the Matthews culture and the kinchin lay

MINISTERS will this week order a historic crackdown on Britain's benefits culture in the wake of the Karen Matthews kidnapping case.

Lone parents and the long-term sick who rely on state benefits will be told to find a job or face having their payments cut, as the Government tries to end the "Matthews culture" of spending an entire life on welfare.

This “Matthews culture” nonsense deserves unpicking, since it is a deliberate attempt to associate people forced into long term worklessness with a brutal and stupid criminal. It’s a bit like accusing your GP of being part of a Shipman culture or saying that James Purnell is part of a Hitler culture because he happens to be a politician. For the most part, the families made victim to this procedure will simply quietly disintegrate. But for people like Karen Matthews, the absence of benefits would merely incline her and those like her to sharpen up their criminal acts and think harder about more realistic ways to put their children to work. So the question is: how would child exploitation work on the free market?

To profit from begging children, it was not necessary to breed them up from babyhood. Small children could be hired for a copper or two a day and sometimes they changed hands permanently for a few shillings. No doubt it was from such trading that the master beggars who made a speciality of organising and training youngsters got hold of their human material. Their methods of instruction remained obscure, but plainly some of them were exceedingly adept at teaching their pupils how best to exploit their childish pathos, for according to a contemporary report children so schooled ‘when turned out of hand by their tutors are generally the most successful impostors in the metropolis on account of their age.

From Kellow Chesney’s masterful The Victorian Underworld. He goes on to cite mid-19th century figures from the Mendicity Soceiety which found that child beggars formed 11% of all the cases that had come to its notice. That is, professional child beggars. There were plenty of amateurs about as well. There’s also the famous precedent of Oliver Twist, itself rooted in real and – in London at least – common practices:

In the winter of 1850-51, the deputy of a nethersken off Gray’s Inn Lane appeared on a pickpocketing charge at Middlesex sessions. A police officer gave evidence that he had managed to peep thropugh a window into a lodging house where he saw the accused surrounded by a group of small boys. From a line stretched across the room, a coat was hanging, with a number of handkerchiefs tucked into its pockets. Each child ‘in turn tried his skill in removing the handkerchief without moving the coat or shaking the line. Those who performed the manouver with skill and dexterity…received the coingratulations of the prisoner’ but bunglers were punished, and the watcher saw two boys ‘knocked down and kicked for not having exhibited the requisite amount of tact and ingenuity.’

There’ll always be a place for beggary, though pickpocketing isn’t what it was. I’d predict good times for druggies and paedophiles, since competition on the supply side should drive prices down. Anyway, it’s the general culture within which criminality operates that matters most:

Here was a fully competitive society without disguise where all could see that strength, cunning, quick response to opportunity and danger, courage and freedom from scruple were the keys to survival. The fly barrow boy with his slang weights made a living, whiule the drudging chamber carpenter went under. The woman who hawked herself in Kingsland Road was better able to feed herself than the one who stitched gunny sacks night and day…to believe in the virtuous precepts of authority was simply to be duped.

Comments

[Fellow Traveller]

Reminds me of the Somalian situation - you can be a virtuous Somali in Mogadishu and starve to death (don't worry - some kindly Western liberals will shed a tear or two at your passing and bemoan the awfulness of this world, while blaming it all on evil Muslims) or you can take to the high seas and embark on the flamboyant and profitable career of the pirate. Those pirates bootstrapped themselves out of poverty in a way that would've made Samuel Smiles proud (excepting the fact that he disapproved of piracy).

The ruling class response to Baby P and the Matthews case smacks of Israeli style collective punishment - wall them all in like the Palestinians of Gaza and starve 'em until they become compliant.

[Aaron]

Here in Michigan, I saw Engler roll out his welfare reforms in the early 1990's. (I'll resist the temptation to use scare quotes.) For the record, assuming such a creature actually exists, Engler predates the notion of "compassionate conservatism". The national Republican Party picked up on the issue of welfare reform and Clinton "stole the issue", implementing reforms that led to the country largely following the Michigan model. Reduce the welfare rolls with various new rules and time limits, shift a lot of people from "welfare" to "disability" benefits, and call it a day.

Welcome to Michigan.

[Alex]

shift a lot of people from "welfare" to "disability" benefits

Been there, done that, in the 1980s. We're now harassing the people involved.

[redpesto]

It's simple: Karen Matthews - like Myra Hindley before her - is The Face of Evil, which makes it so much easier for everyone to hate benefit claimants in general.