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Quasar

Not being a frequent visitor to this board, may I ask WHY, when someone points out the recklessness of having child after child in an overstretched society, there are always those who accuse them of advocating eugenics, of being fascist, of being heartless etc etc etc? The only people who have mentioned eugenics appear to be those who see nothing wrong with struggling families having more offspring - not those who see this as a road to social perdition.

The point is, having children IS a choice, whether purposefully or by default (ie by not using contraception even when easily accessible).

Another point is that children tend to follow their parent's social habits, and very few depart from this pattern. Therefore, in largely workless communities young people tend to grow up with the same low aspirations of their elders simply because no other aspiration has been inculcated into them, ie. they know no different. There are of course the more ambitious ones who will go out there educate themselves and develop a work ethics, but this is a trait that is desperately lacking in increasingly significant strata of the population.

Add to the above the fact that there aren't that many jobs because our corporations make more money by employing workers in the Far East, and we see that the burden on the taxpayer in supporting the permanently workless is becoming quite unsustainable. Yet, having more children does bring in more money from a seemingly infinite money orchard.

Having children is a matter of great responsibility, and their future prospects need to be considered by would be parents with a modicum of sense. The present trend by some to make knee-jerk excuses for indiscriminate breeding, because not to do so is deemed "fascist", is not only blinkered and disingenuous but downright pernicious. Taxpayer money doesn't grow on trees in the fabled orchard, and the country is running out of it.

LydiaJ

Quasar wrote: »

Not being a frequent visitor to this board...

Welcome to the debate board Quasar. Sadly, on this board some threads descend into mudslinging rather rapidly, but nevertheless there are some good discussions to be had here on occasions. Thank you for your thoughtful and articulate (not to mention sensible) post.

Masomnia

We see eugenics as a Bad Thing because we associate it with Nazism and Americans (and British?) sterilizing disabled people. Not sure if anyone has brought this up because I've only skimmed the thread, but Keynes was a eugenicist, as was Beveridge of the famous Beveridge report that more or less established the welfare state. They believed in incentivizing the propagation of the educated, middle classes.

Beveridge knew full well that the Family Allowance would encourage the less well off to have more children than the middle classes, even then they had the same problem that the educated middle classes were not having as many children as the working class. He went as far as to advocate paying a higher Family Allowance to well off people to encourage them to breed more. The way things have turned out shows his fears to be correct, in my opinion.

I wouldn't advocate paying higher child benefit to well off people (imagine the outcry!), but I think it should be scrapped all together. We just don't need it now. We don't have a shortage of low skilled workers generally, and where we do we have no shortage of migrant workers who are willing to do those jobs. We're running out of money as it is, and the situation is only going to get worse as people live longer, need more paying out to them, whilst having paid less in.

Quasar

LydiaJ wrote: »

Welcome to the debate board Quasar. Sadly, on this board some threads descend into mudslinging rather rapidly, but nevertheless there are some good discussions to be had here on occasions. Thank you for your thoughtful and articulate (not to mention sensible) post.

Thank you LydiaJ. As a regular in Discussion Time, I'm used to er... shall we say "vigorous debate".

Quasar

Masomnia wrote: »

I wouldn't advocate paying higher child benefit to well off people (imagine the outcry!), but I think it should be scrapped all together. We just don't need it now. We don't have a shortage of low skilled workers generally, and where we do we have no shortage of migrant workers who are willing to do those jobs. We're running out of money as it is, and the situation is only going to get worse as people live longer, need more paying out to them, whilst having paid less in.

This neatly fits with my view that too many jobs have effectively been exported to the Far East where labour is dirt cheap by our standards. Go into any clothes store, even fairly upmarket ones, and check the labels for manufacturing country. You will be very hard pushed to find anything made here or even in Western Europe, and those tend to be the most expensive items (not all, but most).

Yet in this country there are large numbers of people who have never worked. Out of school and straight on benefits because that's all their parents, uncles, aunts and cousins and friends have ever known.

I'm not about to apportion fault to anyone, but this lack of work ethic and social responsibility must be shared by the authorities and especially the educational system by encouraging low expectations until the time has come when doing anything about it is practically impossible, because the very workplaces that could have been available to improve these social deserts, have disappeared from the UK, and with increasing automation and further Far East involvement, more are disappearing.

Then again, joined up thinking has never struck me by its conspicuousness in the UK's powers that be.

bankhater_1965

lets face it , these benifits that are paid are not paid to fly off somewere on a nice warm beach , they are there to increase the saleries of decent hard working people that have had there saleries cut by us joining the EU and letting foriegn workers in and paying them alot less and this was the reason the minimum wage was introduced as wages got so low because of this , we no see living costs rising but wages decreasing for lower and middle class workers ,thats what benifits are paid for to help maintain a decent living which every citizen who lives in the 4th richest country in the world is entilted to , perhaps if there was more BNP voters perhaps this situation would not have arisen and enock powell was listened too all them years ago , to ever think familys are have been encouraged to breed more just to get benifits is absurd , perhaps theres a 1-2% group who do , thats not going to alter anything, the middle class familys have had there living standards taken away purley down to eastern europeans and others afar and this country has heavily paid the price

pqrdef

LydiaJ wrote: »

I'm saying that we should be aiming for a society in which poor families generally pay for their own food, clothing and rent (even if that means not living in central London), although nobody expects them to be able to afford private healthcare or school fees.

But this is back to front. My model is, the State subsidises the basic train service, so that there is one, but if I want to eat in the dining car, I have to pay for that myself. If I can't, I make do.

Your model is that everybody should pay for the full cost of the journey with no State help, but if I can't afford the dining car, the State will pay for that, because it's nice that all passengers should be able to eat well.

Just goes to show how perverse thinking seeps into the general consciousness. Wouldn't our priorities be straighter if all schools charged fees and the State gave out clothing vouchers instead?

antrobus

LydiaJ wrote: »

I read antrobus's post as sarcastic.....

It was. Of course, I knew that some people wouldn't get it. That's part of the fun.:)

LydiaJ wrote: »

I think lots of people are quite happy to pay taxes to fund other people's healthcare (and their own when they need it).....

Yes, but that might be because people don't actually choose to be ill and in need of healthcare.

LydiaJ wrote: »

...and other people's children's education (because having all children educated is good for the nation as a whole)....

Maybe because it's the children that are being educated. Who there are parents are, and their exact financial circumstances aren't really an issue.

LydiaJ wrote: »

...A lot fewer people are happy to pay taxes to fund other people's housing (especially in central London)
and other people's general living expenses (other than in the short term when people have fallen on hard times and are doing what they can to sort things out, or people like SingleSue in exceptional circumstances).

I imagine that's because people believe that other people's housing costs and general living expenses are often directly related to the kind of choices that other people have made, and believe that shouldn't be responsible for bad or silly choices.

LydiaJ

pqrdef wrote: »

But this is back to front. My model is, the State subsidises the basic train service, so that there is one, but if I want to eat in the dining car, I have to pay for that myself. If I can't, I make do.

Your model is that everybody should pay for the full cost of the journey with no State help, but if I can't afford the dining car, the State will pay for that, because it's nice that all passengers should be able to eat well.

Just goes to show how perverse thinking seeps into the general consciousness. Wouldn't our priorities be straighter if all schools charged fees and the State gave out clothing vouchers instead?

No.

The state should provide education because the state has good reasons for making education compulsory, for the good of the nation as a whole, and private education is beyond the reach of all but the well off. Are you suggesting that we should return to a situation where only the rich can afford to send their children to school at all?

The state should provide healthcare because needs are so variable in such unpredictable ways - some people have healthy lives for 90 years and then die of a heart attack that's all over in half an hour, while other people get debilitating chronic conditions that are often in no way their fault and expensive to treat. It is not possible for those who aren't well off to provide for all eventualities themselves.

The state should provide a safety net of housing and other basic necessities for those who are unable to provide it for themselves for some reason.

The state cannot afford to provide housing in the most expensive part of the country for many people who have no prospect of ever being able to pay for it, because the state only gets its money by taxing its workers, many of whom cannot afford for themselves what they are being asked to fund for others (whether choosing not to work or working for wages that do not reach to the accommodation costs in the area in which they choose to live).

Left wing politics originated in a desire to stand up for the rights of those who worked long hours so that they would not be exploited by those who were idle and felt entitled to enjoy privileges paid for by the labour of the less privileged. I cannot see why this is now taken as meaning that those who happen to have settled into particularly expensive London boroughs should be enabled to stay there at the expense of taxpayers making do in less desirable areas.

ETA: X-posted with antrobus

antrobus

MacMickster wrote: »

...Somewhere along the line the entitlement culture perverted the welfare state, and this is what most people object to.

Yesish. Back in the 1940s when the Beveridge Report was being discussed the likes of the Fabian Society, for example, were firmly of the opinion that whilst society owed a duty to provide benefits for those unable to provide for themselves, that duty only applied to the extent that the recipients accepted their "corresponding social obligations". Somewhere along the line many people on the left have forgotten all about the second bit.

Masomnia wrote: »

We see eugenics as a Bad Thing because we associate it with Nazism and Americans (and British?) sterilizing disabled people. Not sure if anyone has brought this up because I've only skimmed the thread, but Keynes was a eugenicist, as was Beveridge of the famous Beveridge report that more or less established the welfare state. They believed in incentivizing the propagation of the educated, middle classes.

Both Keynes and Beveridge were members of the Eugenics Society, but they were both Liberals, and were so comparatively, well, liberal when it came to eugenics. On the other hand eugenics was also pretty big on the left in the first half of the 20th C and they weren't that liberal about it. As in Sidney Webb, who virtually wrote the Labour Party constitution, and believed that the poor should be rounded up, placed in corrective camps, and forcibly sterilised. Such views were fairly commonplace on the left at one time, but became distinctly less so once the practical consequences of such notions became self evident round about 1945.