A single mother's testament and some hard FACTS

"Personally, I keep having flashbacks to 1997, and not merely because of the most memorable election result in recent times. In January that year, I was a single parent with a four-year-old daughter, teaching part-time but living mainly on benefits, in a rented flat.

I had become a single mother when my first marriage split up in 1993.

In one devastating stroke, I became a hate figure to a certain section of the press, and a bogeyman to the Tory Government. Peter Lilley, then Secretary of State at the DSS, had recently entertained the Conservative Party conference with a spoof Gilbert and Sullivan number, in which he decried "young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing list".
The Secretary of State for Wales, John Redwood, castigated single-parent families from St Mellons, Cardiff, as "one of the biggest social problems of our day". (John Redwood has since divorced the mother of his children.) Women like me (for it is a curious fact that lone male parents are generally portrayed as heroes, whereas women left holding the baby are vilified) were, according to popular myth, a prime cause of social breakdown, and in it for all we could get: free money, state-funded accommodation, an easy life.

For a while, I was clinically depressed. To be told, over and over again, that I was feckless, lazy — even immoral — did not help.

Gingerbread (now amalgamated with the National Council for One Parent Families), keen to forestall the mud-slinging of the early Nineties, recently urged Messrs Brown, Cameron and Clegg to sign up to a campaign called Let's Lose the Labels, which aims to fight negative stereotyping of lone parents

HERE ARE JUST A FEW OF THE FACTS THAT SOMETIMES GET LOST ON THE WAY TO AN EASY STORY, OR A GLIB STUMP SPEECH:

- only 13 per cent of single parents are under 25 years old, the average age being 36.

-Fifty-two per cent live below the breadline and 26 per cent in "non-decent" housing.

- Single-parent families are more likely than couple families to have a member with a disability, which gives some idea of the strains that cause family break up.

- IN SPITE OF ALL THE OBSTACLES, 56.3 PER CENT OF LONE PARENTS ARE IN PAID EMPLOYMENT.

The experiences of single parent J K Rowling writing in The Times
April 14, 2010


Gaint's post is not merely 'offensive shite' it is deliberately provocative, misogynist and designed, by the use of sickening stereotypes, to stir up very negative emotions against a section of our community

I am disgusted that any kind of forum - short of the likes of Stormfront - allows this kind of offensive posting from a 'guest'

MAYBE GAINT'S RECENT POST IS THE REAL EXAMPLE OF ANY PLEA FOR MUDCAT TO 'CLEAN ITS ACT UP' - NOT THE USE OF A FEW SWEAR WORDS