Feature Creep

Always interesting to see Mr Snot's twisted interpretation of how to win over the Daily Mail readership. Sadly, the libertarian aspect of it all seems to have been lost on the senile old duffer. So how does Cyclops plan to deal with unmarried teenager mothers? He'll simply take them away.

Teenage single mothers will be sent to live in supervised homes rather than given council houses, Mr Brown announced.

They will be taught how to bring up children under plans designed to reduce the number of teen pregnancies.

Firstly, if he wants to reduce teenage pregnancies, waiting until they've fired out a kiddy or three to start "educating" them is perhaps leaving it a little late in the day (what of this sex education in schools, if I may ask?). Secondly, it's waste. Nobody is asking the government to squander tens/hundreds of millions of cash we don't have. I reckon half a billion isn't unrealistic. Thirdly, MORE state intervention isn't what the middle classes Labour so desperately want to appeal to are asking for - it's less state intervention (saying "we despise you, but will still provide you with a place to stay courtesy of someone else's wallet, kind of like how we did before" is rather confusing to someone possibly in the midst of post-natal depression).

The policy, which has echoes of the Victorian homes for fallen women, is an admission that Labour has failed to tackle the serial abuse of the benefits system by single teenage mothers.

Vowing not to ‘shy away from taking difficult decisions on tough social questions’, the Prime Minister admitted that the scandal of ‘children having children’ has gone unspoken for too long.

Again. Simple pimple. If you want to stop someone abusing something, you simply take it away full stop for those people. But I suppose when you miss out on the opportunity to impose the righteousness of The State on these girls, it doesn't quite have the same ring to it. After all, who is going to teach them how to be good citizens and vote Labour otherwise? And I wonder what becomes of the absentee fathers in all this? Hardly "gender equality" is it? Teenage boys free to go around getting girls drunk on Bacardi Breeezers, inseminating them behind a bush in the park and then disappearing into the night knowing it won't be them getting sent to the gulag. Sounds like party time for the fellas, if you ask me.

Groups of between ten and 100 teenage mothers will be housed in residential units with job clubs, creches and parenting classes.

They will be made to sign behaviour contracts and if they break the rules they will be thrown out and sent to facilities with a tougher regime.

I wonder what this could entail. What rules would these be? If the reason for them being here in solely that they've had a child and hoped to gain a free council house out of it, surely removing that option solves the problem. Evidently not. Are we looking at 8pm bedtimes and no talking between meals? And what are these parenting classes? Not all teenage mothers are bad mothers. And you can't help but worry about the unnecessary separation of mothers and babies over the breaking of a rule set in, what is in essence, a publicly funded boarding school with dodgy shower facilities.

The problem is that offering up an elaborate benefits package to people who haven't proved any kind of contribution is appealing to some (contribution could be any number of things: voluntary/charity work, helping out at a girl guides group, etc). Again, simply removing the generous benefits offered to those who put nothing physical or financial into the system would solve much of this and would get them thinking more about the "give" aspect of "give and take". (If my employers suggested I could get the same or better pay surfing the net all day, sooner or later I might think about taking them up on that. That's conclusive enough).

Despite the total epic fail of all this, I am heartened by the fact McSnot hasn't managed to follow through on any of the soundbites he's ever unleashed ("British jobs for British people"? "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime"?).

Luckily, we've not got much more of this to come (Labour will be gone soon, and will tell us whilst in opposition - if they still exist - that they simply needed more time to implement this master plan), and whilst I don't expect the Tories to be much (if at all) better, I see the creep towards a total surveillance state being that tiny bit slower under their watch *.

I am almost smirking with astonishment at the total and deliberate misconprehension of the problem.  It's the failure to understand that sometimes the removal of incentive, rather than the provision of after-the-event "deterrents" is the best way forward. And to me, this looks wholeheartedly backward, reminiscent of the places women giving birth out of wedlock were sent to 50 years ago.

Deliberate institutionalism. I wonder who will be next. Those who don't vote perhaps? (H.T. The Lone Voice for digging up the story).

* - May revise this later.