Enter a London coffee house or restaurant, check into a hotel, or wander by a building-site, and you will find the workforce almost exclusively foreign. Yet British unemployment continues to surge towards 2.5 million. Something is rotten in the heart of modern Britain, for that heart is the underclass and its malady is caused by welfare.

A process of reverse evolution is in train. It is no longer the fittest or the brightest, the fastest or the best, who survive and thrive in our contemporary jungle. It is the moronic and the bovine, the fattest and the least productive, who are cosseted and subsidized and excused their behavior. Because of it, they breed. After all, sex is free and the State will ever pick up the pieces. Collect £200 and Get out of Jail for free. While the benighted and exploited middle-classes pay their tax, marry late, and have fewer children, the underclass procreates with abandon. They have every reason, and no reason not to.

As Africa has systematically swallowed a trillion dollars in aid with precious little to show for it, so welfare at home has rendered a burgeoning social subgroup unable or unwilling to pull its (now grotesquely bloated) weight. The middle class pays dearly”€”housing these people, schooling them, nursing them for their myriad addictions and self-induced complaints, and then being mugged by them as they trudge home from their highly-taxed jobs.

Rather than imbue an ethic of hard work, discipline, and responsibility, through a process of handouts and hand-wringing we have promoted instead a culture in which it pays to be a dropout and where a man need not lift a finger (let alone a pick, shovel, mallet, chisel, or spanner) in order to earn a wage. Crack, smack, and street-robbery are so much more rewarding.  Whoever imagined nothing is for free was profoundly wrong. The underclass not only rejects the notion there is nobility in work, it cannot actually see the point.

Every decade that passes, the habits become engrained (some would say, enshrined) and the mindset reinforced. The underclass grows, and not merely because teenage girls fail to discover contraception and believe the swiftest route to a council house is via their own birth-canals. Enabling and sustaining it, feeding it with ceaseless waves of new recruits, is a liberal-left education establishment that has conspired to beach successive generations on the shoals of illiteracy and phonetic spelling and the sandbars of underachievement. Init, well wicked, knowhaddamean? Of course you do. Education used to point the way out of the ghetto. Today it simply consigns our young to a lifetime of delivering pizza.

Without the resources to renationalize industry, left-leaning governments have directed their energies towards taking the public back into state ownership. Create an underclass, make it dependent on your largesse, and you will garner its vote. That is the premise. Or maybe there is no logic; perhaps it is just the old knee-jerk and patronizing instincts of the left. They know best. And it has done irreparable harm. In place of parenting, there are social workers; instead of common sense, there is health and safety and the criminal records bureau; substituting for normal community interaction is diversity training; standing in for work there is always welfare. At every level the state intrudes and society suffers.

I am not advocating we eat the poor”€”far be it for me to promote a fatty diet”€”and nor do I suggest we abandon all financial safety-nets. I simply propose we ditch the tired vocabulary of victim-hood that categorizes the handout-consuming and habitually unemployed as the “€˜most vulnerable in society”€™. It is the wealth-creators who are the most vulnerable.

Look closer and you will find that poverty is more often than not a matter of prioritization for those apparently caught in its maw. I long to hear a politician ask the question: If you have so little money, what on earth persuaded you to have five children? Why at Christmas do you purchase the latest consumer durables, computer-games and plasma-screen televisions and yet baulk at spending on private health insurance? How come you are so fat when fruit and vegetables are cheaply available? It will not happen. For we have infantilized the populace, stripping the underclass of pride, motivation, and personal responsibility and instead awarding it rights and benefits.

In the liberal-left world of the welfare state, everything is a condition, an illness, a fault of someone else. Even obesity is to be blamed on rogue genes, thyroid-malfunction or the antics of food manufacturers rather than on the sloth and greed of individuals. People forget the mouth is generally larger than the anus and thus cram it with more food. They have been allowed to forget.
The origin of yet another subspecies is revealed. But that’s okay. For the state will provide gastric bands and liposuction and will end up owning a few more souls.