Susannah was (as far as we can tell, and this is the impression given in the written articles also) trying to support Mike and Tiffany with their son Toby, who at 3 1/2 years old was still in nappies, unable to speak and aggressive in his behaviour. The social workers believed that intervention was urgent as there was only a few months left before the window for remedying these things closed. The boy was being cared for by two obviously inadequate parents who had failed to obtain a bed for him and whose house had dog’s muck on the floor. The father, who obviously had learning difficulties of some kind, was hostile to the social worker from the start, and repeatedly accused her of simply being there to take Toby away, or as he put it, to “wreck” them. There were a number of incidents in which Toby sustained bruises and his parents’ explanations did not convince.

Tiffany was pregnant with another child, and during her pregnancy was hospitalised; the couple agreed that Toby should go into foster care as they did not think he could deal with looking after the boy on his own, but he pulled out at the last minute. The social workers went to court and succeeded in getting him taken into care. After the second baby was born (and promptly removed), Tiffany threw Mike out after a fight, and although the social workers were willing to work with Tiffany to keep her and her two children together, she decides to give them up for adoption.

Some might say that Tiffany made that decision because she felt beaten down by the constant pressure, but having watched the programme, it appeared that she was enjoying the new-found freedom caused by Mike not being there — she said that she had been controlled by others all her life, and was finally able to be herself. Her depression was also being treated for the first time. It’s possible that she wanted all trace of Mike out of her life, and that included his children. The programme ended by saying her children would be adopted separately due to Toby’s special needs, that Tiffany would not see them again as children, and that Mike had made no further contact.

I read a review of the programme on the Telegraph’s website (the picture of Tiffany is more flattering than anything you see of her in the programme), and one of the commenters (who signed himself “That Guy”) asked “Come on social workers, and their apologists, tell us why the children can’t see their natural mother, who didn’t intentionally harm them, during their childhood?”. The answer is that this is beyond the social workers’ control: it is how the adoption system works and always has done, because it dates back to a time when adoption was a means of getting rid of illegitimate children by pretending that they were really someone else’s. In other countries, a type of open adoption exists where the birth parents still have some degree of access, but that is not true here. There are other options available, such as special guardianship (where children are looked after by specially cleared family members or friends), but that probably was not an option for Tiffany anyway.

What astounded me was the refusal of some commenters to accept that Mike’s (in particular) obvious learning difficulties and inability to see or discuss things rationally were a major obstacle to getting Toby’s developmental needs seen to. One of the commenters compared Toby’s surroundings to his own upbringing in a small, crowded house in the 1950s, as if basic and poor was the same thing as filthy and unsanitary (I am sure they didn’t allow people or dogs to defecate on their floor). During a contact visit, he barely spoke to his son, preferring to absorb himself in playing with the children’s toys separately from Toby (however, the presence of the social worker looking at them and taking notes cannot have helped). He looked child-like, apart from his beard, and acted the part (he also revealed that he had lost a number of children to miscarriage and stillbirth, which may reflect a genetic disorder of some kind). It’s possible that his problems were not all of his own making, but it’s also true that he was in no fit state to raise Toby, much less to attempt to remedy his pressing developmental needs.

It is not the first time I have seen someone on the internet brazenly deny the obvious failings of a parent in such a documentary. Last December, the BBC broadcast a Panorama programme about the difficulties of getting older children adopted out of care, and a recurring feature was mothers with learning difficulties or low intelligence who had made repeated bad life choices which put their children in danger. The mothers’ learning issues were sometimes plainly obvious from the way they spoke, and yet Christopher Booker, in his column on the Telegraph website, said that these issues were “scarcely evident when she was allowed half an hour’s ‘contact’ and they all rushed into her arms”. Yet they were plainly obvious to me, and no doubt to the social workers as well. I’ve written about Christopher Booker briefly here in the past, but for those not familiar with his writings, as well as complaining endlessly about children being seized from loving families and held hostage by a secretive, unaccountable family court system that always sides with the social workers, also insists that global warming is a myth and that asbestos is nowhere near as dangerous as is commonly believed. George Monbiot addressed the failings of his writings on these two aspects here and here, but does not really address the fact that Booker is obsessed with the financial cost of everything — he published a book called The Real Global Warming Disaster, which purports to expose “how in the 1980s a handful of scientists came to believe that mankind faced catastrophe from runaway global warming, and how today this has persuaded politicians to land us with what promises to be the biggest bill in history”. It’s always the money: when social services are protecting kids (or wrongfully removing them), it’s money; when we are trying to reduce the amount of fossil fuels we burn, it’s money; when we strip out asbestos, it’s money. In his earlier book, Scared to Death (co-written with Richard North), he mentioned a number of the child protection scandals of the 1980s and in all but one of them, he mentioned the cost to the taxpayer. Never mind the fact that social workers avoid taking children into care, and prefer family members to care for children wherever possible, precisely because foster care (let alone institutional care, where it is even available) is expensive.

I’m often sympathetic to people who have had their children taken by social services, and I’m well aware that they make mistakes and that they are often not fixed as quickly as they should be (although often, the social workers are acting on instruction from doctors who fail to spot conditions like brittle-bone disease and assume a baby’s injuries are inflicted by their parents). However, when I see such ridiculous nonsense posted as comments on articles on this subject from people who are blind to obvious danger to children, my sympathy for them just drops like a stone. If anything, it’s rather a shame that poor Toby wasn’t found, and rescued from his miserable surroundings, much earlier.

I’ve heard suggestions that Steve must have learning difficulties of his own, otherwise he would not, and should not, have been allowed to marry or have a sexual relationship with Trish because she would be deemed a “vulnerable adult”. Having seen the interviews with him, I do not know where anyone gets this impression — he has a job in IT and seems well aware of the challenges facing the family and his own responsibility in caring for a wife who cannot work. Trish was very frightened of having her baby taken away and was shown asking the midwives if she’d be allowed to keep the baby (a girl named Elizabeth); they told her that there was no reason why she shouldn’t. She was worried about this after reading about this happening to another woman with learning difficulties in the paper (this may have been Kerry Robertson/McDougall). In the event, according to a post by Steve on the show’s Facebook page, the midwives did inform social services (as was their duty), but further inquiries revealed that they were satisfied that Trish was competent, or at least well-supported, and were not interested.

As for the question of Steve and Trish’s marriage, nobody can tell how severely mentally impaired Trish is simply by seeing her on TV. It could have been prevented at the outset had anyone who worked with them thought Trish could not make valid vows, and they would hardly have been allowed IVF (several times) if she would have been considered an inevitably unfit mother. It’s possible that she may be more intelligent than her speech (she clearly has some difficulty with speech due to her injury) indicates, and despite her problems with short-term memory (hence the pictures showing her how to prepare the baby’s bottle), she did eventually learn how to do this without them. She suffered a head injury at 13, and had doubtless learned a fair bit about the world by that time, so it is not the same as someone who had been impaired all their life. She also has some insight into her condition, as we see when she talks of the frustration of not being able to remember things, and on another occasion says she hopes her child has her husband’s brain and not hers, otherwise she would feel very sorry for them (she also remembers how the accident happened).

Those of us who’ve seen them on TV do not know much about Trish’s history other than what they have told us, so we do not know if she progressed at school or took exams at all, or what she has managed to do with her time since the accident or since her marriage. We do know that it was Trish who made the first move in their relationship and Steve admits that she is more confident than he is and does the talking when they are out. Clearly, her cognitive impairment was not judged to be so severe that anyone saw fit to prevent their marriage, and possibly it is not as severe as her behaviour (at a very emotional time for both of them) might suggest. Who are we to judge?

His government, he said, was rejuvenating the job market by getting people off benefits and into work: “Everyone should work who can.” It was the “saddest figure in Europe”, he said, that Hungary had the lowest employment rate in the EU.

For the long-term unemployed – a disproportionate number of whom are Roma – this means taking part in the government’s new public work programme. According to Jeno Setét, a Roma activist, between 70% and 80% of Hungary’s Roma population do not work (the rate for the whole population is around 10%). This scheme aims to get 300,000 people into work by 2014 via a sort of community service scheme for which participants are paid less than the national monthly minimum wage (around 80,000 HUF – £214 – for unskilled workers) but slightly more than they would receive in benefits.

Anyone unemployed for 90 days is offered a place on the programme, which administers projects cleaning streets or sewers, cutting down trees or building football stadiums or dams. Refusal to accept a placement will result in all social security benefits being stopped to the refusenik and family. Gyöngyöspata was chosen last year to run a pilot scheme. Unemployed locals – almost exclusively Roma – were deployed to cut down trees in a nearby wood.

For Setét, the public work scheme is a “smokescreen” that will do little to help Roma get “real” jobs and will reinforce their position at the bottom of Hungarian society. “If people on the scheme were paid properly and trained properly, I’d be all for it,” he added. “But they are not. Right now it’s a way of humiliating people and paying them a slave wage.”

While the system of “work for benefits” does not involve the obvious racism present in the Hungarian version, it does not even pay more than benefits and is not even in public services but consists of fake “work experience” schemes for large commercial organisations and also carries the threat of lost benefits. The US version is known to have pushed people into food banks and soup kitchens by withholding benefits in the absence of work; our other fellow-traveller in this is a notoriously racist country in eastern Europe which is becoming an undemocratic pariah state.

There really are far, far too many people sponging off the taxpayer right now with their fake or exaggerated disabilities and they’re one of the reasons we’re in the financial mess we’re in. … Every time the disability lobby squeals for more another few jobs are lost, another few basis points are lost from GDP growth. But these people don’t care; they know better than that: the government owns a magic money tree and its ability to distribute the fruits thereof is boundless.

The notion of ME being ‘fashionable’ goes back a long way — at least to 1992, when a paediatrician outside Tunbridge Wells diagnosed a sick and frightened 14-year-old girl named Lynn Gilderdale (left) with it and told her that she had a fashionable illness. As I think I’ve proven on here over and again, ME is not a “fake disability” which “makes you a bit peaky”, it’s a serious illness that can lead to very severe physical disability, ongoing sickness and severe pain. There is too much evidence of physical pathologies, including demonstrable damage to the central nervous system and other systems in the body, to entertain any theory about it being psychological either in origin or in continuation. If you develop severe ME, as about a quarter of sufferers do (like the already mentioned Miss Gilderdale), you might not be able to use your special parking space as you might well be bedridden. You might have to settle for a bedpan rather than a nice big disabled loo. You might not even be able to speak, which for the rest of us would be a good thing if it happened to him (as well as Ricky Gervais, Frankie Boyle and all the other miserable excuses for comedians who make a living mocking disabled people). Most of them would be only too happy to work (or to get an education, or to do the things the rest of us call fun). As someone I know who has severe ME said in reaction to Liddle’s rant, “if Rod Liddle really wants ME, he can have mine”.

The statistics have already been well argued over, and the fraud rate of DLA, by the government’s own statistics, is 0.5%, and the statistics referred to in Liddle’s piece (that 80% of those claiming Incapacity Benefit (78%, actually, as reported in the Mail) — or rather, Employment and Support Allowance as it is now called) are fit for work most likely refers to those found fit for work by ATOS’s test, and many of their decisions are overturned on appeal, so the real figure is probably much less than 80% or even 78%. ATOS has been known to fail people who are undergoing chemotherapy or are otherwise manifestly unfit by using a tick-box assessment, as this investigation showed. The Mail’s report at least acknowledges the criticisms of high appeal success rates and of seriously unwell people being wrongly refused; Liddle simply repeats the rounded-up 80% figure as fact.

Liddle concludes by claiming that “the people fraudulently claiming sickness benefits are doing a disservice to those who really deserve it: The people who really become disabled or ill. It has become easier to claim these benefits, partly as a consequence of the disablement (sic) charities who, out of their own self-interest, insist that an ever-greater proportion of the population is disabled”. First, over-emphasising the issue of fraud, for example by misrepresenting the number of people turned down by a government test (regardless of future appeal results) as the number of people fraudulently claiming the benefit, is an easy way to make sure that many of those who do really deserve it will not get it, because it will make disability more difficult to prove but this does not necessarily mean it is not there. Second, people tend to think that “real” disabilities are the very visible ones everyone knows about: blindness, paralysis and cerebral palsy, for example. Other conditions may not affect someone getting to the test on their own, but might result in them being unable to do pretty much anything for the rest of the week, or they might still hinder that person working (or finding employment) in a way the test might not allow for. These include employers’ prejudices, for example, particularly if the disability affects someone’s appearance or manner of speaking.

James Delingpole’s article puts the “disability lobby” among a number of causes which allow for taxpayers’ money to be siphoned off to “hard-left organisations like Friends Of The Earth and the New Economics Foundation” so that they “can campaign for more encroachment in our lives by the overweening state”. My own observation of the disability campaign is that it is non-partisan, and while its current campaign is against attacks on disability benefits by a Conservative-led government, it responded warmly when the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, supported their position (as with senior Tories in the House of Lords more recently). The campaign is about empowering disabled people to live independent lives as much as possible, not funding large charities to care for them on an institutional basis, as some of them once did. None of those I’ve worked with are charity bosses on “fat cat” salaries; they are severely disabled people who have worked very hard without remuneration, often at great risk to their own health (as the picture accompanying this paragraph demonstrates; it is of Sue Marsh, a co-author of the recent Spartacus Report, who was hospitalised with complications of her Crohn’s disease late last month).

He also quotes a figure which traces back to the Family Resources Survey, namely that 11 million people in the UK — “that’s a quarter of the adult population” — qualified as disabled. However, this figure was for the whole population and included those of pensionable age; the figure for the working age population was half that. The problem is that these figures do not estimate those who are entitled to claim benefits, let alone those who actually do — they include anyone who has anything that could be termed a disability. For example, 1.5 million people reported incontinence, which does not always occur alongside other physical disability and need not impair someone’s ability to work. (You can see the DWP’s breakdown of these statistics in this PDF, and you might notice the substantial “Other” section in “Disability prevalence disaggregated by impairment” — this would include sight impairments, for example.)

It is, in any case, not “fake disabled” people who have “crippled the economy”, but bankers and others in the financial sector who bankrupted several large banks with their irresponsible lending practices, and the rich and large corporations who find ways of getting out of paying their taxes while expecting the rest of us to pay for at least some of their healthcare and other public services. The small number of “fake disabled” are an unfortunate consequence of making sure that real disabled people are not forced into beggary, indignity and early deaths; we need some means of detecting them but not at the expense of making sure those who need the support, get it. As for ME being fashionable, I’ll believe that when I see a woman in lilac pyjamas with a nasogastric tube and dark glasses being carried on a stretcher down a catwalk in Milan. Until then, that’s just a bad joke.

Has BMT been carried out in patients with EB before?

Yes, two clinical trials of bone marrow transplants from healthy donors without EB into children with severe EB are currently ongoing in the US. Early results from the trial indicate that, in some patients, there may be some benefit derived from bone marrow transplants.

However, overall results are mixed and, sadly, there is a significant risk of death. Consequently, such trials are not planned currently in the UK.

The episode was titled “Butterflies”, and although in the first few minutes Dr Griffin presents Henryk Hanssen with a newspaper front page reading “Hope for Butterfly Child”, the significance of this reference was never explained (it refers to the fragility of the affected person’s skin, which can tear and blister very easily from friction or pressure). Hanssen and Griffin have some apprehension about the exploitative nature of the media coverage and the experimental nature of the procedure, as well as the patient’s enlarged liver, but agree to proceed with “extreme caution”. The girl with EB, named Cindy, had a sister who was a year younger, who decided she did not want to donate her bone marrow and explained that her sister’s condition had completely dominated their lives, with at one point her bicycle being taken away because her sister could not ride it. Dr Griffin later managed to persuade her to give her consent by telling her that they were very fortunate to have an exact tissue match and that, if successful, the treatment could change her sister’s life (this after her mother said she had signed the consent form and that her underage daughter’s consent was of no significance). The operation goes ahead, but we do not find out whether it was successful; we do not see Cindy after she goes to theatre, and Griffin tells her mother that the operation is not a quick fix, which might open the possibility for future appearances, but none of the family are in the next episode.

I’ve raised concerns about ridiculous storylines in this strand before — Holby’s Saturday evening sister programme Casualty ran a storyline in which a man who had been diagnosed with ME was shown beating his wife (he was later re-diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, which was a curious diagnosis in itself as you don’t just have muscular dystrophy, you have one of several dozen types of it). I objected to the ME storyline because it is more common for sufferers (who are more likely to be female) to be abused by medical professionals of both sexes, rather than a male sufferer to abuse his female partner, who was a nurse. It was a lot like having one programme on domestic violence in several years, and it featuring a violent wife rather than a violent husband. That time, my complaint was brushed off on the grounds that medical accuracy had sometimes to be sacrificed for the sake of the drama.

This storyline was very clearly inaccurate, presenting a treatment which is very much in its early stages and which British doctors have refused to offer because of its experimental, high-risk nature, as if it offered a very significant hope in curing EB now (or at least checking it, as damage that has already been done cannot be undone). Is there no limit to this organisation’s “artistic licence”? People die of complications from this disease every year, and many of those who have it (particularly if severely), especially if they have many friends with it (which they are more likely to nowadays because of social networks) will have known people who have died. There are many ways a story like this could have been told — there are other conditions which require a bone-marrow transplant (or an organ donation, even) to cure them, so why could one of them not have been used, rather than pretending that something that, right now, doesn’t work, does, and that something will radically improve a patient’s life when it is more likely to kill them?

This article exposes something I have had personal experience of in the past year, which is proper jobs (usually minimum wage jobs) being replaced by “self-employment opportunities”, in which the worker is paid directly and expected to look after his own taxes and National Insurance contributions, and commonly they are paid less than the minimum wage, which is quite legal as he is not actually an employee but a contractor. The Daily Mirror has been running a campaign, “Gizza Proper Job”, which exposes this behvaiour going on in a number of major companies including one that I’ve worked for (not on this basis), Hermes Parcelnet. Their full index of stories on the subject is here and sectors implicated include nursing, car manufacturing, hairdressing, telesales, doorstep energy selling, scaffolding, car delivery … you name it, it’s there.

I haven’t been on any of these “self-employed” sub-minimum-wage jobs, but I had an agency convert itself into such an enterprise and begin pressuring its employees into going on one of two contracts in which pay was administered not by them, but by a third party, and the worker was expected to pay the contractor’s fees. The drivers at the site where I did most of my work either refused to sign or insisted on being backed out after a week when the promised higher pay did not materialise, but they then started using another contractor and told me it was either self-employment, a managed limited company (which paid my wages as a “director” of that company) or no more work. I approached other agencies and they told me that the limited-company approach offered benefits when the worker was in a long-term placement, but not when they were working on an ad-hoc basis. The management companies (Oriel and PML are two of the biggest names in that particular business) charge a fee either every month or every week, and if you only get one day’s work in a week, you may lose most of it to the management fee.

The ostensible reason my agency did this was to circumvent the new agency worker regulations, which were apparently rushed in over the last summer and most companies were unprepared. Their main provision is that long-term agency workers are entitled to pay equal to that of similarly and directly employed workers, and the agency tried telling me that this would mean my wages being adjusted downwards if I had been getting paid more than the directly-employed workers. In fact, the rules state that agency staff must be paid as much as or more than them. Agency staff are often paid more per hour than regular staff because they do not have any security and may be travelling further (I regularly travelled to Maidstone, and frequently to Worthing, for one of my agency driving jobs), and often find their wages reduced if a “temp-to-perm” job actually becomes permanent. In any case, the organisation I was working for (an ambulance service) was only hiring agency staff to do this particular kind of work, so the issue of adjusting my wages would not have arisen.

Owen Jones, in his recent book Chavs, had a section on the casualisation of the work market, with a move to hiring agency staff to do regular jobs so that they can be sacked at a moment’s notice if they were no longer needed with no redundancy pay, but this move away from proper employment contracts towards “self-employed” work at below the minimum wage seems to have only just been picked up on - the Mirror reported (on their “Penman and Sommerlad investigate” blog, not in print) last June about the “trade platers” (people who deliver cars on “trade plates” or temporary licence plates) who earn well below the minimum wage and frequently have to hitch-hike from car auction sites which are away from regular public transport (like the one in the middle of nowhere off the A30 west of Camberley). This is something I became aware of in 2007, so it’s not new.

I will certainly be giving my story to the Mirror’s investigation (and naming the agency, which I haven’t done here yet). Luckily, I got out before I could get scammed, but it seems others are too desperate for work and will take anything, however poorly it pays (I’m still living with my parents). It is not the only way employers are currently able to get around the minimum wage (which is only £6.08 per hour currently) — among the others is not paying someone for the time which is taken travelling from job to job for the same employer, as touched on in this article attached to the Panorama on this subject from last October — but it also exposes the worker to the liabilities of tax returns and potential (large) fines if they make a mistake. Those who work in the media may be able to afford that, and they are better educated and have access to networks of other freelancers. Agency drivers don’t. Fake self-employment must be exposed and must be stopped.

What stuck out for me was the bit where Maria Miller revealed that she did not expect the level of public spending currently required by Disability Living Allowance to be reduced by the purported 20% in the next four years; they instead intend to maintain it at last year’s levels, i.e. to check the growth of the cost of supporting disabled people, not to drastically reduce it. Given that many people have looked at the new criteria and found that they will no longer be eligible, despite considerable mobility needs: for example, Lisa Egan, who has Osteogenesis Imperfecta (which makes it easy for her to injure herself by doing normal things like walking) and uses a wheelchair, found that under the draft proposals, she would not be eligible for the new benefit at all because she can “mobilise” using a wheelchair. As many people with disabilities use their DLA to actually buy a wheelchair (as well as adapt their home), this would presumably exclude paraplegics as well (not quadriplegics, as they would need assistance in washing, cooking and so on).

A change to the entitlement criteria that excludes a number of very obviously physically disabled people, yet would not greatly reduce the cost to the taxpayer, reflects a scheme which is really intended to do two things. The first is to play to the tabloid gallery by contrasting “deserving” recipients (such as blind people, as in the example Lisa mentions) with undeserving ones, such as alcoholics who might need supervision to make sure they do not choke on their own vomit; but it might also weed out a number of people with hidden disabilities that are not tabloid-friendly, and might elicit hostility from ignorant people if they use a disabled parking bay.

The second is simply another opportunity for the British corporate welfare state that has been operating at least the whole of the Blair/Brown government and probably before. In this particular case, public money is going to be redistributed from those who need it — those with disabilities who would use it to enable themselves to go to work, to live in their own homes and generally stay independent and out of a care home — to corporate bigwigs and their (mostly able-bodied) lackeys. To employ (whether directly or through a large contractor) people to carry out repeated assessments on obviously disabled people, let alone those with mental illnesses who may find that the stress worsens their condition (and thus their burden on the NHS), is not exactly a worthwhile reapportionment of public money. The increased burden on the public purse in other areas does not appear to have been considered, such as the likelihood of hospital bed-blocking by disabled people who cannot be discharged as they have no suitable accommodation, as commonly happens today with the elderly.

This debate has also revealed the typically cowardly mentality of the Labour Party, which has refused to commit itself to reintroducing DLA if they regain power at the next election. Their excuse is that they cannot predict what the economy will allow by that time, but we all know that the real reason is their timidity in the face of the Tory press at any election time. There has been a series of articles berating the current Labour leadership for capitulating too easily to the Tories’ agenda in the name of seeking “credibility”, such as this one by Mehdi Hasan in the New Statesman which also argues that Labour should use its own terms of reference rather than appeal to Tory sentiments by using Tory imagery. The centre-left group Compass has released a pamphlet attacking “white flag Labour”, in which economist Howard Reed attacks the “tame surrender to the misguided economic policies currently wreaking havoc on the UK’s economic and social fabric”.

The white flag has, of course, been the rightful symbol of New Labour since the mid-1990s, as they invariably show timidity towards the Tory press but also towards foreign (particularly American) aggression, involving the UK in their wars and signing humiliating extradition treaties which offer British citizens no protection. It is difficult to see how they can gain any credibility with progressive voters while they maintain this position; they are more likely to inspire apathy, even among their core vote and especially those who abandoned them for the Lib Dems as they saw Labour as essentially the red Tories: a war-mongering, tabloid-appeasing party. With the predicted collapse of the Lib Dems at the next election, apathy about Labour can only help one of the major parties. They need to get themselves a backbone, pretty quickly.

Syma Mohammed is claiming that Muslim women find it significantly more difficult than men to find a partner, as evidenced (she says) by the disproportionate number of women to men at various Muslim marriage events in the UK. She offers a number of explanations, including the fact that Muslim men can marry “people of the book” but women can’t (they must marry Muslims), and that Muslim men are likely to be able to get a wife from “back home”, while women are unable or unwilling to do this. I do not believe the situation is as rosy for Muslim men looking for wives as she makes out.

For a start, in fact very few practising Muslim men marry non-Muslim women. Many scholars recommend against it, as men are expected to make every effort to ensure that their children are raised as Muslims, and this means they see both their parents praying regularly and neither of them (for example) drinking alcohol. In fact, some even say that it is forbidden in a western context as we do not live in a Muslim country, and so the husband cannot guarantee that the children will be raised Muslim if the marriage breaks up and the mother objects. This cannot account for any significant surplus of unmarried Muslim women.

Second, one cannot entirely rely on the disproportionate number of women at these marriage events as a guide, because men and women may have different reasons for going to them. It could well be that the women who attend want to choose their own spouses because they do not want to rely on their own families to choose one for them, as the author says, because they want someone on her intellectual or achievement level, if not higher, and perhaps someone who might have a different mentality to someone their families might find for them. This is less likely to be a problem for men, who are not expected to obey whoever they marry.

She does not acknowledge that men are often expected to have a home ready for the wife to move into, or at least, have a steady job that can pay for all her needs. In theory, a man is expected to be totally responsible for meeting all the wife’s and children’s needs, such as food, clothing and shelter, although many families now accept that it is impossible to do this on one income in London unless one is very wealthy. In many Muslim countries, men cannot marry until their mid-30s because families demand high dowries for their daughters and, sometimes, gifts for themselves also, as well as an expensive wedding and feast and so on, and this is still true with some Muslim immigrant families here. If a man is finding it difficult to get work (as many men are given the economic climate), he is much less likely to be able to persuade a family to allow their daughter to marry him (and the woman does need the family’s permission).

Finally, converts often find it particularly difficult, because immigrant Muslim families are often wholly unwilling to allow their daughters to marry converts. In some cases, they will entirely refuse someone from outside their ethnic or tribal group; some will assume that someone who has experienced life outside Islam will go back to their old life, and some rejections are simply racist. This is not to say that this is never a problem for female converts, but Muslim concepts of “suitability” often demand that the husband have some advantage over the wife in wealth, profession, family history or whatever as he is the head of the household. A female convert will often express the desire to marry an Arabic-speaking man, which is likely to be greatly easier for her than for a male convert, particularly if the Arab is from one of the old Arab tribes.

None of this is to say that a woman who marries easily is guaranteed a satisfactory marriage, but there are factors which may make it easier for a woman to get married, particularly a convert, than a man. It may be easier for a well-educated Muslim man of immigrant background with a good job and a nice house to get married than a similarly well-placed woman, but it is not easier for men in more reduced circumstances.

Cait Reilly is currently suing the government after the DWP forced her to leave a voluntary work placement in a museum to do one of their unpaid “training” placements in Poundland (for overseas readers, this is a chain of shops that sells everything for £1) which turned out not to be training at all, but two weeks’ unpaid shelf-stacking and floor-sweeping, something anyone can learn to do in under an hour. Ms Reilly had worked in retail before, as have I, and even till work does not require two weeks’ training — in my case, it took one working day to give us the “customer service” pep talk and to train us on the tills.

There have been a number of moronic, mean-spirited responses to her campaign from the right-wing media; Reilly speaks of how Vanessa Feltz “attempted to humiliate [her] on air” and having listened to her atrocious show (she is a columnist on the Daily Express, by the way) I can well believe that. There was also a piece by Jan Moir in the Daily Mail, which accuses her of exhibiting a “sense of entitlement” which might not endear her to future employment, and ridiculing the human-rights angle of her legal claim by comparing it to ten years’ in Guantanamo Bay:

I would argue that doing a little unpaid work in return for benefits is not a breach of your human rights, it is actually a bonus. See it as a life lesson — and you might get more out of it than you think.

I would argue that a little perspective might not go amiss, even from a typical 22-year-old graduate who knows everything and has big ideas about what she wants to do in the world.

I would also argue that her stance is deeply insulting to those whose jobs actually do entail sweeping floors and stacking shelves. And who do so without complaint to feed their own families and to help to pay Cait Reilly’s benefits allowances. For nobody owes this girl a living. Least of all those who work for a living.

To start with, I think her Job Centre’s insistence that she take part in this placement was a bureaucratic error: she did not need retail work experience (she already had it) and was already in work-related activity, i.e. her ongoing museum work experience placement, which she had shown the initiative of organising for herself. Work experience placements do have a place: for a prospective employee to demonstrate their suitability (over a short period) with an offer of a job if they are, or for a teenager to get a glimpse into some sector of industry, or for someone inexperienced in recent work to gain experience without a great deal of risk for the employer. It is more agreeable that the employer be a small enterprise or a charity, and that the placement be a learning process of some sort.

This type of “work experience” involves doing menial work which requires little or no training that the employer could be paying someone to do, for free, which is a disincentive to them to actually pay people to do the same jobs. Much the same could be said of council work such as bin collections, but public sector jobs are often heavily unionised and employing unpaid menial labour on a routine basis would result in industrial action, and rightly so (while the retail sector has fairly weak union representation). Supermarkets, in particular, nowadays require fewer till staff as many of them use self-service tills which require only one or two for a bank of six or more. When the beneficiaries are enterprises the size of Poundland or Tesco, there is also enormous potential for corruption.

Most people would not mind doing a voluntary position for a charity, or a brief work-experience position with the promise of a job (or at least a reference) afterwards. Increasingly, young people have found themselves doing one “internship” after another, never receiving a wage and leaving them unable to move away from their families’ home. This is not work experience; it is exploitation and benefits nobody except the employer, and serves to make some professions inaccessible to anyone whose families cannot afford to support them for extended periods after leaving school or college. Nobody is talking about the world owing anyone a living, except the Mail with their straw-man headline (“It is my human right not to work for Poundland”). Most people want to work, but if I’m going to sweep floors for nothing, it had better be for a good cause.

You can read the transcript on this blog here or you can download it in PDF format here.