Lynne Featherstone

Appalling, quite appalling:

A Tory councillor has claimed that there should be compulsory sterilisation for parents on benefits ... Mr Ward, who has sat on Medway Council in Kent for eight years ... said, "I think there is an increasingly strong case for compulsory sterilisation of all those who have had a second (or third, or whatever) child while living off state handouts."

The Daily Mail has the full story on their website.

Here's one example of what that would mean - suppose you have a happily married couple, hardworking for years and then one of the suffers a horrible accident at work and is invalided out. They decide they want to have a family, and rather than bring up an only child would rather go for having two children. Knowing full well the financial implications, and being willing to bear them, they decide that the partner of the injured one will also stop work for a couple of years to help bring up their new family as it arrives.

Only not in the world of John Ward - he would have them ordered off to compulsory sterilisation.

As I said - appalling, quite appalling. He seems to have in mind some caricature of everyone who is on benefits as being irresponsible and feckless - what a wrong, out of touch and insulting view. And that's without getting on to the appallingly extreme and inhumane nature of the solution he wants - compulsory sterilisation.

UPDATE (26 March): John Ward has now quit as a councillor.

Comments

1. Alasdair W says:

   25 March 2008 at 11:08 am

   That is really quite sick
2. Jennie says:

   25 March 2008 at 12:13 pm

   Scarier than the fact that this idiot has made his idiot pronouncement is the number of people who will say "oooh, that's a good idea".

   This demonisation of the poor because it's their fault for not trying hard enough, rather than the system's fault for it's crushing bureaucracy, is the attitude of both major parties, and most of the newspapers. It's a meme that's not going to go away soon.
3. Justin Hinchcliffe says:

   25 March 2008 at 2:00 pm

   What a nasty man (to put it mildly). You have to accept that ALL parties contain unpleasant people. They are, though, in a minority. The vast majority of us are honourable people who go into politics to improve things. Do you remember the Lib Dems in Harrow, circa 1992, advising that a good way to keep elderly Tory voters warm in the Winter was to firebomb their apartment?
4. Jennie says:

   25 March 2008 at 6:20 pm

   All parties do contain unpleasant people, and most of them have unpleasant ideologies of one form or another too. I can't speak for Lynne but I'm by no means an uncritical Lib Dem member ;)

   I don't recall the incident you refer to, but the idea made me laugh. There's a big difference between something which was clearly meant as a joke and something meant entirely seriously, even if the joke displays something of a black sense of humour.
5. Ian Ridley says:

   27 March 2008 at 12:30 pm

   Original article is cached by Google for now:

   http://tinyurl.com/2cmz36

   I always prefer to see these things first-hand rather than rely on the media!