All sorts of hoo ha about that 13 year old kid fathering a child with his 15 year old girlfriend. The usual middle class contempt for working class people being aired and exercised, of course, and some Claire Rayneresque hand-wringing about our broken society.

Of course, it's not the best start in the world for the little girl to have underage parents. It's not the best option in the world for Alfie and Chantelle to have a child while still being children themselves. But I wish them well, because by God they're going to need some good wishes.

How did we get here? How did Britain come to top the European charts for teenage pregnancy? Yes, as Dr Crippen points out, that bad old British cultural wince about sex probably isn't helping, along with the voluntary nature of participation in sex education and, to some extent, the rise of "faith" schools with their superstitious babble. But surely, even in the face of all this, there's just enough knowledge out there to make the link between unprotected sex and babies? And so why would Alfie and Chantelle choose to risk having a baby?

I suspect it's got a lot to do with diminished expectations. Not for Alfie and Chantelle the certain prospect of A levels, a gap year bumming round Europe or the Far East then uni before dad paves the way into a nice little earner. When they look around them, they don't see people in big houses with nice jobs and nice cars going on holiday four times a year. They see minimum wage-slavery and missed opportunities, failure and frustration and poverty, all to a background of carping criticism from the people in the big houses down the road. So why not have a baby? Something to do, isn't it, and you might just get a little extra in your hand from the social.

The way to fix this? Yes, compulsory sex education; yes, good advice about contraception; yes, freely available contraception and lots of it. But also we need to think about the kind of society that abandons people to a lifetime of benefit dependency and penury, then slags them off for it.