Breeding for Fiscal Responsibility

The brilliant Iain Duncan Smith's eugenic plan for the proles has been temporarily derailed by Britain's Head Boy, who has decided that, for this month at least, electoral promises made to breeders are a bit less breakable than those made to users of the NHS. The brilliant Duncan Smith had hoped to achieve behavioural change in the lower orders by withdrawing state support for any offspring beyond the second; although as a paid-up creeping Jesus of the Roman persuasion he presumably disapproves of using contraception, let alone teaching it in schools. "With two children, you send a message where people have to think: can I afford another child?" a minion told the Sunday Murdoch. "If you are on benefits and know the state will support you for the next child and the next, you are not facing the same decisions." If you have two children and another on the way, and lose yet more of your salary to the Osbornomic miracle, or if the British bill of rights declares your employer's right to sack you rather than give paid maternity leave, the brilliant Duncan Smith would stir your family's aspirational pluck and gumption with the loving goad of adversity; while Britain's Head Boy, for his own modernising, metrosexual, robustly humorous part, would doubtless advise a visit to a private physician for a discreet dose of the coathanger.