Flight Decked?

Oh dear. It seems that Tory peer-to-be Howard Flight has put his foot in it. Cameron has told him to apologise, and apologise he has, and furthermore the apology was "unreserved".

What has he been saying? That the Jews were to blame for the Holocaust? That Global Warming Climate Change Chaos is a criminal conspiracy? That immigrants should be rounded up and sent home?

None of the above. His crime was to say:

We're going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it's jolly expensive. But for those on benefits, there is every incentive. Well, that's not very sensible.

Labour have called the comments "shameful" and said they showed how "out of touch" the Tories are, and Plaid Cymru have called them "disgraceful". Brendan Barber, of the in-touch-with-the-people's-mood TUC, said that Flight was "an insensitive throwback to the worst of 1980s politics". Man-of-the-people Eric Pickles has said that he found the comments "personally repugnant". David Cameron was clear that he didn't agree with the remarks, and was sure that Mr Flight would want to apologise. Which, after a brief interlude, he has. Shame.

The Tories are planning to remove child benefit from families where someone earns more than £43,000 a year. This will prove a slight disincentive for those familes (who may be accurately called middle-class) to have more children. At the same time, families on less than £43,000 (which will include those on benefits, or should) will continue to get the full child benefit that they do at present. I would be grateful if anyone could explain how anything Mr Flight said was wrong. The first two sentences are pretty much uncontested fact, or at least reasonable assumptions. It can only be his comment that encouraging those on benefits to "breed" is "not very sensible" that is causing controversy.

Paying people to have more and more children (i.e. breeding) when they can't even afford to support the ones they have is indeed not very sensible. I can see the argument for helping anyone who finds him or herself on low or no wages to support children they already have, and that is reasonable and humane. But the current system pays the feckless to be even more feckless. In an age of reliable contraception, there is no reason why anyone should have children they can't afford. Why I should keep on paying for Che'lsee to pop out her fourth and fifth sprogs while sitting at home watching Jeremy Kyle is a mystery. The noises from the Left are as expected. But for Cameron and Pickles to join in an attack on a man who is only saying what many ordinary people are thinking shows a lack of balls.

I happen to think that Flight is wrong on the issue of the higher earners. If you are earning over £43k, you can afford a couple of children, and these are the kind of people who are the least likely to have children they can't afford in any case. His remarks on the incentive that those on benefits have to produce even more children are spot on.

The Coalition - gradually revealing themselves as New Labour with a new coat of paint.

Osborne "declares war" on the rich

Thanks to JuliaM, I saw this piece from Monday's Grauniad. It's by Joseph Harker, and it's a doozy. Apparently, by taking child benefit (worth approximately £1000 for the first child and £700 thereafter) away from people earning over £44,000, Osborne is "declaring war on families".

When I heard on the radio this morning that George Osborne was removing child benefit from high earners, I winced, thinking that the £1,000 per year to be taken away would be a bit of a blow to those on salaries over £44,000. As his mantra goes, "we're all in this together", so it may be a price worth paying in order to reduce Britain's budget deficit.

But when I later discovered that benefits would be cut for all children, not just the first, I realised that this would be both hugely painful – and go against all that the Tories claim to support.

Hugely painful? For whom? People on £44k a year and above? Do me a favour. They are rich.

Julia's post is an excellent demolition job on this piece of exhibition-grade Islington whingeing, and I can't say anything better than she already has, so I won't go over that ground again. All I will say is that the comments in the Garundia are mostly anti, and for the reasons you would expect.

Some may believe that, to a high earner, child benefit is a luxury.

Yes ....

You see, Harker has five children, so he will be hit hard by this.

Children are hugely expensive – and child benefit is the state's way of acknowledging the financial hit to parents, and making a small contribution to offset it. For larger families, costs such as clothes and food multiply. It costs £240 per term for my three older children to travel to senior school, for example. And even little things like swimming classes, football practice and music lessons all mount up when multiplied: not to mention the "luxuries" like eating out (one family meal at McDonald's: £20), or the annual holiday (flights out of the question).

Well, yes. Anyone who has had children will know that they are a massive drain on your finances. But then, you sort of know that when you have them. Unless Harker's offspring are the result of failed contraception, and quintuplets to boot, then he must have chosen parenthood consciously - if he felt that having children was going to be so desperately costly, why did he choose to have five? Or any at all?

Here's the thinking, in the comments: Tweebuffelsmeteen writes:

If you want to have 5 children .... look after them yourself. It is not up to me to look after them for you.

To which Upnorthkid replies:

Yeah it is. It's called society. Or it was till that duo of millionaire wreckers hijacked our nation.

Apart from the fact that the 'millionnaire wreckers' were elected by the voters, which makes this a new definition of 'hijack' that I wasn't aware of, this is the Left's thinking in a nutshell. We are a 'society', and therefore everything is everyone else's responsibility. I have children - you pay for them. I want a job as a community mime artist - you owe me a salary. I don't feel like working - you owe me a plasma TV and a Playstation.

I can see the logic of the taxation system supporting people who are struggling to bring up their kids. No-one wants to see children going hungry because their parents are on the minimum wage. I can even see the point of paying the support in cash to the mother (the old Child Tax Allowance nearly always went to the father in the form of a lower tax code, and of course it all went on booze and fancy women, you know what men are like, har har). But why was this ever a universal benefit? Why does a woman/man earning £150,000 get a gift of a grand a year per child, paid for by, in many cases, people who are earning a tenth of that? Harker whinges on that he finds it hard to keep his head above water, but some people need the Child Benefit so little that they have been able to save it over the child's entire lifetime to give the kids a legacy of £16,000 when they reach 16, to do with as they wish. Read this and weep.

I'm sorry, Mr Harker, but someone on £44,000 is not struggling on the breadline. The average salary in the UK is half that. I know people (clever people, doing proper jobs) who are lucky to get £18,000. The most I have ever earned in a year was £25,000, and that seemed like a lot to me. So please forgive me if I don't sob in sympathy with well-rewarded journalists who are going to find it difficult to afford the second pony for the middle daughter or the third mini-break in the Seychelles because Tuscany is sooooo crowded this time of year, dahling.

If you can't afford kids, don't have them. and that applies to Guardian journalists as much as it applies to the benefit breeders on sink estates.

Here's an idea: let the Government make a statement that, from 7 July next year, Child Benefit will be paid only in respect of the first child and no others, and will not be paid at all to anyone earning more than the average wage. That's fair: any children already in the pipeline will be supported under the present system. But, from tonight, if you fancy getting fruity, you'll be the one who pays for it.

You can just hear it now - "It's so unfair!"