Aspiration is the best birth control: How the Philpott case highlights the plight of women trapped in a spiral of benefit, babies and predators
Well, it had to happen. Just days after he’d given benefit claimants (and his own dark barnet) a sharp new spring haircut, the Chancellor was asked, on a visit to Derby, whether the Philpotts of the same parish were a product of Britain’s benefit system.
‘It’s right we ask questions as a Government, a society and as taxpayers, why we are subsidising lifestyles like these,’ he said, forgetting to use the new mockney accent he’d launched at Morrisons. ‘It does need to be handled.’
George Osborne is right to answer that we are right to ask questions. We have to look at this, however unpopular (or popular) it makes us.
Questions: George Osborne, right, was right to say that we are correct to question the benefits system after the case of Mick and Mairead Philpott, leftMick Philpott coddled teenage girls to be his own cash cows, from which he could suckle. He got them in calf, repeatedly.
As the headline screamed: ‘Man who bred 17 babies by five women to milk benefits system is guilty of killing six of them.’
Shameless Mick, with his football team of children, is a narcissistic, psychopathic parasite.
Scrounger: Mick Philpott (pictured with his wife Mairead, centre, his mother Peggy, right, and sons Jesse, right in green, and John, far right) claimed thousands of pounds in benefit and refused to get a jobBut the backlash against the women who received the State bounty has already started – some MPs and newspapers last week called for child benefit to be confined to two children, saving £3.3 billion, and no doubt some will question the system further: babies born to girls under 16 qualify for a one-off £500 Sure Start Maternity Grant, thereafter the mothers can get child benefit up to an unlimited number of children, and are a council housing priority.
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‘These girls are failed by their schools,’ she says. ‘It’s a huge waste of potential, and lives, and costs us all dearly.
'At one school in South London, only seven per cent of girls left with five good GCSEs.
'Many got pregnant because it was a sound financial decision to improve their circumstances. But of the girls who did pass their exams, none had babies.’
So, George, this is the uncomfortable question that I think the doomed relationships of Kim, Pam, Heather, Mairead and Lisa with that man raise.
What was so missing in their upbringing and education that they were prepared to leave school, and bear child after child, to slave and skivvy, and give their wages from part-time cleaning jobs and their child benefit and tax credits straight to this man?
And in answering this question, I can’t help feeling yes, of course these girls were victims of this repulsive predator, and their own weakness, but they were also failed first by their parents and then their schools and the social services, and therefore also the State.
The take-away from this is, of course, that aspiration is the best contraceptive, but no one is going to say that: it’s much more macho to talk about cutting the handouts, now that ‘Welfare UK’ and ‘Benefit Britain’ are shaping up to be such key election issues.
But they should talk about it.
About the girls with no aspiration, nor qualifications, and about the lack of jobs for the equally poorly educated males who could be their partners, because all of the above helps explains the mystery of why so many young women hooked up with Mick: they must have found any attention was better than none.
Even attention from an aggressive, violent predator whose idea of a classy marital celebration after the deaths of six of his children was for him and his wife to get p****d and rape each other at their graves.
Fair point: Writer Harriet Sergeant pointed out that state handouts offer girls a perverse incentive to fail even before they get pregnantAs Mairead Philpott said in evidence: ‘He was my guardian angel, he loved me and cared for me and made me feel safe.’
So expect a backlash against gymslip mums and large families receiving out-of-work benefits that won’t help anyone.
What might help, though, is a moment’s thought for the girls, the mistresses, Mick’s ‘bitches’, as he calls them, and yes, even Mairead.
This uniquely grave tragedy of the six lost children is not, in the end, about the over-supply of benefits, and it is insulting to suggest it is.
It’s about a psychopath who could manipulate and dominate young women who didn’t put up resistance as they felt he was the best life had to offer.
It was all too easy for Shameless Mick to prey on such women’s dependency.
‘You put Michael Philpott above your children, and as a result they have died,’ the judge told Mairead.
The truly scary part of all this, for anyone with a human heart, is not that these women were dependent on the State.
They were so utterly dependent on him.
You can't win a whiff-whaff war Pippa‘I’m also told the Johnsons are almost as competitive as the Middletons,’ says Pippa, who has called for a ping-pong match – or whiff-whaff-off – with the London Mayor.
A note of warning. My tribe will win. Or we will claim we did, anyway.
As Dame Ann Leslie is reported to have observed: ‘The Johnsons are like Hungarians. They go in the revolving door behind you, but they always come out in front.’
Warning: Rachel Johnson tells Pippa Middleton (pictured) that her tribe will winLuton a London airport? You must be joking
Luton Airport. Where to begin?
It’s not so much that they make you pay for those plastic baggies, or that they padlock all the power-points.
What truly gets my goat is that of all the destinations the airline industry gulls passengers into thinking is London – Stansted, Gatwick etc – Luton is the most useless.
When I returned from a trip abroad last week, blizzards delayed my flight, so hundreds of us didn’t exit baggage reclaim till after midnight.
A joke: Rachel Johnson is not a fan of London Luton AirportWe left the terminal in a snowstorm, dragging our luggage, to walk to the bus to take us to Luton Parkway, from which we would in theory find a rail connection to real London.
Only there wasn’t a bus. Or a train. The last connection had already left. Which left a coach (departure time 12.43am).
I don’t mind using regional airports. In fact, I prefer them.
So could those who are planning to replace Heathrow with a spanking new airport somewhere else please remember that at least the creaking hell-hole that is Deathrow has fixed links to the capital.
How dare somewhere that has no regular train services to the capital brand itself a London airport?
It’s not a London airport. It’s a joke.
I giggled when Edwina Currie said she could live on £53 a week, then demanded a £500 fee from cash-strapped Radio 5 Live to say so on air. She was the only person in my years at The Lady who demanded dosh in exchange for a quote. As for the £53-a-week challenge? I failed it by Monday, when I filled up with diesel (£90) then bought the ingredients for a butternut squash, leek and pancetta risotto at M&S (£22 without wine).
