Where does the blame lie?

quiet integrity

If illegitimate children weren't accompanied by a council house and state support, 'Josh' would have had an incentive to do his best for himself and his new family.
When is a political party going to be bold enough to advocate stopping using tax-payers money to support the breeding of people too feckless to seek self-improvement.
Hasn't anyone else noticed that they breed twice as fast as responsible adults? They are often grandparents in their mid-thirties, when others are thinking about starting a family after developing their career first.
We put more thought into breeding dogs and horses in this country than human stock. I yearn for a compulsory depot contraception programme that goes hand-in-hand with living off the state, i.e., our backs.

Austin Barry

Had Josh's achievements been academic, then there would be an interesting paradox to consider. But being good at sports is fairly meaningless in a societal sense as the tabloids daily remind us: John Terry may have fame and lots of dosh, but he is still an oaf.

SUSAN HILL

But surely a committment to anything - even sport - in a family who have committment only to dishonesty and the teaching of it from one generation to another, is better than to nothing. And not all sportspeople are footballers or behave like them.

Bunnykins

Quiet integrity: I agree up to a point. It should certainly be made more difficult for people such as these to get as much support as they do. Reduce the level of support for each subsequent child and then see if the breeding continues. However, it's a cultural thing, I'm afraid. Old fashioned as it sounds, those for whom faith, family and learning are the foundation stones of life will not be enslaved by this example of generational crime and hopelessness.

Bill Corr

Margaret Sanger and her chums were all in favour of the State taking action to prevent such people breeding.

Eugenics is now a dirty word, but a great many sound people were all in favour of it once.

Is it due for a revival?

Ian C

As a society we have gone from having major disincentives to ex-marriage procreation to massive incentives through non-judgmentalism and financial support as described in the story.

It is surely in the non-judgmentalism AND the well known failures of the education system that allows such events to happen?

Solution - start with getting the teachers sorted out as they can deliver both halves of what is going wrong. Morality and education go hand in hand.

Austin Barry

"Eugenics is now a dirty word, but a great many sound people were all in favour of it once."

Yes, indeed, including Mr. Hitler.

Fergus Pickering

Come, come, Ed Balls has an Oxford degree, a first for all I know, but he's still an oaf. On the other hand the girl (well woman I suppose) who can do 90 mph on a tea tray seems a delightful person. And was not Denis CVompton, who had no academic qualifications at all, as far as I know, a perfect gent.

john problem

Is this a piece of fiction? Any kid who can do all the useful things he is said to have done would know about condoms.

Em

Ian C: Please don't blame the education system. Once teachers were allowed to teach. Now they are expected to be responsible for every aspect of a child's behaviour. Every time something goes wrong in society it is handed to the schools to 'do something about it' by 'including it in the school curriculum'.

The school curriculum is at bursting point with everything it's expected to contain.

Recently I heard of a mother who blamed her child's obesity on his school because 'they hadn't taught him about healthy eating'.

We live in a blame culture and teachers are easy to blame.

SUSAN HILL

Condoms ? Of course they all know about them, and about every other sort of contraceptive. They either don`t bother or want a council house. And of course it is not a piece of fiction. Josh and his gf are just like thousands of other teenage couples - watch the TV programmes about single parents. It is just very sad that he had potential to do more than breed on benefits and turn to the crime the rest of his family have lived by.

hadrian

I am olf fashioned enough to believe quite firmly, contrary to all popular sociological, psychological, geneticist explanations that in the end what counts and should be reiniforced in individuals' conscience and consciousness is personal responsibility. When we sneer at this basic concept we actually denigrate human dignity. I have an early Victorian Bible from my father's great grand-father and it has inscribed in it the following salutary reminder:
'If THOU steal'st this book away,
remember in the latter day,
the Lord will say,
where is the book thou stolest away?'

Excuses and blaming others will be no good then. Sadly this simple but profoundly true lesson is one the modern classroom is scarely even allowed to to consider. We suffer as a result. Look at the Bulger case and the utterly absurd treatment of Venebles and Thompson. Too young, we were told, to know what they were doing. As a retired teacher I beg to differ.

wrinkled weasel

We very quickly become the sum total of our tiny, everyday decisions. These are influenced particularly by peer pressure.

You have to be a strong individual indeed to break the mould, to tear yourself away from the hard-wired nuture of childhood. Footballers are a case in point; they have a very singular skill, which happens to be popular with the masses, and by a stroke of capitalistic certainty, they end up with a lot of money. A yob in a Ferrari is still a yob. And they can all live in Alderley Edge and have Neff Ovens they never use, but they are still a product of their family background.

Nobody is really to blame. If you are born on the wrong side of the tracks, sooner or later it will come out and take control.

There are exceptions. There are many people who have found incredible changes in their lives due to Christian conversion. I have seen it. I have seen ex Heroin addicts turn their lives around and become contributing members of society due to a new found faith.

I am not saying this is the only way out, but it is a way out, and it works.

SUSAN HILL

Wrinkled weasel.Strangely, a cousin of Josh, who came from the same thieving side of the family - wanted to marry her boyfriend in church but their local vicar insists on that old-fashioned thing, the pre-wedding course. They went reluctantly, both became Christians, both still active ones, three years on and are very different people now. I have seen it happen too in other instances.

De Rigueur

Susan and Wrinkled,

Time to force-feed the next generation on Christian morality.

Then we could reward each mother and father with bonus points, that they spend in Tesco, for each week the child stays out of trouble. This scheme could be extended to schools. They could be rewarded with funds, that they could spend on PE and games kit for each child in their care who a) turns up every day. b) does not misbehave in class.

No doubt you'll think I'm joking, but in a way, I'm not.

Please feel free to pass this idea onto M. Gove Esq.

SRS

Bunnykins and quiet integrity-- 'faith, family and learning' are cornerstones, to be sure, and, as Susan points out, from time to time individuals rise above their circumstances and acquire these against all odds. But when there is neither faith nor respect for learning in a family or among peers those odds seem overwhelming. It seems cruel and narrow minded to me to speak of people 'too feckless to seek self-improvement.'

hadrian

It is true that every genuine Christian believer will always have judgement tempered with mercy, remembering that 'there but for the GRACE of God, go I.' or as the Apostle Paul put it, ' the children of disobedience, among whom also we all had our conversation [conduct] in in times past...and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others...For by GRACE are ye saved thrugh faith; and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God NOT of works lest any man should boast.' ( EphesiansChap2)
The purpose of Grace at work in individuals and societies is discernible but there is also the solemn principle of God's judgement on sinful conduct- the consequences do not just cosily remain with us in isolation but have societal effects- most sharply on those closest to us. God warns the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children even to third anf fourth generations. Sobering thought. Yet for all that we as Christians must seek the reform of those with messed up lives rather than simply casting harsh and cruel judgement that writes people off as 'beyond help'. Most active churches will have similar testimonies of messed up lives restored to new purpose and dignity ( though never to perfection!)
All of this makes crystal clear that Christianity assumes and instills a very clear sense of personal moral responsibility.
As for forgiveness I firmly believe God confines the right to extend or withold that to the VICTIM and that therefore a murderer, though they MAY genuinely repent, nevertheless must face the death penalty. The victim is not around to forgive. Our humanistic society in deriding these ancient truths has only itself to blame for the increasingly deranged way it deals with victims, their relatives and criminals, murderers in particular. Having watched the unsavoury sight of Will Self on Question Time in moral high dudgeon that Venebales was a 'child' and that we were baying for blood because we saw him as therefore 'super evil', one could but shake one's head at this absurd red herring. No wonder ore society and legal system is so morally murky! Whether he and his accomplice were any more evil than any other murderer is neither here nor there. We do not pass judgement on the degree of evil, just on the act of deliberate killing itself.

wrinkled weasel

I am currently finishing Peter Ackroyd's biography of Charles Dickens. If there is one literary figure whose life and work is a paradigm of the tension between self and surroundings, it is he.

Noa Zrk

An intriguing subject and an interestingly varied post.

We are all acquainted with such families; Ma and Pa Larkin et all but without the humour. They provide us with both a mirror and a measure for our own success or failure and we would not be human if we did not draw conclusions or make judgements.
Generally, we accept that the role of the state in the lives of individuals should be minimal; that is to encourage opportunity and social acceptance , but not to enforce behaviour, to protect others from the consequences of crime.
For me the question is to what extent the curiously toxic mixture of state non judgementalism and social intervention has exaggerated the consequences of socially irresponsible personal behaviour.

The extent of the small personal tragedy, the dawning and self realisation of loss and its personal consequences, is for the novelist to empathise with and evaluate.
It practice it is manifested in an increasing number of broken marriages and relationships, single parent families and a life of petty and crime.

hadrian

The parent-child bond is absolutely sacrosanct in Scripture. Of course we may well see some families where we regard ourselves as fit to judge that the kids'd be better off taken way from such coarse, ignorant, impoverished, just plain dumb parents. However the State has no right to breach family bonds except where parents have degenerated to such an extent they pose a threat to the child's life. Such pre-emptive/ defensive action will always be exceptional, though in highly dysfunctional societies such as our own, it may regretably be increasingly needful. Those very stupid and naive baptists ( to judge them charitably in the absence of any more sinister motives) in Haiti who recently tried taking some of the ragged kids away 'to a better life', could be seen to be in egregious breach of Biblical standards of behaviour and encouraged the parents to be likewise.

Sam Armstrong

Josh wanted removing from that family, and fostering by better parents.

Sometimes the chattering classes like to fetishise these dysfunctional families, such as in the TV series 'Shameless'.

Society needs to become more critical of dysfunctional families. End child benefit to slow down the birthrate of delinquent children.

Bunnykins

Sam Armstrong "Society needs to become more critical of dysfunctional families...." I would go further than that and say society needs to become more critical of itself. We live in a society that hero-worships sports and film stars, that defends the indefensible whilst scoffing modesty and belief in G-d and which prefers the safety of victimhood over the virtue of accepting personal responsibility for one's actions. I'm afraid that Josh and his family are merely inevitable bi-products of our retarded value system.

Graeme Thompson

I hope the grandmum got at least two years. Proper deterrence would be a start. And not two years sat around playing pool and watching tv, but hard time for her despicable breach of trust.

For a very long time the insanity of providing incentives to have children with the State as sugar daddy has existed. We'll still be moaning about this in 10 years time I'm sure. And 10 years after that.

If we had a Party genuinely willing to go 'back to basics' and take the war to the BBC when it launches its inevitable propaganda assault against it, we'd stand a chance of putting things right. Unfortunately the subversive left that runs the BBC dictates the terms of policy and debate. Politicians who otherwise would seek a mandate for the changes needed dont. We need a Churchill to save us from the enemy within, and I dont see him.

daifromwales

The basis of societal morality - including the opprobrium heaped on unfortunate young girls having children out of wedlock - was necessary when almost everyone had trouble enough to feed their own children - never mind that of their next door neighbour.
Now we ask "The State" to pay. Which means that I have 2 children, and I see a mother with 7 children by 5 fathers living entirely on £40,000 benefit. Which is about what I pay in taxes every year.
This is why my clever kids are in the minority and her dim kids are in the majority. And it is why I despise her so much - and despise those who give her my money even more.
The western European nations contain the first living species on planet earth since life began for which the normal evolutionary processes are in reverse.
It may be cruel not to provide support to those who through deliberate action or sheer incompetence live on other people's work, but today's alternative is suicidal.
Bliar + Broon etc. know that a stupid population is more likely to vote for them. So I have no optimisim left whatsoever.

And marriage is dying because, if young men can get what they want without it, why should they bother? So I see lots of young ladies who are desperate to settle down and have a family - but there's nobody prepared to help them to do it. So much for b***** feminism...