Carnival of the Pollykicking #5

Ah, dearest Polly; what would we do on these cold days without you to warm the cockles of our hearts with your deathless prose?

Why does he do it?

Ah, well, the question that I think that you should be asking is, "why doesn't he do it?"

Hang himself, that is.

Tony Blair cannot resist affronting his natural allies.

Yes, I know people like that. We call them cunts and they have no friends.

So when talking to the BBC about his plans to intervene early and intensively with problem families, he relished stirring a hornet's nest. Everyone involved with the policy groaned. "Well, that's just the PM," sighed one of the policy's Downing Street authors.

Wait a second; this is one of the policy's authors? And he is sighing because Blair actually broadcast the policy rather than sneaking it in the backdoor? For fuck's sake, this author has just made Blair look good (in relation to the author anyway)!

And so his promise to prevent children from high-risk families turning into "a menace to society" drew needless fire from every side.

Yes, it did; not least from me and for very good reasons.

As I wrote yesterday, it is all about getting them young, you see. An army of children who look to The Party for their succour, for whom The Party is their parent; sleepers guaranteed to vote Labour in 18 years.

And, of course, Chris pointed out an even more pertinent point: that the government really isn't very good at raising children and giving them a good start in life.

One of Princess Toni's arguments for the need for asbo's for fetuses was that they could grow up to be anti-social, no need of cause to wait to see how they actually grow up, and so state intervention could pre-emptively rehabilitate them. So this piece in The Times is instructive as to want would actually happen should the Dear Leader get his way.

[of children under state care] only about 6 per cent can expect to achieve the benchmark of five GCSEs at grades A* to C that will provide them with a gateway to further education when they get their results tomorrow. This compares with 56 per cent for all other children.

As in previous years, only 1 per cent of children in care can expect to go to university this year, compared with 37 per cent of all young people.

A poor education does disproportionately lead to a life of crime, since if you have had a poor education you do not have the skills to get a legitimate job. What Tony is proposing would therefore mean is the State breaking up families where the children could end up anti-social and drain on society, and so the State can guarantee that they do.

Well, quite. If Social Services aren't allowing little black girls to be beaten and starved to death by their relatives and not even sacking the fucking stupid bitch who allowed it to happen, snatching Orkney children away from their parents over Satanic abuse hysteria, and carrying out or ignoring sexual abuse in their care homes (aided and abetted by NuLabour Ministers for Children) they are busy fucking up the children that they do "care" for.

It didn't even please the Daily Mail: "Critics dubbed it the ultimate encroachment of the nanny state into the home," its front page claimed. The madder Tory commentators saw social workers poised to invade every home in Kensington and Chelsea. Heath drew a cartoon of gun-toting police raiding a maternity ward.

Well, it is pretty fucking sinister, wouldn't you say, Polly? I mean, who deems what is suitable? NuLabour? Because they are such wonderful role models, eh?

Blair may have enjoyed the overreaction on the Guardian letters page yesterday. An academic claimed that targeting teenage mothers "reveals an implicit nuclear family bias". Even dottier, a professor emeritus, no less, claimed: "Blair ... cannot be ignorant of the policies which led to sterilisation and ultimately extermination of antisocial groups in Germany. It could happen here if people do not protest." Ho hum.

Ho hum? Ho fucking hum? I tell you what, Pol; much as this pisses me off, why don't I direct you to your favourite pendant, eh?

Ho hum is her reaction to a warning about the possible return of eugenics? Ho friggin’ Hum?

Perhaps it’s just another example of how we should all become more like Sweden?

For over 40 years, young socially marginalised working class women in Sweden faced the danger of forced sterilisation. This was carried out under laws intended to purify the Swedish race, prevent the mentally ill from reproducing and stamp out social activities classed as deviant. The last sterilisation took place in 1975.

Between 1934 and 1976, when the Sterilisation Act was finally repealed, 62,000 people, 90 percent of them women, were sterilised. 15-year-old teenagers were sterilised for "crimes" such as going to dance halls. One woman was sterilised in 1960 for being in a motorcycle gang. Orphans were sterilised as a condition of their release from children's homes. Others were pinpointed on the basis of local neighbourhood gossip and personal grudges. Some were targeted because of their "low intelligence", being of mixed race, being gypsies, or for physical defects.

Polly Toynbee is an illiberal fuckwit. There, I've said it. And I don't feel any better because I don't understand how someone this fucking stupid can be writing for a broadsheet newspaper, even if it is The Grauniad.

Blair's advisers hope that he may be less rebarbative in his keynote speech today, addressing child poverty experts and economists in that haven of sanity and social justice, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. But whatever the tone, here is a welcome return to Labour's most fruitful policy-making from the early months in power in 1997, when 18 policy groups explored every cause of and solution to social exclusion from a unit under the PM's close patronage. The resulting policies have changed many lives on the 2,000 worst estates.

Really? Well, fuck me, Polly; I thought that Blair and Brown had not only hit the poorest—you know, the ones on those estates—hardest financially, but also overseen a decrease in social mobility. For fuck's sake, woman, read the real news rather than paying attention to that fantasy news-ticker in your near-vacant brainspace.

But he lost interest as he put keeping the middle classes on board ahead of services for the neediest. School targets urged better academic results, not improving the life chances of children who might never shine. In the NHS, waiting lists came before more health visitors and help for families in trouble.

Um, Polly, what you are actually saying here is that—despite all this policy brainstorming—NuLabour have utterly fucked everything up. That is what you are saying, isn't it? Now, you are equating this policy with those earlier failures, so you are admitting that this, too, is likely to be an appalling trainwreck. Well, yes, you're right: it will be. But only a total cretin like yourself would ever advise us to ignore Blair's rhetoric.

Were the middle classes a political necessity?

Yes. Convincing Middle England that NuLabour were not traditional tax and spend Old Labour (even though, actually, they are) was the greatest trick that he pulled, and it is what has got him elected three times.

UPDATE: Prodicus takes some serious issue with our Pol.

The middle classes, Pol, are the bulk of 'the masses', in case you hadn't noticed. They're everyone who's not at the bottom of the heap or at the top of it. They - I mean we - are not past tense. We are the majority, the payers of the vast taxes which your beloved is spending like a drunken sailor, the hard-working pension-poor, thanks to your dream boy, and the buyers of newspapers, though not your newspaper, in my case. I pay your hero enough without putting money in your pocket, you visitor from Planet Deluded.

Beautifully put.

Until Iraq blew everything off course, disabling his political radar, Blair was adept at balancing the needs of the poor with middle-class demands.

Yes, and he satisfied the needs of the poor with increasing amounts of middle class money. Now the middle-class are tired of seeing their hard-earned quids pissed up the fucking wall.

But it was a constant source of conflict as Gordon Brown fought to keep money flowing into tax credits to hit the child poverty target Blair announced in 1998 (but perhaps later regretted).

Yup, and those tax credits have been such a fucking success story haven't they, Polly? Oooh, are you wet for your big Norse warrior, you little Lefty whore, you?

Fucking hell, I can't be bothered to go on; this is sapping my will to live. Let's just say that if you don't want unsuitable—no wait, hang on: let's call a spade a spade here—if you don't want poor people to have babies, then stop paying them to have them.

UPDATE: just in case you wanted some proof that this is the case, here is James Bartholomew quoting from an article in the Sunday Times.

The analysis of figures in 14 European countries found that Britain has by far the highest proportion of single mothers in the European Union.

The report says that in 2001, more than 8% of British households were headed by a single mother aged 18-35, while the UK also has one of the highest rates of benefits for single mothers.
...

Libertad Gonzalez, a Barcelona academic who compiled the research, studied a sample of 6,580 single mothers from the European Community Household Panel. She estimates that for every £675 a state offers in benefits to lone parents, the incidence of single mothers goes up in that country by 2%.
...

Gonzalez said single mothers received more benefits in Britain and Ireland because they had “liberal” social policies where welfare payments were means-tested, which gave greater assistance to the greatest in need.

By contrast the southern European countries had benefits systems where there was an implicit understanding that family networks should provide assistance.

“The correlation across countries is quite striking,” said Gonzalez. “The countries with the highest incidence of single mothers are also the countries with more generous benefit, and vice versa . . . Spain, Greece and Portugal with small numbers of single mothers also have lower benefit levels. The UK and Ireland are both generous with benefits and have a higher incidence of these families.

Let's adopt the Citizen's Basic Income and have done with it. I'm bored of this discussion, and I'm bored of Polly advocating the spending of yet more cash.

In the name of all that is unholy, shut the fuck up, woman.