The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Link: Telegraph | Business| Now child benefit will start in late pregnancy.

How interesting that this article is in the Telegraph’s “Business” section. The only people for whom “baby farming” is a business in Britain are the members of the drug-addled underclass.

As respectable working couples have smaller families in order to meet their burden of mortgage debt and taxes (the former caused by Government restrictions on building houses and the latter by lack of Government restrictions on building the State), only the underclass will be sufficiently fertile for its population to be stable. The effects stimulated by Labour’s long-forgotten replacement of tax allowances for children (which encouraged earners to breed) with child benefit (which encourages idlers to breed) are exacerbated by each additional incentive for the irresponsibly fecund.

Already, as Theodore Dalrymple explains with characteristic eloquence:

No one who looked at patterns of child rearing in Britain could doubt that something is wrong with them. Our illegitimacy rate is 40 per cent, 25 percent of our children grow up in single-parent households (families isn’t quite the word), and in some areas of the country—the poorest, of course—the figures are even worse. Child neglect and abuse, encouraged by the growth of serial stepfatherhood, are rampant. At the same time, children are exposed to an almost constant mental diet of images of depravity. It is hardly surprising that violent and brutal antisocial behavior occurs at ever-younger ages, and that old people fear to travel on buses in which children are present

What brave new world that has such Chancellors in it.