-elected.

ONE of the problems I’ve had with Iain Duncan Smith’s recent pronoucements on social breakdown and benefit dependency is his apparent refusal to acknowledge his own party’s complicity in creating the problem.

But a new interview to appear in next month’s Fabian Review seems to indicate a change of heart. According to Next Left, IDS not only starts to accept the Thatcher government’s mistakes in the ’80s, but also credits Denis Healey as the Labour chancellor who kick-started Britain’s economic recovery, making Thatcher’s job easier when the Tories took over in 1979:

Britain’s position by 1978/9 was appalling – we were just disappearing as a nation. It simply was not possible to go on any longer.

You have to remember it was Denis Healey who did most of the serious hard work, the heavy lifting, before Mrs Thatcher came in. Had she come in without Healey’s work in the IMF, I don’t think she’d have lasted two years. She would have been out in 1983. Getting the economy back to a point where it was profitable and we had some sort of enterprise was [vital].

But yes, what happened next was in some ways [unfortunate]. We forgot that, while the economy was moving on, society itself was not really ready for this. Swathes of the population got left behind in the process…The gap between the bottom socio-economic group and the rest started to grow, and it’s grown ever since. Under Labour it’s grown almost faster in some senses.

While I’m not going to point the finger and say the changes made in the Eighties were wrong, we didn’t have any real sense of where this might go and what needed to happen. Big social reforms should have taken place then, and they never did.

IDS’s willingness to cross the political divide in an attempt to reach new solutions is entirely commendable. Don’t get me wrong — those who know me, and who read this blog, know that I’m as tribal a politician as any, and I will do everything I can to help Labour win a fourth term.

But some problems are just so colossal, so entrenched, that I find it difficult to work up the enthusiasm to waste time with name-calling in the House of Commons. I’m glad that at least one MP on the opposition benches feels the same way.

READ it here.

AMONG the generally positive responses to my previous interventions in the “benefit dependency” and single mums debate, there was this comment from “Bill”, purporting to be a Labour councillor and a social worker.

It was a very full and thoughtful comment, and I wanted to take some time to respon to the points Bill made:

I’m a Labour Councillor, and I work as a social worker, tasked with safeguarding the most vulnerable children of all. I realise that you use this blog to express your “anger” about things quite a lot (teenage parents, child abuse) but I’m not sure being angry changes much or helps anybody. It doesn’t in the job I do, for sure. Reasoned arguments and evidence might.

I would be nice if you spelt out a little more what exactly the hoped for outcome of your piece was? Have you achieved it? When and how will you know if you’ve been successful in your endeavours?

The hoped-for outcome of my piece is to start to achieve a change of mindset in the Labour Party and beyond, so that we can stop feeling obliged to pretend that every lifestyle choice people make is beyond criticism, even as the vast majority of the public, at least privately, have no qualms about such judgments. I believe such frankness would help Labour engage with the public more successfully. 

Reading your post, I don’t think it would help anyone if I responded to your post with personal attacks of any kind, although that’s not consideration you seem to have thought to extend to the “teenage mums” you refer to in your post.

Fortunately, I have never attacked any teenage mums in any of my writing, unless questioning the wisdom of someone’s choice is strictly “attacking”.

I did wonder a couple of things about your original post:

i) why don’t you refer to boys / men – in their teenage years or older. I do wonder why the object of your onslaught falls, exclusively on women, rather than men. There’s young fathers out who do a brilliant job, yet there are many who aren’t involved in their children’s lives at all, for a variety of complex reason. I do wonder why you have attacked the girls / women literally left “holding the baby”, but leave the male sex entirely out of the equation. You do attack men in the Mail on Sunday (and I think attack is sadly the right word). Is this because you realised you had made a mistake is singling out just one, particularly vulnerable, group from criticism?

I don’t feel the need, in my blog or elsewhere, to insert caveats which any intelligent reader would assume anyway. The point I made in my original post was about the economics of single parenthood; given the number of young single women who are subsidised by the state to care for their babies compared with the number of young single men, I didn’t believe it was strictly relevant to include men in this part of the argument. I don’t think the lack of mention of men’s/boys’ role in any way made the article less easy to understand.

In fact, the YWCA site, to which I was directed by another angry commenter, states: “It needs to be better recognised and understood that young women who see little hope for their future are most likely to view early motherhood as a positive change to their lives. For young women with low self-esteem, tough lives, low incomes, low educational achievement and low aspirations, motherhood can provide a more prestigious and fulfilling status than the one they currently occupy.”

Perhaps you should complain also to the YWCA about their lack of mention of the fathers.

ii) you seem a little confused about age, Tom. Do you really think that the issues faced by 14 year old mother and a 19 year old mother, or their young children, might be subtly different? Can you think of any differences here? It might be worth including them in any future articles.

I’m not at all confused about age, and I doubt if many of my readers, aside from you, of course, would have tripped up on that one.

iii) How many teenage mothers have you spoken in preparation for your little piece?
I do understand that you overhead a new baby’s grandfather talking in hospital a while ago, but has your personal experience of this issue gone beyond that? I’m sure it has, but I do wonder why you don’t seem to mention it.

This gets to the nub of the issue. I’m sure you are exempt here, but I have detected a degree of exclusiveness among professionals working in this area: “We are the qualified professionals who work every day in this area with our ‘clients’ and therefore we have an exclusive right to pontificate about what the issues are.” It could be almost interpreted as a closed shop situation. It’s an unusual position to take: that an MP, whose job is to scrutinise legislation and to debate and decide how the nation’s resources are spent, should not be able to express a view about a controversial area of public policy.

And in fact, in the course of eight years representing a constituency with one of the highest levels of teenage parenthood, I have spoken to many women of various ages about their experiences and circumstances. 

iv) Given you have been a Government minister, and represent a party which has been in office for nearly 12 years and doubtless you will represent a large number of young parents in Glasgow, don’t you think it might have been a good idea to include any qualitative or quantitative evidence to support your arguments, other than a single anecdote, in your piece? I wonder if it might have been an idea to talk about some of the significant changes in Children’s Services legislation and policy which I presume you have voted for, as their clearly of relevance to this issue. Have you read, or even heard of, the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy (at a local or national level). Don’t you think it might have been a good idea to read it first?

Indeed, I’m well aware of the government’s (and local authorities’) Teenage Pregnancy Strategy and of the targets to reduce this problem by 2010. The problem, Bill, is that too many professionals — including you, I suspect — refuse to describe this problem as a “problem”.

iv) I’m sure I’m not the only person to be saddened to read a Labour MP writing in the Mail on Sunday that Iain Duncan-Smith, has a “lot to offer” this area of debate. What precisely is that Tom, please explain? He didn’t really have that much to offer his own party, and seeking to rebuild his career on his ‘Broken Britain’ hypothesis hasn’t changed matters.

I happen to have been impressed by IDS’s efforts at least to understand the problem, which is more than most in his party have done. I believe the issue of teenage pregnancy and the wider area of benefit dependency is so serious, so colossal, that no single party is going to be able to resolve it. 

v) Just out of interest, why did you write this piece at this particular time? Did something happen to make you so very angry that you didn’t want to write about? Just out of interest, don’t you think it might be a little harder for the young parents to represent to find work now, compared to a year or two ago? I wonder if you thought this was worth mentioning?

Yes, the appalling death of 23-months-old Dundee toddler, Brandon Muir. A drug-addicted prostitute with learning difficulties was allowed to look after her young son because there aren’t enough people around to stand up and say: “That is grotesque.” Because the main point of my original post was not about teenage mums per se; it was about challenging the refusal of society publicly to judge others’ lifestyle choices. I didn’t mention Brandon’s case specifically because there’s no direct correlation and I could well imagine the howls of indignation: “Tom Harris believes every single mother is unfit to look after her child!” Which, of course is nonsense. But the reports of Brandon’s death and the subsequent court case started me thinking about the “rights” of parents and how they should never take precedence over the rights of children to a loving and secure environment. And, following on from what the YWCA site (above) says, a child should never, ever be used as a way of achieving financial benefit for his parent.

vi) Have you ever met personally, or directly heard about, any individual young woman who became pregnancy purely and simply because of the benefit / housing entitlement this would create. Do you actually know of a single one? If so, and I think you answer may in any event be no, how are you sure that this was the case?

You’re absolutely right on this one, Bill: the answer’s no. In fact I’m far too polite to ask any woman of whatever age and background what her motivations were for becoming pregnant. But I refer you, again, to the YWCA site. It says almost exactly what I said in my previous post, although I did not come across the YWCA site until after I’d written it. Let me turn the question around: do you believe that there has never been a case of a young woman who felt her opportunities were so limited, her future so constrained, that she genuinely believed her best hope was to become a mother?

There is a clear correlation between poverty and the incidence of teenage pregnancy; NHS Scotland point out that women living in the worse off parts of the country are up to ten times more likely to fall pregnant at an early age than those living in wealthier areas. This seems to me conclusive evidence that poverty of aspiration and lack of education lies behind many such pregnancies.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe the YWCA is wrong, maybe the NHS is wrong, maybe everyone who believes this is wrong. The fact that you’ve challenged me in my assumptions suggests you think they are. In which case, there’s no problem, is there? Perhaps I shouldn’t waste my time worrying about those young girls brought up in workless households by single parents and who achieve very little at school. Perhaps there is, after all, no such thing as poverty of aspiration.

But, of course, there is.

I would be interested in your thoughts.

kind regards,

Bill

You now have them, Bill.

Kind regards

Tom

THERE have been many, many excellent responses to my original post, The return of morality, and more today in response to my Mail on Sunday article.

But this, from one of my regular contributers, Jim Baxter (he’s also a constituent, but that did not affect my judgment), encapsulates what I want to say, but does it better.

Thank you, Jim.

It’s disheartening how many people seem to have taken Tom’s arguments as an attack on teenagers. His attack is on the deterioration of attitudes to the point where it is acceptable for able-bodied people to live off the state for years, if not for life.

A commenter on a previous thread said you cannot get the poor to turn on the poor. Nobody wants people to turn on people, although the low-paid cetrainly resent the fact benefits claimants in their communities get more money than they do. They don’t necessarily resent the claimants themselves, just the social deterioration that has brought us to this point.

We’ve spoken of the miners’ strike. What was their slogan again? ‘We’re sick of this dangerous job. We want benefits instead’? I think it was ‘coal, not dole’. The Jarrow marching was not about getting state benefits. It was about getting work. Most people want to work but if a benefit claimant is going to lose money by doing so, or, in some cases, gain money or accommodation by getting pregnant and ignoring the long-term consequences, then living on benefits will necessarily be the choice of many. It need not be cynical or parasitical although it becomes socially deleterious and self-perpetuating.

When you have little money an extra ten pounds a week can make a big difference. If the state will give you that and a job won’t, if you can’t get a house any other way than by having a child, and this applies to both partners, then whoever, as Tom said, is to blame for this situation, it will persist.

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:

——————————————————————————–

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.