Tories have shamed single parents and heaped financial pressure on them

theguardian.com:

If we can judge a society by how it treats its weakest members, then a special type of judgment should be reserved for a society that deliberately weakens certain of its members. During more than a decade of austerity, successive Conservative governments have fanned the flames of shame surrounding single parents, and used the benefits system to heap financial pressure on their already vulnerable families.

Take Iain Duncan Smith’s 2015 party conference speech. Introducing the two-child limit to benefit payments, the then work and pensions minister said it was about“bringing home to parents the reality that children cost money”.

When we say “single parent” we probably mean single mother. There are 1.8 million single parents in the UK, a quarter of all households, and nine out of 10 of them are women. Let’s not ignore the huge, unacknowledged role that sexism plays in a system designed to impoverish and subjugate, and in the stigma that subsequently arises.

Single parents are assumed to share the same (often negative) characteristics – young, unemployed, feckless, uneducated, hyper-fertile – yet the data shows otherwise. The average age of a single parent is 39 years old and less than 1% of them are teenagers. More than half (55%) have only one child and almost half have previously been married. Single parenthood is a stage in family life and the average length of time spent as a lone parent is five years. Almost 70% of single parents are in employment and about half work full-time, a rate that increases as the age of their child increases. Yet, despite their industry, single parents and their children are at much greater risk of falling below the breadline. Half (49%) are now living in relative poverty, double the rate (25%)