It’s A Funny Old World…

…when if you acquire more animals than you can comfortably house and feed adequately, you’re regarded as a ‘hoarder’ and the RSPCA and mental health teams get involved, where if, like Bradley Ariza, you have more children than your salary and housing will comfortably allow, the NSPCC and social services don’t want to know.

And you will be regarded, by the ‘Guardian’ who gives you a column to complain at length about the unfairness of it all, as a ‘family in poverty’:

After the rent, food, shopping, clothes and activities for our children (clubs, music lessons etc), so they can enjoy their lives to some extent, my girlfriend and I have to go without food fairly regularly.

Well, why have three, then? I mean, I'm assuming they aren't triplets?

There’s the usual complaints about rising fuel costs and food costs and the increase in private rents (because the landlords aren't supposed to be making any money, oh no, they are supposed to provide for free…) that you’d expect.

But no-one addresses the issue of why does this chap keep breeding!

If I am being honest, there is a case for making it financially easier for people to work more. From my perspective though, the problem is not that we are getting too many benefits. The problem is that as soon as we try to work our way out of the grip of the welfare state, we lose so many benefits, and incur so many other costs; transport, childcare etc. Yet instead of helping people, there seems to be this obsession with punishing those on benefits, as if being poor is some sort of crime.

It isn't. Deliberately making yourself poorer and then whinging about it should be.