SORRY guys and gals, you are a drain on public resources that would be better spent on those who did not create their own problems.

Before you start bleating, let me pose one simple question: whose fault is it you are a lone parent?

Not mine, but I am paying for your mistakes and do not see why I should.

•Was it my fault you got pregnant? No.

•Did I break up your marriage? No.

•Can I help it if you got roped in with the wrong person? No.

•Am I stopping you going out to work? No.

Quite the opposite because, unlike the Government, I would see you all back earning as soon as your bratlings go to school, never mind waiting until they are 12.

Right now, single parents lose benefits when their offspring hit 16, but former investment banker David Freud, who is in charge of drafting a plan to get single parents back to work, has other ideas - starting with chopping handouts four years earlier.

Of course, it is couched in all the usual namby-pamby nonsense about social disadvantage and dependency; none of which can disguise the 3.1million people who have been on benefits for more than a year, 95% on incapacity or lone parent income support.

It puts a whole new meaning on a sick society.

If I am not mistaken, children start school around the age of five and are locked safely away long enough to allow most singles to take on part-time work at least.

"Ah but", comes the cry, "that can take us over benefits thresholds and we end up worse off."

"Tough" say I, although Mr Freud is perhaps a little more considered.

Work, he says, is good for people. It gives them purpose, improves overall health and could help lift around 200,000 children out of poverty.

Needless to say, the apologists at One Parent Families Scotland beg to differ: the Government should not pressurise single parents back to work, though quite why not they do not explain.

Likewise with Save the Children, which likes the jobs carrot but naively fails to appreciate the usefulness of a big stick.

I would rather see those genuinely disadvantaged, through chronic illness or disability, better catered for.

They would be far more deserving than benefit-wise, social inadequates who use kids as an excuse for idleness.

Read what one poor lone mother had to say, and no prizes for guessing she is a psychology student: "Why the Government made the cut-off point age 12 is something I can't understand. That is just before puberty and kids need family support around them at that time."

Well, the last thing most kids want when they hit puberty is a parent fussing around them and would it be churlish to suggest that university is not, perhaps, the best place for someone who can't understand why 12 was chosen?

It is the age most children move from primary to secondary school and discover the independence their parents so obviously lack.