A Question of Breeding

Don't you just love it when some toff or other rich bastard makes an unguarded comment which is highly revealing as to their private thought processes. First of all we had Lord Young telling us that we'd "never had it so good", despite this "so-called recession". Now we've had another Tory Peer, Lord Flight, giving us the benefit of his thoughts on eugenics. In a nutshell, his lordship believes that his government's policy of stopping child allowance payments to high earners will discourage them from breeding, whilst those horrible lower classes living it up on benefits, will be at it like rabbits. Presumably he's a subscriber to the widely held (by morons mainly), belief that young working class women deliberately get pregnant so as to force their way to the front of the queue for social housing, and for the vast fortune that are child benefits. Trust me, if you'd ever seen some of those flats provided through social housing, you'd want to be sterilised in order to avoid the possibility of ever having to live in one as the result of having children.

Anyway, it's interesting, if not really that surprising, that the worst nightmare of a Tory peer should be the idea of the middle classes being overwhelmed by a growing horde of working class children. It is also hardly surprising that Flight and his ilk still have a very Victorian view of working class women being little more than baby factories. That said, his predecessors in that era would probably have welcomed the prospects of more and more working class kiddies being born in order to provide an inexhaustible supply of cheap labour for their factories. Mind you, we don't actually have any factories any more, which is part of the problem. Arguably, if the 'lower classes' who so worry Flight actually had jobs - jobs that paid a living wage - they might not produce so many children. But whatever the rights and wrongs of Flight's outburst, it's left me thinking that perhaps I've misjudged the coalition. I mean, if their policies on social benefits are going to result in the extinction of the Tory-voting rich bastards, then I'm all for them! Maybe this is all part of the Liberal Democrats cunning plan to destroy the Tory voter-base from within! Or maybe Lord Flight is simply as bonkers and out of touch as his colleague Lord Young?