no malingering in back-to-work Britain

In yet another demonstration of the sort of lateral thinking that has made Gordon Brown not only saviour of the banks but saviour of the world, Work and Pensions Minister James Purnell announced a government pledge to force long term sickness benefits claimants and some single mothers back to work. The Welfare Reform White Paper has also been welcomed by the Conservative Opposition, largely because it steals their thunder by arguing that unearned benefits undermine society and destroy the work ethic.

a spot of hard work never hurt anybody

The sand in the vaseline of this get-in-your-invalid-car-and-find-work initiative is that the UK has just registered the highest unemployment figures for 11 years. For example, Plaid Cymru (Wales) MP Hywel Davies observed that there were 320,000 unemployed people in his constituency but only 20,000 jobs advertised. Scottish MPs are also skeptical, as well they might be. Nobody (dares) to gainsay ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ in our Through the Looking Glass mother of Parliaments, but it would help if the UK had any Arbeit on offer to its able-bodied citizens, never mind the vulnerable, disadvantaged or unskilled. Genuine skivers will always find a way to avoid job opportunities and cheat benefits, but they are a tiny minority. 

But enough of this cup-half-empty rhetoric. Despite the fact that my White Paper to reskill unemployed lap dancers as school zebra crossing attendants and bankers as traffic calming bumps in the road met with studied silence from the government (Thus passim), our policy wonkers have been hard at work solving this latest conundrum. It’s so simple it hurts:

Latest UK Government health advisor

Send the sick and the lame on a ‘Crusade to Health’ to Lourdes. Allow those that are cured back into the country and put them to work immediately building a Brit Art installation out of their crutches, eye patches and walking sticks. Those that stubbornly refuse to be cured should be branded a threat to national security or similar by no-nonsense Northerner, Immigration Minister Phil Woolas who can knock together a failsafe points-based entry system at least as good as the one which kept out the million or so illegal immigrants we apparently boast. And there’s more. Since RyanAir are the main carriers to Lourdes, there is a fair chance that they won’t be they won’t be able to run fast enough to catch the plane back in any case so they’ll have to live in a French concentration camp – Calais has a good one, I hear. 

Behold the miracle: the lame leap from their Beemers and into the pub each match day

In the event that nobody will lend the UK Government enough cash to buy the RyanAir tickets, even during one of their miraculous ‘million seats for £1.00′ bonanzas, there is another solution. I have noticed that whenever my local team, Arsenal, play at home, miraculous numbers of people with disabled badges leap from their cars and rush to the ground, more agile and fleet of foot, in many cases, than the footballers themselves. If the government wants revenge and tabloid headlines, my advice is to start by investigating those displaying disabled badges in 4×4 jeeps, Beemers and pimpmobiles on Match Day restricted parking zones. There is more than a fair chance that they are also benefit cheats, especially if they can afford the gouging season ticket prices charged by our foreign-owned Mercenary Utd. soccer clubs.

Or we could move towards creating real jobs which people, disabled or otherwise, will enjoy doing. If that fails, make a Novena to St. Jude, patron of Lost Causes.

Young women on government back to work scheme (1905)

By Julia Margo, Demos

One of the themes to emerge from debates last week about the Karen Matthews/Baby P/shocking state of social services scandals was the ongoing saga of Britain’s teenage birth rate, or more precisely the so-called benefit claiming class of teenage single mothers who suck up state resources and services, do not work, but procreate freely and supposedly by active choice: Britain has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe. Only ten per cent of teenage mothers stay with the father of their child. Abuse and neglect are more likely to happen in households headed by a young single mother, children are more likely to be depressed, anxious and to do less well at school. But it is the propensity of their mothers to be reliant on state benefits that has captured the imagination of the political class this week. James Purnell has suggested that the government will move to end the benefit culture surrounding single mothers and more or less compel them to work or undertake training.

Single-parent teenagers are not the wily benefit cheats they are portrayed to be but more often ill-informed teens who have nothing better to do with their lives and realistically can aspire to little more. I welcome the idea that the government will offer teenage mothers opportunities thus far denied to most of them (education and training), but not if it is framed in terms of getting them off their lazy bottoms. Teen parenthood is commonly associated with a poor educational background, lack of opportunities or experiences such as travel – not only foreign travel but even moving much beyond the confines of a deprived and uninspiring local area – neglect and other aspects of poor parenting. However woolly and lefty this may sound, it is supported by hard econometric analysis: politicians who choose to ignore the evidence because it does not fit a popular argument or appears patronising are making a gross error.

You'll feel a little prick then as many as you like

Essentially we are talking about a group of girls who often lack the capacity to get good jobs, missing not just the physical requirements of qualifications, skills and accessible local labour markets, but the less tangible essentials of self-confidence, supportive parents and wider social networks (things which also help people to be good parents). Is a more interventionist Job Centre Plus and benefit conditionality really going to plug this capability gap? Teen pregnancy is one of the few policy areas in which genuine silver bullets exist. We could for instance ‘offer’ the contraceptive injection, (AKA the jab or ‘jag’ every three months, to all 16 year old girls in the country: wham, bang! we would have abolished teen pregnancy (if they remember to turn up). But this does not mean these girls can or will study or work instead. We could compel them to work, as Purnell suggests: simply make it impossible to claim benefits without evidence of job-seeking, stipulate time limits for claiming and cut off support for those in breach of this rule. Quite clearly it is their children who will suffer.

I do not mean to paint these girls as hopeless cases. But are we forgetting why we on the Left fought for more state support for the parents of deprived children in the first place? The debate should not be about how we compel teenage mothers to work rather than exist on benefits, but rather how we prevent teen parenthood from being a negative for the parent and child. It is a negative mostly because it is a flag for material and social deprivation, two things which make being a successful parent – and holding a relationship together – much more difficult. The worklessness aspect is merely part of this, not its cause.

Some teenagers make excellent parents and have good jobs. These are the ones who have strong social networks, supportive parents, an engaged partner and an education which enables them to work and progress their skills and experience in the labour market and so provide for their children. We cannot give teenage mothers better parents or partners but we can help them to be better parents, by investing more in Sure Start parenting programmes and schemes such as Nurse-Family Partnerships which are proven to improve parenting in teen parent families.

We can provide free and high quality childcare for children up to school starting age so that mothers can genuinely work – it is ridiculous to claim that they could do so now, without such support. We can offer more rounded education in schools about how to run a home, a relationship, a family. We can radically reform Job Centres so that staff are better at helping and supporting people into jobs – at the moment their record is abysmal. We can improve social services, as the government is also suggesting, so that it provides meaningful help and protection to children and families. And we can look at ways to more actively engage fathers in their children’s upbringing – Australia’s version of our Child Support Agency is one model we could explore – so that this anarchic debate moves on from being just about young women and their feckless behaviour. Am I alone in thinking that these girls would probably greatly appreciate the emotional and material support of a partner? Where are all the men responsible for these children anyway?

Mum's not the word

By Julia Margo, Demos

I expect that my fascination with Karen Matthews is predictably middle class. Her crime may be heinous, but she has captured our imagination in her role as working class anti-hero: a reminder of how some people (the ‘other half’) live in today’s Britain. The weekend coverage of sink estates – the ‘bubble communities’ in which the working class associates of Matthews and other greasy-haired and withered welfare-dependent mothers supposedly live and breed, governed by social norms unrecognisable to you or me – reveals our need to intellectualise from above the divides that shape our society. Not to make sense of them but to shiver in smug confidence that this is not our world.

Clear your plate, Emily, or mummy will patronise you

In middle class suburbs children skip to school with nutritious lunch boxes and lacrosse sticks. In Matthews-land they walk barefoot with mud for shoes and lice in their hair. Or so our narrative goes. Poverty is linked to poorer child well being, but lots of poor parents are brilliant and norms of behaviour in many small working class communities are often better enforced than in some looser middle class hubs.Somewhere in the reporting of this horrible story cruelty and bad parenting became a class issue and being poor or out of work became synonymous with child abuse and neglect.

Take the Conservative party’s new plans to intervene in low income homes where parents do not work. In these homes, parenting style and effectiveness will be examined by trained staff as well as parental attitudes to work. The assumption is that parents who do not work or work sporadically are worse parents. An army of trained welfare to work officers will therefore help parents into work and thus magically solve their parenting deficits. An earlier idea from the Conservatives was to use the tax and benefit system to promote marriage, the assumption being that married parents are better parents. Matthews, who is neither married nor employed, would presumably have been targeted by both interventions. (For balance, let’s not ignore the incumbent Labour government’s ‘Welfare to Work’ plans to force disability claimants and other cadres of the long-term unemployed to seek work or lose benefits in an economic downturn with the prospect of 3 million unemployed amongst the able-bodied portion of the population? JK)

Why would they not work?

The statistics do suggest that children are more at risk if they come from single parent or unemployed families. A wealth of econometric analysis shows there is a small association between being very poor and being a bad parent and being a single parent and neglecting your children. But this is merely freakonomics, it tells us nothing about why this may be the case, and since the vast majority of single parents and unemployed parents are absolutely fine, it appears to be a red herring.

It is quite simply more difficult to parent alone and without money; we should not ignore the need to tackle structural disadvantage in society if we are to genuinely protect children. But being poor does not make parents cruel or neglectful. The link between bad parenting and poverty or unemployment is there because the skills required for good parenting are similar to those required for successful employment and holding down a relationship. Quite simply nice, friendly people, who would make nicer, friendlier parents, keep their partners more often than moody, difficult people and tend to find it easier to get and keep work. And following this through, people with personality disorders and extreme interpersonal difficulties find it next to impossible to work or hold down a relationship and parent in a Karen Matthews-esq style.

Identifying and treating antisocial traits in childhood will definitely help

The solution to genuinely bad parenting (as opposed to the average struggling parents) cannot be to either redistribute money, or to force parents into work and incentivise marriage. These address merely the symptoms not the cause. And at the extreme end, would not address the interpersonal difficulties that explain why a mother would abuse her child. In the long-term we need to develop interventions that address the roots of cruel parenting: interpersonal development. Indications of anti-social personality disorder and other psychological and social problems are often apparent in children and teenagers. The way to protect the next generation of children from cruel parenting is therefore to invest in interventions that would address developmental problems in early childhood and end the cycle of cruelty.