“Don’t complain, you’ve got roof over your heads which is more than some people have, stop whining about what you havnt (sic) got and be grateful for what you have got. I’m in a family of 8, when we were all young we all lived in a 3 bedroomed house, what’s your problem?? Put bunkbeds in rooms for children. STOP having children then!!!’ fumed reader Trish Jones, attracting a mere 183 likes.

But it was John Cook who really did the business with this: “More needs to be done, sure give him the snip and tie her tubes jobs a good un.” 203 readers got off on this one.

It’s easy enough to take the piss out of everyone here. The couple who had more children than they could afford and the angry Bristol Post readers who were livid for them doing so. But actually, it’s more nuanced than that.

My partner and I would have had more children had we been able to afford them, so we didn’t. Simple economics prevented us from the family size we would have had if both our income and house had been larger. So we stuck to simple economics. David and Danielle Payne decided to have as many children as they wanted, seemingly without any thought of how they might house them all. So, we’re good and they’re bad, right? Wrong.

A very rich man, let’s say the MP for the 18th century Jacob Rees-Mogg, had a privileged upbringing, enjoying the best education money can buy and then waltzing into lucrative areas of work. Rees-Mogg is so rich, he can easily afford six children and a full-time nanny to look after them. Another rich man, let’s call him Boris Johnson, has 6, 7 or 8 children (no one is quite sure of the exact number, least of all it seems Johnson) and then, in his mid fifties, meets a woman 20 years his junior and has two more. But thanks to Johnson’s privileged upbringing, enjoying the best education money can by and then waltzing into lucrative areas of work, being rich beyond belief, and not having to live with any of the children he helped create with numerous partners, nothing is a problem.

Do you see where I am going with this? If you have lots of money, acquired via inheritance and the efforts of others, it’s fine to live the life you want but if you are like the rest of us, you have to make difficult choices, like not having the children you’d like to have because you don’t have the money.

I don’t condone the Paynes because they’ve chosen to have more children than they can properly home. That’s the way it is for the lower orders, of which I am one. We were lucky to have two wonderful children and hopefully provide for them a decent upbringing, which we would not have been able to do if we’d had more children. These ‘difficult decisions’ are almost always the sole province of the working class. I’m very uneasy with this.

In any event, the failing Bristol Post was doing what these does it does best, or worst: it stirs the shit, because David and Danielle Payne live not in Bristol but in Godalming, Surrey. In other words, it’s clickbait tosh and this feeble apology of a newspaper needs to be called out for what it is.

And what the Post also did was to encourage people’s very worst instincts. It is always the working classes, the hoi polloi, who are feckless and irresponsible, never the well-to-do establishment. Funny that, since it is your actual upper classes who spread hate and division across our not very green and increasingly unpleasant land.

At worst, the Paynes are twats, allowing a version of their story to be told by clickbait wannabe journalists. The real wrong ‘uns are the toe-rags of the Bristol Post who seek to demonise people in order to get a few clicks. I might be a failed writer and blogger, but I’d never sink this low.