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Large families on benefits
Interesting blog piece from Declan Gaffney looking at the vexed question of large families on welfare benefits.
There was a good example of this on BBC1’s Sunday Politics last weekend, when the Conservative MP for Shipley Philip Davies and Kate Bell from the Child Poverty Action Group discussed the latest proposals to cut child benefit for out-of-work families with more than two children. Kate stated that there was no evidence that people on benefits were choosing to have more children, and the presenter challenged Mr Davies to provide the evidence. First the MP tried appealing to stories in the popular press (which even its greatest fans would hesitate to describe as an authoritative source on these matters): then he played his ’get-out-of-jail –free’ card.
Andrew Neil: ‘Where’s the evidence?’ Phil Davies ‘We do see this happening, I mean we read reports in the papers of families with eight, nine ten kids who are all on benefits expecting to be housed in bigger and bigger houses. My constituents come to me in my surgery and talk about these people living next door to them, living down the same street as them that they object to, and it’s building up huge resentments among many working class voters who actually are going out, doing the right thing making sensible responsible decisions ...’(and so on).
Now it’s pretty clear that somebody has got it wrong here: whether Mr Davies’ constituents or Mr Davies himself, it’s impossible to say. There is no reason to doubt that some of Mr Davies’s constituents complain about families with ‘eight, nine or ten kids’ living on benefits. But he says that these constituents are complaining about families of this size /living on the same street as them/, and that’s a different matter, because there is no reason to believe that there is any significant number of such families in his constituency.
It’s not unlikely that some constituents have raised complaints about large families on benefits with Mr Davies and with many other MPs. What I don’t believe is that MPs are hearing large numbers of complaints /grounded in personal experience/, as they like to claim. Rather, constituents are expressing grievances based on what they read in the popular press and what they hear from politicians like Mr Davies. When an MP claims to be just repeating what his constituents are saying, a version of Hume’s test should be brought to bear: which is more improbable- that the MP has some solid evidence to support his or her assertions which for some reason he or she has decided not to present, or that there is in fact no such evidence and the MP is just trying to play the ‘get-out-of-jail free’ card?
For the whole article, see Large families, MPs and Hume’s test
Yes I saw the programme. I thought I heard distinctly the sound of the bottom of barrels being scraped.
Every time I see the title of this thread I think of White Punks on Dope (The Tubes) and imagine Phil Davies singing Large Families on Benefits to the same tune. I don’t know why. I think I need to lie down.
And quickly!