Welfare Murder

Been chaos at work for the last week or so, hence the recent abandoned feel of this inconsequential little blog. Just thought I'd take the opportunity to make a note of the excellent recent blog of Ed West in the DT which says everything I would like to have said about the welfare state's complicity in the murder of Baby P, Haringey-style.

Of everything I’ve read about Tracey Connelly today, this little titbit stands out:

And when paramedics were called to the house on August 3, 2007, to find Peter blue and cold in his blood-spattered cot, they were horrified when his mother kept the ambulance waiting while she searched for her cigarettes.

That says it all. I know conservative commentators risk accusations of playing politics over an infant’s death, but if we’re to reduce the frequency of such cases in the future (we’ll never stop them) we need to be honest. Tracey Connelly was the ideal welfare state client - paid hundreds of pounds of taxpayer’s money every week to sit at her council-funded home getting drunk and fat, surfing the internet for poker and porn, sexually incontinent and lazy, totally irresponsible about her offspring and skilled only at taking advantage of naive liberals in social services.

She grew up in shocking chaos herself, the product of a one-night stand between a drug-addict and a paedophile, and with that background Oxbridge was never likely to be on the cards. Neither her biological nor step-father was up to much; but her surrogate father, the state, did not help either by throwing money her way. Her entire life seemed to be a litany of bad behaviour being rewarded by the authorities – every time she did something bad or stupid, they did something nice for her, until finally she, along with her mentally sub-normal, violent boyfriend and his even nastier brother, went too far.

I’m a Haringey resident and pay their extortionate council tax rate, but I would have been happy to contribute towards giving Peter Connelly a decent life. Instead our money ensured his death. In December 2006 Peter’s injuries were deemed so bad that he was taken away and placed with a friend for a few weeks, before being handed back again. So what did the council do to punish his mother? They took away her three-bedroom flat and gave her a larger four-bedroom house.

What did they expect? That rewarding someone for bad behaviour would stop that behaviour? Have the authorities lost track with human nature? Baby Peter’s life ended in that four-bedroom house, his death assisted by a welfare state that is as dysfunctional as any alternative family model. It’s become a cliche to rant about single mothers and their free council flats, but one of the under-reported, unintended consequences of the system is that such properties attract a breed of work-shy, violent “stepfathers” and sometimes, in this case, their family or friends.

The statistics suggest that children living in step-families are 100 times more likely to suffer fatal abuse than children whose biological father is at home, while analysis of 35 cases of fatal abuse between 1968 and 1987 showed children living with a unrelated men were 70 times at risk. And why do some many children live in such high-risk surroundings? Because the state encourages it.

Liberalism is supposed to help the weak and the defenceless against the bad and the strong, but in its unintended consequences the welfare system now does the opposite. Despite the money spent by the state, or perhaps because of it, Peter Connelly’s brief and pathetic life was lived in Dickensian poverty. It is a problem we are unable to cure because, unlike the Victorian social reformers, who understood that eliminating poverty required improving both the physical and moral state of the poor, our campaigners for “social justice” do not believe in being judgmental.

Until we change that attitude, and our welfare system, many more children will die in circumstances like Baby P.

The only dot that remains unjoined here is the direct responsibility of the British Left for the long chain of events that led to this parlous, feral, savage and nationwide state of affairs. It grieves me that mindless "progressives" like Mary Drivell are still peddling their incontinent claptrap in the main pages of Ed West's broadsheet. But not half as much as it grieves me to contemplate just how much damage and harm the social experiments politicians that share her shade of red have done.

The murder of Baby P is a "progressive" murder. Those who Mary cheerleads for should be held accountable.