Urban myths about benefits

"They only do it for the family allowance, you know." That overheard remark became a family joke. It was made, possibly more than once, in the direction of my parents in the 1960s as they shepherded around their four young children. Yeah, we were noticeable. We were little, we had red hair. We got up some people's noses. Hey ho.

My parents used to joke about it. There are always people who think it's okay to pass disapproving, ignorant and daft remarks about other people's families. Don't let it bother you - just laugh.

Now it's not so funny. Things have changed. And not just because family allowance is now child benefit. The difference now is that those with the disapproving, ignorant and daft remarks make them, apparently, to their MP. And instead of laughing at them, the MP goes on national television and argues for a benefit cap on the strength of them.

That, at any rate, is what Philip Davies, MP for Shipley, has done. He told viewers of the BBC's Sunday Politics show that he reads reports in the papers "of families with eight, nine, 10 kids who are all on benefits expecting to be housed in bigger and bigger houses." Mmmm. Is that really evidence? It is, according to Philip Davies, because: "My constituents come to me in my surgery and talk about these people living next door to them, living down the same street as them, and it’s building up huge resentments among many working class voters..."

Davies doesn't laugh at his constituents and tell them to stop being so disapproving, ignorant and daft. Which would be the natural reaction of anyone who knew anything about people's lives, or who had bothered to discover that there is no evidence for a "they only do it for the family allowance" breeding theory. This is presumably because he's keen to support Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith who is currently flying a policy kite about a two-child benefit limit.

He's not a hardliner, though, Mr Davies. When interviewer Andrew Neil pressed him on what would happen if a woman with three children was suddenly widowed, or a woman with one child unexpectedly had twins, he was prepared to make exceptions. You felt that they could have spent the rest of the programme, possibly the rest of the week, thinking of categories of people who might, on reflection, be the kind of non-feckless people that the welfare system should support.

For number crunchers, there's a systematic demolition through statistics of the weakness of Davies's claim on a blog by Declan Gaffney, former policy adviser to the Labour government.

But there is a simpler and quicker rebuttal. It was made at the end of the Sunday Politics discussion by Kate Bell of the Child Poverty Action Group. Andrew Neil let her have the last word. "What this policy is going to do is penalise children whose parents are unlucky enough to lose their jobs." Exactly.