And they didn't live happily ever after.

Once upon a time, there was a mother pig who had three little pigs. The three little pigs grew so big that, one day, their mother said to them, "You are too big to live here any longer; you must go and find houses for yourselves".

If an article in one of last week's (paywalled) papers is to be believed, this scene is being played out on a regular basis up and down the country, with young people told to move out of the family home because 'their bedrooms are needed for younger siblings'.

The implication was that the withdrawal of housing benefit for the under-25s would cause great hardship for this reason, which rather suggests that their families were expecting the state to provide a safety net - and accommodation - once the 'child' reached 18, making way for more children in the household.

For those in receipt of the maximum amounts, child benefit and child tax credit combined can represent a significant proportion of the household income. It's a laudable practice when it enables a responsible family to meet their bills and feed and clothe children who might otherwise go hungry but there is a fatal flaw in its application.

In its simplest form, child = income. While those who bear the full financial responsibility for their offspring might hesitate before adding to their brood, there is no financial disincentive to produce large families when someone else is footing the bill; science has long known that mammal populations expand in times of plenty and humans are no exception.

And, just as in the animal kingdom, that expansion brings an increase in predators trying to benefit in their turn. Along with the tattoo artists, beauticians, baby boutiques, high street bookmakers and lottery ticket sellers are men who batten onto young single mothers to profit from their accommodation and child benefits.

This may well be the untold story behind the cohort of newly-homeless teenagers; a mother infatuated or dominated by a potentially hostile partner is surely far more likely to follow her primitive animal instincts to protect and nurture his new offspring and pack the previous litter off into the wilderness to fend for themselves. Like the starry-eyed progressives who wrecked our education system, those responsible for the tax credit structure appear to have ignored the animal instincts that drive human behaviour.

Suggestions of denying payment for children conceived  by parents already on benefits have led to much outcry (and an assortment of straw men - or rather women), as you would expect to happen with a system that allows claimants to generate their own hostages. The Dickensian spectre of child poverty makes a powerful argument; so powerful, in fact, that it appears to have obscured the question of how many children there are and what happens to them when they grow up.

While the vast majority of parents will doubtless continue, as generations before them, to support, house and occasionally be driven to distraction by their grown offspring until they achieve independence, there is a danger that a proportion of teenagers who cease to qualify for child benefit and tax credits will suddenly find themselves evicted from the family home while still young enough to be vulnerable to every passing Big Bad Wolf.

I don't have a solution, though it would certainly help if people could be persuaded to take a more responsible approach to parenthood; in a country where pets are acquired on a whim and abandoned at will, I can't imagine the families in question ever taking on board the idea that a child is for life, not just for tax credits.

Zoomorphic quote of the day

Hot on the heels of the tale of stolen shoes comes another glimpse into everyday life in our troubled times:

Two men were arrested at Legoland after around 10 parents got involved in a mass brawl in front of horrified children.

They weren't horrified to start with, mind you, having been reared in a soap-opera-fuelled culture where the boundaries between reality and fiction have become increasingly blurred and screen violence is commonplace:

At first, some children thought the disruption was part of an act for the pirate-themed ride, but as more parents got involved it became clear that it was a fight.

The spectacle, according to one eye-witness, sounds positively Homeric:

'About ten people were involved - even some of the women flew off the ride trading punches'

(in the manner, one imagines, of the vengeful Olympian goddesses descending on the battlefield before Troy, albeit rather less divine in appearance).

The Legoland management, predictably, take a calmer view than the tabloid media, claiming that 'An altercation occurred between a family group and a male guest'.

Meanwhile the police state that  fixed penalty notices for public order offences were issued to two men aged 29 and 30, which is definitely old enough to know better. What hope is there for the offspring of men who behave like this on a family day out?

Under the circumstances, perhaps it's appropriate that Legoland's statement concludes with a phrase that could have come straight from a nature documentary:

'The group of males and their families were removed from the park'.

(The title is the result of a Google search to answer the question this story immediately brought to mind:  'What is the opposite of anthropomorphism?'. It is, perhaps, significant that a lot of other people out there seem to be asking the same question.)

Mick Philpott - hijacking the welfare state

The current welfare reforms have caused such an outbreak of unison knee-jerk reactions that the MSM are in danger of looking like a 'Riverdance' tribute act.

In the midst of the argument - after a startlingly short time, given the usual glacial pace of the justice system - stands Mick Philpott, appearing just in time to polarise opinions completely and give the straw men of the Left another outing.

Any suggestion that the benefits system is at fault for allowing - or encouraging - this man to treat his women as brood livestock and effectively farm their children for the income they generated is met with a barrage of hostility amid accusations of attacking all benefit claimants.

Like Karen Matthews before him, Mick Philpott embodies some of the worst aspects of human nature; someone prepared to exploit and ultimately endanger his own children for personal gain. It's nothing new, of course; it's the same behaviour that has for centuries led beggars to parade and even mutilate children to enhance their chances of soliciting alms.

But what has changed is the way that child benefit and tax credits have skewed the system. Each new child, instead of being an unwelcome extra mouth to feed, now represents a substantial and all-too-easily generated increase in income; the less you earn, the more tax credit the child brings in. Successive well-meaning efforts to tackle child poverty have led to payments at the lower end of the spectrum that can dramatically exceed the child's actual costs to the family.

Take, for example, the couple who recently appeared in the news arguing that, because of the taxes paid by their parents, they were entitled to a life of leisure on state benefits; the breakdown of their income given suggested that they receive £20 child benefit and £60 tax credit payments a week for their daughter (caveat: Mail). The child in question is all of four months old; she's hardly even on solid food but it appears that she's getting more than the jobseeker's allowance.

Equally, in the Philpott case, it's hard to see how 11 children could justify the alleged £45,000 a year allocated for their upkeep, given state-provided schooling (with meals), healthcare and housing. But, just as we saw default rates rise when social housing tenants were expected to take charge of their own finances, some of this money must be going to people who cannot - or will not - manage to put it to its proper use.

The defensive reaction against the welfare cuts has left me wondering whether many of the most vociferous critics have tacitly accepted that, because a minority of parents on benefits will misappropriate the child-related payments, the only way to avoid child poverty is to throw more public money at all of them in the hope that, when their parents' wants are met, some leftover cash will eventually filter down for the benefit of those children at greatest risk of deprivation.

The effect of this is to render young single mothers highly vulnerable to predatory older males, for whom they represent a significant source of present and potential future income. Younger men, still waiting to find suitable housing, simply cannot compete. There's a horrible irony in the way that a welfare system which should be the hallmark of a civilized country has, in effect, returned a sector of the population to the social structure of the great apes.

One of the most frustrating aspects of this media fuss is that, amid the strident criticism of the cuts and the implication that to censure a single claimant is to condemn them all, we seem to be losing sight of the way that excessively large families intentionally conceived and  reared on welfare payments must effectively reduce access to resources, both financial and supportive, for those who unexpectedly find themselves in need.

The safety net of the welfare state was devised in an age where pride and a work ethic made it a genuine last resort; now the kind of people it was meant to help - the newly unemployed or homeless and families in genuine hardship - must queue up behind those who, like Philpott, have been knowingly playing the system for years.


There are some interesting perspectives on this story at Unenlightened Commentary and Burning Our Money (which has made a welcome return).

'Underclass arithmetic'

Without wishing to comment on current news stories - except to say that it seems to me the height of folly for online newspapers to give copious amounts of detail about the family of a missing person and then allow speculative comments from readers - I have a genuine question.

The inclusion of the ages of the people involved in legal cases, a standard feature of local papers and the grubbier end of the national press, allows the reader to spot some noticeably recurring patterns which give considerable food for thought.

The vast majority of recent criminal cases involving the lowest socio-economic groups (a difficult one to phrase, that - I can see the Urchin hovering, ready to blow his 'elitist whistle'; good job he hasn't seen the title yet), can be seen, with the use of some simple arithmetic, to involve at least one of the following:

• a mother whose first child was conceived before she reached the age of 18 (or, in some cases, 16)
• a man who, in his late thirties or forties, fathered a child with a woman under 20
• a woman in her late thirties or forties living with a man at least ten years younger than she is

Now, what I should like to know is whether this is an accurate reflection of society as a whole, and if not, what causal factors are at work.

The mean age for first-time mothers in the UK is currently 29, yet the majority of criminal cases feature, directly or tangentially, a woman less than nineteen years older than her eldest child; does this mean that the chances of a teenage mother or her children being involved in a crime at some stage - as either perpetrator or victim -  are significantly higher than for the rest of the population?

And while we're familiar with the stereotype of a teenage pregnancy where both parents are barely out of childhood themselves, what attracts teenage girls to much older men? For a recent example, take the offensive tweets to Tom Daley; their author was the product of a liaison between a girl in her mid teens and a man in his forties.

That's an extreme example, admittedly, but there are plenty of cases where a quick calculation implies a woman under 20 moving in with a man over twice her age - or two women, in the case of the house fire in Derby. Why do these girls move on from relationships with their peers to live with men as old as their fathers?

It's not easy to imagine a social context in which a full-time mother barely past school age could build an equitable and stable relationship with a man so much older, though another feature of many criminal cases - and late-night road accidents - involving young mothers is the freedom given by relatives taking care of the child for extended periods.

Given that some of the youngest child-mothers, at least as portrayed in the press, display a startlingly casual attitude to cigarettes, alcohol and drugs, could these relationships be initially founded on the supply of one or more of these commodities? (In the context of court cases, it's worth considering here that maternal drug and alcohol abuse have been repeatedly linked with behavioural disorders in young people.)

Or is it a case of access to housing? In such cases, where the detail is given, it is almost always the man who is the householder, while the opposite seems to be true in the cases where an older woman is living with a younger man.

I appreciate that all this only seems odd through 21st-century Western eyes - up until the beginning of the last century, none of these situations would have seemed particularly unusual. However, with the changing role of women in society, freely available birth control and the higher expectations of compatibility and equality within a relationship, it seems odd that they persist.

Since much of our society now regards as normal a married or cohabiting couple of similar ages with interests in common, I wonder whether the controlling factor here is the benefits system, which allocates housing and financial support in ways that may well encourage certain types of behaviour.

There seems to be a life-cycle emerging from the statistics; a teenage girl goes out with boys her own age until she gets pregnant. Then as a single mother, she hooks up with a string of older men until, often because she now has a large number of children, she gets her own house and finds a younger partner to move in with her.

Meanwhile, her eldest daughters are already beginning the whole cycle again and her adult sons - well, they seem to be left out of the picture completely, liable for child support if they work, doomed to a life of benefits if they don't and, in any case, unable to provide suitable homes for potential partners so they can't settle down. 

So they hang around, battening onto a succession of single mothers on benefits or minimum wage in state housing until they, in their turn, get places of their own and become dominant males - it's pure Desmond Morris. It's not a situation that is going to bring out the best in anyone, let alone a young man with too much time and testosterone on his hands.

Perhaps, thinking about it, that's the answer to why families like this, however unrepresentative of the population as a whole, seem to make up the bulk of cases in Britain's criminal courts.