Why is it Left wing to allow millions to live on benefits, and let children get each other pregnant? Tom Harris asks this question in an excellent article in the Mail on Sunday today. He’s right to get angry about a situation that means one in five UK children are brought up in workless households, the highest in the EU. But the reason is not because our women are lazier than the French and Italians. In my News of the World column today I ask: why do so many choose welfare dependency as a lifestyle? Well, it is because we pay them to.
To understand why Britain has such welfare dependency, look at the incentives. The horrible truth is that a girl leaving a British school with poor qualifications has a choice of career: work or pregnancy. As welfare is split up (council tax relief, tax credits, etc) no one in government has an overview of the real choices facing our school leavers.
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