Deadbeat Dads

I didn't see the Channel 5 programme which featured some of the UK's 'deadbeat dads', one of whom is apparently the father of 40 children to 20 different women.

I assume this article from The Times covers the same ground as the TV programme, but I wouldn't give these feckless fathers the publicity they seem to crave, nor the women involved who need their heads examined if you ask me, for having children with such hopeless and inadequate men.

Instead I would make life very difficult for men who bring children into the world whom they have no intention of supporting and it seems ridiculous that someone with 16 children is entitled to claim £68 a week in incapacity benefits for a bad back.

I would cut off his benefits unless he agreed to have a vasectomy and I bet that kind of straight talking would quickly get his attention.     

Jobless father of 15 may cost taxpayer £2m


Keith MacDonald six years ago with his eighth child


By Lucy Holden - The Times

An unemployed man has been labelled “Britain’s most feckless father” for having 15 children before the age of 30, leaving the taxpayer with a potential £2 million bill.

Keith MacDonald, from Sunderland, claims to have made at least ten women pregnant over 14 years after chatting them up on the bus. He is one of four fathers appearing in a Channel 5 documentary called 40 Kids By 20 Women.

Collectively, the men have fathered more than 70 children with more than 40 women.

Mr MacDonald, who relies on benefits, has had four children in the past two years and is expecting his sixteenth. He said: “It’s easy — they never seem to say no. Just chat them up on the bus.

“That’s what I do and they never seem to say no. If they like you, they like you. Get their number and text them and arrange to meet when you come off the bus. I just pick them up like that.”

Mr MacDonald is believed to collect about £44 a week in income support and £68 a week in incapacity benefits for a bad back.

He tells the programme that he cannot find work because he is “no good at listening” and spends most of his time playing computer games. It is believed that by the time his children reach the age of 18 they will have cost the taxpayer more than £2 million in benefits.

Mr MacDonald first came to public attention in 2011, when he tried to fake his own death. One former partner claimed that it was because he was trying to shirk responsibility for his ninth child.

He was later convicted of assaulting her and stealing £80 when they had a row over cheese toastie crumbs that he had left in a room she had just vacuumed.

Mr MacDonald seems to have an aversion to the use of contraception and had his first child when he was 15. He told Channel 5 that he had conceived two children on double-decker buses but denies that all of the 15 children are biologically his.

Boasting of his fertility, he told the documentary’s producers: “How many of my ex-girlfriends am I still friends with? None of them. Apart from one and that’s the one that is pregnant now.

“The last time I had sex was nine months ago and the person’s pregnant.”

He previously claimed it was “not his fault” that he had fathered so many children because he thought that “they were all on the Pill”.

Mike Hoplin, 56, is another of the men featured on the programme. He is described as a “serial dad” by Channel 5 because he has fathered 40 children by 20 women. He said that he had to have the names of his children, and the names of his grandchildren, tattooed on his body so that he could remember them. He said that he did not “believe” in contraception and, because he was an alcoholic, most of his children had been “taken away” by social services. His oldest child is 37 and his youngest is three.

He added: “Due to my drinking and womanising most of my kids have gone through the care system and that makes me feel like s*** because they’ve suffered.

“They took them from me because I’m an alcoholic. I’m still an alcoholic, I just don’t practise it. A lot of people have turned their backs on me.”

He said that he felt “rotten” that his children had been brought up by someone else, because it was his duty and he had been “too drunk to care”.

Of the 20 women he has made pregnant, he was in a relationship with six and many of his children would not speak to him, he said.