Rudi Ion struggles to count up the children from his huge Romanian clan who now call Britain home. It could be 100, he tells me.

‘I’ve got 25 cousins all living around Nottingham, each with three or four kids,’ he adds with a loud laugh.

Rudi is speaking from his rented three-bedroom terrace house in Bridlington Street, a shabby part of the Midlands city where he’s settled with his wife Anda and their two sons, nine-year-old Ionut and Constantin, six.

His mother Elena, 53, and sister Ana, who is 32, live there, too.

Rudi is an ebullient 28-year-old who speaks English well. He doesn’t seem surprised when I tell him that a recent controversial report from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that more than 25 per cent of children born in England and Wales in 2011 were to foreign mothers — up 16 per cent on the decade before.

The highest number — 2.93 children per family on average — were the offspring of Romanians, and a spokesman for the ONS has suggested that Britain’s generous benefits system could encourage the migrants to have more children so they can claim extra money.

What is particularly striking, according to the ONS, is that Romanians who come to Britain are actually having more than twice as many children as they would at home, where the average is 1.25 children born to each family.

This week, the EU Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, Laszlo Andor, attacked the so-called xenophobia of British politicians over the issue of migrants coming to Britain and claiming welfare. He grandiosly announced: ‘Benefits tourism as such is a myth.’

Yet Rudi readily admits that our generous benefits’ culture does encourage Romanians to uproot to the UK, where they can claim state money for the children they bring with them.

‘Your benefits system is crazy — I would actually say it was sick,’ he says, as he makes a gesture involving sticking his two fingers down his throat.

‘Of course Romanians will settle in Britain if they get this kind of money. It is like walking down the road and seeing a sack full of cash that has been dropped, picking it up and no one saying anything.

‘If my people bring more children in, or have more children here, there are more benefits. So, of course, they have babies.’

His family came here from District Two, a multicultural area of the Romanian capital, Bucharest, after Rudi had first tried his luck in eight other countries dotted around the European Union.

He admits: ‘I made my way by pick-pocketing, thieving and other small crimes.

‘I was put into prison or arrested by the police in Norway, Finland, Sweden, Spain, Italy, France, Austria and Germany before I arrived here. My German is quite good because they jailed me there for six months, and the Austrian prison was very tough.’

He explains that his favoured modus operandi in both France and Germany was to stand in a telephone box and pretend to make a call and then run out of coins.

He would turn to the next person waiting in the queue and ask them if they had a Euro to give him. If the unsuspecting person got out their purse or wallet, he would snatch it and run off.

‘But I don’t do bad things anymore because I am not poor and live on your benefits,’ he told me. ‘I arrived in the UK on January 7 three years ago, and went to the Nottingham job centre to get a National Insurance number a few weeks after.

‘I came to Nottingham to stay with a cousin and found a good private accountant who told me how to claim the benefits. I soon brought over my family, too.

‘I have never been told to look for work by the job centre. I have never called back there after I got the National Insurance number. Why would I want a real boss when I get £300 put into my bank account each week for nothing?

‘There is the child benefit of £170 a month for Ionut and Constantin, too. In Romania, we were only given £17 a month for them. Now I sing “God praise your Queen Elizabeth” every day, because we have arrived in heaven.’

The £300 Rudi receives each week is made up of housing benefit, to cover his £500 a month rent (the house is owned by a private landlord), and he also receives tax credits (paid weekly or monthly) because his self-employed income is so low.

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WE may not like how much tax we have to stump up but we do it because it pays for pensions, schools, hospitals and helps those in need. So how outrageous that an estimated £55million a year is handed out in child benefit and tax credits to foreigners whose families don’t even live in Britain.

An astonishing £200,000 goes to just 61 foreign workers with six or more children, two thirds of them from Poland.

Meanwhile hard-working middle class Britons who commit the “crime” of earning £50,000 a year have had their child benefit cut or taken away altogether.

The Prime Minister talks tough and says he will crack down on this farcical and insulting situation. But the truth is he’s powerless because EU rules prevent him from doing anything about it.

Free movement of foreign labour also means free movement of your money into foreign pockets apparently.

Why should 40,000 children abroad be supported by British taxpayers instead of by their fathers?

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A jobless mother is demanding a new council home after she complained that a previous tenant had died in hers – which she says offends her gipsy culture.

Lisa Bowden, who has not worked in 15 years and collects around £13,000 a year in benefits, was given her current newly-decorated two-bedroom flat two months ago.

But she discovered that a man had died there, and claims it is against her culture to live where someone has passed away.

Miss Bowden, 40, who has four children by two fathers, said she can feel the presence of the deceased man’s ‘spirit’ and insisted that Dartford Borough Council move her to a three- bedroom house with a garden.

Neighbours branded her a ‘freeloader’.

The former traveller, whose flat in the pretty Kent village of Stone, near Dartford, is equipped with mod cons, said: ‘When someone dies from a gipsy culture, we would burn the caravan.

‘It is forbidden for us to enter somewhere where someone has died. It doesn’t matter that the man who died here was not a gipsy. I can feel his spirit and it gives me the shivers.

‘I can’t live here – I always sleep with the light on and would never stay at night on my own. The council need to give me a new home – one with a garden and three bedrooms so my daughter can visit.’

Miss Bowden lives with her nine-year-old son, while her 15-year-old daughter lives with her father, Miss Bowden’s ex-husband. Her other children have left home.

She gets £70 weekly employment and support allowance, and £60 a week in child tax credits. She also receives £80 a month in child benefit, and her £90 weekly rent is paid for by the taxpayer.

Her house has two flat-screen televisions, a PlayStation 3 console, a Nintendo Wii, a new sofabed and a new microwave, kettle and toaster. At Christmas she bought her nine-year-old a laptop computer.

When she was given the flat in October, the council gave her nearly £200 to redecorate, and she got a new bathroom and kitchen. Miss Bowden said she had called in a priest in an attempt to exorcise her flat, but claims she can still ‘smell the death’ inside it.

She claims her ‘haunted’ flat  is making worse a long-standing lung condition, and was recently admitted to hospital for a chest infection. She added: ‘I told them I didn’t want a flat where someone died, but they didn’t listen and told me either I take the flat or I end up on the street.’

One neighbour said: ‘She’s so ungrateful. Beggars can’t be choosers. Nobody should turn their nose up at a free flat, even if someone has died in it. It’s not like he is still in there.’

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A controversial Muslim cleric who lives off benefits is urging his followers to also sponge off UK taxpayers by claiming their ‘Jihadseeker’s allowance’.

Anjem Choudary, who in the past has planned to disrupt the minute’s silence on Remembrance Sunday, also openly mocked hard-working Britons, calling them ‘slaves’.

The Sun newspaper secretly filmed him saying Islam will overrun Europe, David Cameron and Barack Obama should be killed and calling the Queen ‘ugly’.

But today he said he had been ‘joking’ and his words had been misconstrued.

He also maintained that Osama Bin Laden was his ‘hero’.

The father-of-four takes home more than £25,000 a year in benefits and lives in a £320,000 house in Leytonstone, East London.

He told a crowd of around 30 fanatics: ‘People will say, ‘Ah, but you are not working’. But the normal situation is for you to take money from the kuffar (non-Muslim).

‘So we take Jihadseeker’s Allowance. You need to get support.’

In another video a grinning Choudary is recorded telling his disciples that it is justifiable to take money from non-believers.

He said: ‘The normal situation is to take money from the kuffar. You work, give us the money, Allahu Akhbar (God is great).

‘Hopefully there’s no one from the DSS listening to this.’

He also called Mr Cameron, Mr Obama and the leaders of Pakistan and Egypt the ‘shaitan’, or devil, and said he wanted them to be killed.

Choudary spoke glowingly of the 9/11 attacks and urged his followers to have ‘hate’ in their hearts for core British concepts like democracy, freedom and freedom of religion.

The 45-year-old former lawyer added: ‘We are going to take England — the Muslims are coming. Brussels is 30 per cent, 40 per cent Muslim and Amsterdam. Bradford is 17 per cent Muslim.

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