Starvation: the Latest Part in the Tories Long Campaign against Young Mothers

Mike this evening put up a piece reporting that a survey of 300 young mothers found that they were experiencing severe financial problems. Two-thirds of those questioned said that they were only just managing, and a quarter had been forced to use food banks.

This is disgusting, and Mike takes apart the equally revolting attempts of the DWP to put a positive spin on these statistics. They claimed that it was ‘encouraging’ that more children were living in ‘working households’. Mike points out the obvious: this has absolutely nothing to do with child poverty. Similarly, doubling free childcare for three and four years may look like an improvement, but it’s questionable how many this will actually help.

And he also shoots down the lie that ‘work coaches’ are ‘encouraging people into jobs’. They don’t encourage. They just bully, adding more stress to people already under considerable financial strain.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/03/28/young-mothers-are-starving-because-they-are-shortchanged-on-benefits-and-cant-find-paying-work/

Mike makes clear the reasons why these young women are starving: they’re being short-changed on benefits, and can’t find paying work. This is, of course, all part of the Tories long campaign to create a cowed, impoverished workforce willing to accept any job, no matter how poor the conditions and pay.

But it’s also part of the deeper Tory hostility to young mothers. Mike acknowledges this in his article, stating that the Tories’ hidden policy here is to prevent people having children at a young age. He’s right, and some of them have expressed their hatred of young mums in particularly grotesque rhetoric. Way back in the 1970s Maggie’s mentor, Keith Joseph, declared that unmarried teen mothers were ‘a threat to our stock’ – a nasty eugenicist turn of phrase, for which he was rightly pilloried. It’s even more sinister when you realise that Sweden continued sterilising people on eugenics grounds right into the 1970s. Among those targeted for sterilisation as a threat to Swedish genetic stock were promiscuous young women. I don’t know if Joseph wanted to see such legislation introduced here, so he could sterilise a few British unmarried mothers. Given his comments, it really wouldn’t surprise me.

A little while ago I posted up here episodes I found on YouTube of a BBC series broadcast in the 1980s investigating government secret and the way this undermined democracy. In one edition of the programme, they discussed the way the police had compiled secret reports and records of ordinary people they found suspicious, even though they had committed no crime. These included young people simply following the latest fashions in dress and music, like punks. In one area, they were also writing down the names of young pregnant women, who did not appear to have boyfriends.

And then in the 1990 there was the unsavoury spectacle of Peter Lilley prancing about the stage at the Tory conference one year, reading out his ‘little list’ in what he thought was a parody of the Mikado. On it, amongst all the other people, like the unemployed and welfare recipients he and the rest of the attendees hated were unmarried mothers.

This is why so many young mothers are finding it so difficult to cope now. The Tories have always despised them as part of the ‘undeserving’ poor, to use the language of the Victorians that Maggie thought was so ‘virtuous’. And so I doubt very much whether they are at all sorry to see these poor young women starve. In fact, given the eugenicist views expressed by Keith Joseph, I can imagine some are probably only too delighted.

Which raises the question whether these women are also part of those targeted for ‘chequebook genocide’ – the term Mike has coined for those the Tories seem happy to see starve to death after having their benefits removed. Mike coined the term in response to the deaths and mass poverty caused by the DWP and their wretched Work Capability Assessment. As Jeffrey Davies on here has pointed out, the congenitally disabled were the subject of Nazi extermination as well as the Jews, Gypsies and others they considered subhuman. Mike and many other bloggers from the Left and disability rights movements have speculated whether the Tories have the same policy, but heavily disguised. The news that a quarter of young mothers now have to use food banks makes you wonder if they’re also targeted for extermination as a threat to ‘our stock’, in the same way that the Swedes also forcibly sterilised promiscuous young women.

Tags: Aktion T4, BBC, Bloggers, Childcare, Conservatives, DWP, Eugenics, Food Banks, Government Secrecy, Gypsies, Jeffrey Davies, Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher, Peter Lilley, Police, Punks, Starvation, Sterilisation, Vox Political, Women, Work Capability Assessment, Young Mothers, Youtube