A glimpse into the dark heart of the Tory Right (1): punishing teenage mothers just in case
A new eight-part series at Conservative Home, the first sentence of which contained a glaring lie, is a valuable glimpse into the dark heart of the New Conservatism.
In a series of articles by MP on the right of the party, supposedly focused on how to ‘tutbo-charge’ economic growth, we get frightening but valuable insights in what is to come as the right of the party wrests control of social policy from the party’s remaining moderates.
Today’s offering is from Harriet Baldwin. Her key policy proposal is based on the devolution of welfare benefits to local authorities (remember this is supposed to be about economic growth). She uses the United States welfare model as evidence of what can be achieved through localization of benefit rates.
You know, the United States, where soup kitchens now proliferate.
This is scary indeed, especially Essex County Council is already leading the charge to the destitution of the poor. I’ll be covering the coming roll out of this viciousness in a subsequent post.
For now, though, take a look at this piece of Tory logic from Baldwin, someone supposedly capable of sitting in parliament as lawmaker and guardian of democracy:
Although I have never met an out of work teenager who chooses pregnancy, the availability of benefits linked to the number of children could be seen as an attractive incentive to a 16 year old, who might not otherwise have many ways of earning more than £3.64 an hour. With one child and a range of child benefits, rent and council tax paid, a teenage girl can have a net household income of over £9,000 per annum.
At a time when we need to focus amore [sic] support and help on getting young people into work, the incentives to work at the point where a young woman leaves education are not strong enough………….
How can the incentives be reformed so that fewer choose to have children at a point when they cannot support them without welfare?
You get this logic? Baldwin accepts that she has never met anyone who gets pregnant in order to claim welfare, produces no evidence that they do, but then proposing reducing the benefits of teenage mothers just in case there might be some who get pregnant with welfare in mind.
The term policy-based evidence can’t do this justice; Baldwin seems to have had a logic bypass en route to her determination to punish teenage girls (fathers don’t get a mention) for the motivations she admits they don’t have in the first place
This, readers, is what waits in the wings of the Tory party, scrabbling for power and influence, using the august tome that is Conservative Home as their soap box.
Next up, this brainless numptie using a paragraph in MoneyWeek as the key evidence for her radical economic policy of making very rich people richer.
your last five words summarise perfectly Tory policy
To summarize, Harriett Baldwin would choose (she’s ascribing the reasoning to a fictional character, but the logic is entirely her own) £9,000 a year and a child to support, over the £12,000 a year that minimum wage delivers, with no child to support. Or the £25,000 a year that is average income. Because this is exactly the reality of people claiming that unemployment is a “life-style choice”.
I’m only amazed that Baldwin didn’t claim that the unemployed mother would be receiving £20,000 a year and living in a four-bedroom mansion in Mayfair. Which is exactly what one David Cameron has claimed in Parliament.
Further, in the US, all benefits are stopped after eighteen months irrespective of circumstances. And the soup kitchens are funded by charities and the Catholic church, not by the Government.
The Tory’s are about making the rich, richer? Garbage. The great thing about Labour’s minimum wage is that it made the minimum wage so prevalent. Many jobs that previously would have paid more, drifted downwards to the minimum wage. Labour’s fairness uber alles policy suited the employer class. As did the open-door policy to cheap migrant labour.
But by raising the bar on the level of salary needed to create a ‘proper job’ they created a perma-frost of unemployed, mainly youthful people. And oversupply means low-pay.
The irony is that, without a minimum wage & copious benefits, the market would push wages higher since employers would have to bid higher to obtain workers – many of whom would be young people in starter-jobs and therefore not available.
As with the banking crisis, it is political interference and mendacity that is at the root of all of the current ‘capitalist crisis’. Whether it is Gordon Brown needing a City over-heat so that he could over-spend and buy votes (FSA), or Clinton needing junk loans (Fanny Mae), the result was not symptom of a toxic capitalism, but well-meaning, progressive interference in market honesty that caused melt-down. And bonus for banksters.
Tory vermin. all of them.
she is real plummy mouthed tory twit. her interview on 5live was embarassing on this issue. Vic Derbyshire, who is light years more intelligent than Harriet Twit the first apppeared to be under orders to be gentle on her.
I am not surprised she is an idiot.