My 12-year-old son has additional needs and significant sensory processing issues. He has not been in school for almost five months and I am his full-time, unpaid carer. I am currently claiming universal credit. Right now, I am furiously paddling to stay afloat and trying to stay far enough away from the edge financially that we don’t lose our home. But even that is not a given.
In the story of poverty. Something missing. Heart-rending etc etc. And where’s the child’s father? The child support?
No, of course, she could be a widow. Etc. But there is, as so often, the assumption here that all of us should be supporting them through taxation. Rather than, say, the biological parents of this child supporting the child.
My 12-year-old son has additional needs and significant sensory processing issues.
There are some kids with serious issues. There are far more who have parents who self-diagnose these things. Half the time the “special needs” are just specially needy parents.
Even given he has additional needs, how is keeping him from school helping? Most of those kids need school more than anyone else.
More to the point, why did she buy a pizza she couldn’t cook, and did she make the poor little sod eat it raw?
Also, for anyone who made it to the end of the article, the kid’s parting words have a definite ’…and then all the bus clapped and cheered’ vibe to them.
Or am I being too suspicious that a political mum has invented words to put in her child’s mouth for the sake of an article?
As someone who is Officially Poor…
It’s amazing how much you can save if you damn well learn to cook and don’t buy that “budget pizza”.
Especially when firing up an oven to “cook” a pizza is just about the single most wasteful thing you can do if you’re not planning to use the “waste” heat to keep the room unfrozen.
And truly amaaaazing how kids pick up on the “it’s this or nothing” thing when it comes to what appears on a plate. Even the “special needs” ones.
But that’d require actual…parenting.. the thought…
Or the 4 biological grandparents.
Could have been wiped out in the same unlikely accident that took out the baby-father, but they’re benefitting, they’re winning in the genetics of life, and they’re not being mentioned either.
This is the opening sentence. Monday’s dearth of words was a one-off and what follows is a traditional guardian snivellathon.
She is a writer – if writing two pieces on a blog you started eight years ago to ‘share here some of my day to day musings, experience and what brought me here. I’ll do this in words and pictures’ is being a writer.
http://onebyonephotos.blogspot.com/?m=1
Two posts? Suggests a slight inability to stick at things.
There are two Joanne Barker-Marshs listed with Companies House, both based in Manchester, both born in May… of different years. Perhaps she thought 1968 was a little too old.
She was a director of two companies, neither of which did much – again that inability to stick at things.
As others have said, it would be nice to know who the father is, where he is, and what his contribution is… and whether it was he or she who was unable to stick at that relationship.
It would also be nice to know what her views are or were on inventing and spending half a trillion quid on lockdowns et cetera, on mass uncontrolled immigration, on the green net zero bullshit, on the Ukraine fiasco, and so on.
I wonder if she would be capable of drawing a line from these policies and philosophies to the parlous state of the economy.
If she is like most English people of her age I think we can take a good guess on both questions.
(We know that the Guardian is incapable of putting two and two together here.)
She is an unwitting perfect cipher for the West: unserious people prioritising frivolous behaviour while doing serious things like having children with no consideration of how they will feed them if it turns out that the economy upon which they are balanced has well-disguised foundations of sand.
For that matter, the pensioner who can’t afford heating and rides the bus to keep warm. What has she spent all her life doing that she doesn’t have friends, family, offspring who can help her? Or any savings? Do people really go through life thinking they can get to be 70+ years old and have achieved nothing and the government will take care of them?
Sorry to hear of your struggles. Terrible to think that a child in modern UK is going without hot food for want of 7p. Have you tried some of the free recycling sites for microwaves – they are very efficient to run – regular use about £20 a year.
Reply:
Telling someone to microwave their food is almost as patronising and unhelpful as telling them they need to learn to cook and budget better.
So, if some bint demands we pay more taxes to fund her kid, we’re not allowed to explore alternative solutions, we just have to pay up? Fuck that.
Interested – these things happen, eh? But maybe her having a baby at the age of 42 was a chancy idea. Marsellus Wallace tried to warn us.
It would also be nice to know what her views are or were on inventing and spending half a trillion quid on lockdowns et cetera, on mass uncontrolled immigration, on the green net zero bullshit, on the Ukraine fiasco, and so on.
There was a brief spasm of “take THAT, Putler!” when energy costs started going on Uncle Sam’s Wild Ride, but that seems to have been memory holed like the media campaign in early 2020 to make out the NHS was racistly killing brown bodies with Covid.
Now the official explanation for When Money Dies 2: 2 Weimar 2 Furious is, eh, Brexit and them bastard Tories not punitively taxing energy companies in the middle of an energy crisis.
“I could not justify my decision to not cook his tiny, budget pizza beyond that of making sure we practised being poorer. I didn’t feel able to cook it because it would cost too much to turn the oven on for this one small thing.”
That’s sensible. I’m reluctant to use our oven for small things, it’s really wasteful. My daughter is into baking and her using the oven gets me asking her pertinent questions about what else she can put in there to make it worthwhile. What you need to do, love, is to bake big batches of things that keep, or else cook “top of the stove” stuff in a single saucepan. And if you do use the oven in winter, turn off the heating and leave the oven door open when you’ve done cooking.
Just hang on and wait for a heat pump and a hydrogen boiler. That’ll make everything OK.
JuliaM- I doubted that too… he probably said – ‘fook off Mam where’s the rest?’ one thing i don’t doubt is 500 calories per day sustained will be deadly for her and her 12 year old. But that’s what’s so crap about campaigning scribblers, its not journalism, because claims are made and left out there not examined,tested.
Marsellus Wallace tried to warn us. – was it “the night of the fight you may feel a slight sting?”
Anyone who describes themselves as an “unpaid carer” OF THEIR OWN FUCKING CHILD can safely be categorised as a whiny entitled parasite.
HB – it was just a small prick
@Interested,
That business of foundations on sand being problematic as no doubt you know comes from a biblical quote, where it appears that the alternative is to build directly on rock. In the UK (and elsewhere, but not apparently in Israel) there are many alternatives that are far worse: peat, swelling and shrinking clays, etc. and sand is relatively ideal, especially when it is the bedrock …
As for the bitch in question, do we have a photo? Is she, by any chance, overweight?
“Do people really go through life thinking they can get to be 70+ years old and have achieved nothing and the government will take care of them?”
Yes, possibly about half the population.
“As for the bitch in question, do we have a photo? Is she, by any chance, overweight?”
Not obviously:
https://news.trust.org/contentAsset/image/a91c3c0d-8d0a-4ada-99c5-402ddeebed23/multimediaFileUpload1/byInode/1/filter/Resize,Jpeg/jpeg_q/69/resize_w/1230
Jim, in the photo, she appears to have the beginnings of monkey pox!
Oven heat is dissipated into the surrounding room, thus warming it, so the energy is not wasted – the house/flat’s heating system will adjust accordingly. So, as expected, it’s just the usual Grauniad nonsense.
Throughout most of human history, people have been dirt poor.
The last hundred years or so since the industrial revolution has been an anomaly.
For the first time in history, advances in technology have raised average productivity to such a level that as a nation we have a net surplus of wealth.
Which was rapidly followed by the parasite classes, I mean politicians, feathering their own nests and bribing parts of the electorate with our own money.
Not only have they spent the surplus that exists, they have busily spent wealth that rightly belongs to future generations.
Honestly, as a country,I think we are screwed.
Our advanced society runs on cheap energy, and when our idiot politicians are doing their utmost to undermine that, the results are going to be fatal in the long term.
Sadly, the only way out of this is to stop allowing the idiots in charge to do this. I say sadly because this requires an intelligent and informed electorate that recognises that the Government can’t and shouldn’t do everything.
This woman is an exemplar of the type of attitude that is destroying the country.
She wants the benefits of belonging to an advanced Western country without having to create the wealth that funds it. She is, in short, a parasite.
As TW and others have pointed out – where is the father & the extended family? The expectation is for others to bail her out of a situation that she got herself in to.
From her photos (and completely guessing), she looks like someone who’s partied too hard, and worked too little to support herself. Honestly, who gets to nearly 50 without putting enough assets aside for when times are hard?
What we’ve seen over the past decades are the parasites multiplying to the point where the health of the nation is fatally compromised.
We will soldier on of course, with a slowly dwindling quality of life for the majority. Institutions will become more and more corrupt, and our high trust society will degenerate into a low trust one. We are already half way there.
It won’t be long before one day we will wake up and realise that our once first world nation is now third world with all that entails.
Jim,
In the photo she has the smile and the hair of someone who’s just been shagged. Couldn’t she use some of the 50 quid left on the bedside table to heat her poor little boy’s pizza?
Do people really go through life thinking they can get to be 70+ years old and have achieved nothing and the taxpayer will take care of them?
FOC
I’m noticing a lot of these single mothers don’t seem to have any parents or siblings who can help them out with a place to live or extra income. Are all single mothers only children and orphans as well?
Even most married women still will have their parents help watch their children once in a while.
“How dare they gloss over rising food-bank use as if it’s normal in one of the richest countries in the world. ”
Yep. The self-righteous prig wants the solution to be the one that she wants, not one that’s already in place and apparently working.
Why do so many people think it’s the state’s responsibility to look after them in the manner they want to be looked after?
@JuliaM – “why did she buy a pizza she couldn’t cook”
There’s no reason to suppose she did. The article merely says that she doesn’t want to inefficiently heat the oven just to cook this one item.
@Ed P – “Oven heat is dissipated into the surrounding room, thus warming it, so the energy is not wasted”
It is in summer when you don’t need heating, or in cooler weather when you wear extra clothes instead of putting on the heating.
@Penseivat
The photo metadata shows it was taken in February. How long do you expect £50 to last?
The article says “I could not justify my decision to not cook his tiny, budget pizza beyond that of making sure we practised being poorer.”. What does that mean? “practiced being poorer”?
Why is she keeping her child at home? Paranoid he’ll catch Covid at school?
Well tough sh1t, you’ve caused your problem, don’t demand taxpayers help you
I’m sick of ths rampant ‘special needs’ scam which schools exploit to receive more money
The kid is fucked up because dad is missing and this silly cow cannot raise a man.
He is doomed.