Thursday, 28 Mar 2024

Johnson claimed working mums’ kids more likely to ‘mug you on a street corner’

Children of working mothers were “unloved and undisciplined” and are more likely to “mug you on the street corner”, Boris Johnson once claimed.

The Prime Minister whose past views have come back to haunt him on the election trail last week faced a furious backlash after an attack on single mothers was unearthed.

Today another of Mr Johnson's 'hot takes' has emerged in which the PM lamented the rise in the number of working women, writing they had been “socially gestapoed into the workplace”.

“In the last 30 years an ever-growing proportion of British women have been ‘incentivised’ or socially gestapoed into the workplace, on what seems to me to be the dubious assumption that the harder a woman works the happier she will be, when I am not sure that is true of women or anyone else,” he wrote.

The extract comes from a collection of his journalism published before he became mayor of London.


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In it Mr Johnson said an increasing number of female graduates tended to pair up with male graduates – a process known by economists as “assortative mating” – and that they then pool their advantages.

“The result is that in families on lower incomes the women have absolutely no choice but to work, often with adverse consequences for family life and society as a whole – in that unloved and undisciplined children are more likely to become hoodies, Neets [not in education, employment or training] and mug you on the street corner.”

The views were slammed by Labour shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, herself a working mother.

She said: “It is obvious that Boris Johnson has nothing but contempt for women and working-class people.

“For him to speak about us in such a disgusting manner shows just how out of touch he is. It is clear he only ever stands up for the privileged few.”

Mr Johnson has repeatedly been asked to apologise to the various groups he maligned during his time as a right-wing commentator.


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He has previously said Muslim women wearing the burqa looked like “letterboxes”, referred to gay man as "bum boys" and described black people as “piccaninnies,” with “watermelon smiles”.

Previously asked to apologise Mr Johnson has said previously he “genuinely never intended to cause hurt or pain to anybody and that is my intention.”

He added: “If you go through all my articles with a fine-tooth comb and take out individual phrases there is no doubt that you can find things that can be made to seem offensive and of course I understand that."

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