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Monday 19 November 2018

Austerity, the UK and the UN

Whether or not The Guardian publishes my letter about our hideous treatment of the poor and disabled in the UK, following their report on UN findings relating to the vulnerable in Britain, I feel I must air my thoughts and experiences here.

If any of you have followed my fb posts over the past six years you may have noticed how I’m confounded that a country like ours can’t - or won’t - afford to staff or support its NHS properly. Our health system was set up in the immediate after-war years, when the UK had a much greater debt than now, following an expensive war with Germany and the Axis powers. If we could afford free hospital, GP and nursing care in 1948, why not now?

We are still, despite Brexit, the fifth richest economy in the world, yet we treat our impoverished no better than the poor sods sheltering under London’s arches in 1840. I have commented before that we have returned to Dickensian Britain. In A Christmas Carol Scrooge has to be shown what it is to struggle, to be homeless or lame. The novel could do with a modern retelling. 

In a civilised, wealthy country there can be no need to treat people who have nothing with such disdain. When George Osborne said, in the early days of the Cameron government, that ‘We are all in it together,’ my hollow laughter echoed around the hot air vents emanating from Bath’s subterranean hot water springs. I bet someone’s sheltering there tonight. They can’t lie on the benches around the Guildhall as someone has put obstructive bits of metal on the seats making it too uncomfortable for the homeless to stretch out. 
Conversely let’s hear it for the great and good who work at Julian House - a homeless charity  in Bath that’s busy saving the lives of the dispossessed. 

Osborne’s lie ‘We are all in it together’ inspired me to write my collection of short stories Austerity and Other Cuts. My tales are based on the poor, the unemployed, the virtually-homeless folk I knew, or knew of. The ones known to me all had university degrees but the benefits system they relied on was being pulled from under their feet.

Heaven help them now if they hadn’t managed to get jobs five or six years ago. Sleeping on a canal boat in winter is no fun when you haven’t even got an on-board toilet...

                                   ***

I have been a special needs teacher all my working life. I therefore chose to work - in the main, but not exclusively  - with boys and girls from non-privileged backgrounds. Some of the homes I’ve visited over the years have shown me what poverty, ‘not quite managing’, is all about. For instance a couple of homes I visited had no curtains. In one home a child whom I represented but whom I didn’t actually teach, slept with the family pet dog in his basket. Another home was spotless. Too spotless. There was no food in the house. The kitchen cupboards were much cleaner than mine.

Yet all these families had a home. They were living in council houses or flats. But in recent years such hard-pressed tenants may have been at the mercy of private landlords or in B & B accommodation. 

Over the past few months I’ve found it expensive to run a home in Bath - and I’ve worked all my life. I have my own home, can run a car, still have good health and I’ve never had children. If I’m feeling the pinch - with ever-increasing prices in the shops - how must it be for people who rely on benefits or are on such low pay they aren’t ‘just about managing’. They can’t be managing at all. 

Someone I met a few years ago (another graduate) said she had to decide between buying sanitary-wear and food. That’s poverty. When my mother was a young mum in the 1950s her friend dreaded going to the butchers with a few coppers (coins) in her pocket. What was she going to buy for her family of five? 

I believe it was Caitlin Moran who said that poverty was always having a wet towel in the bathroom. So many wet hands forever trying to get dry on the solitary family bath sheet. 


And our government is making life even harder. Unless you’ve lived a life of poverty, or been through a difficult time financially or know of folk who have, how can you be in government and set up such an unfair benefits system? As Ken Loach said it is ‘calculated cruelty’. And now Philip Alston, UN Rapporteur, has brought to the world’s attention what the UK is doing to (not for) those in need:

The United Nations rapporteur has condemned the British government's "punitive, mean-spirited and often callous" treatment of the country's poorest and most vulnerable, in a damning report.

As documented in The Independent last week
the UN's special rapporteur said policies and drastic cuts to social support were entrenching high levels of poverty and inflicting unnecessary misery in one of the richest countries in the world, adding that Brexit was exacerbating the problem.

His final recommendation states that, as the country moves toward Brexit, the government should adopt policies designed to ensure that the brunt of the resulting economic burden is "not borne by its most vulnerable citizens". 

                                  ***

This year I won’t be waiting until Christmas to add to my Crisis at Christmas donations. Nor will I wait to be told to pack some extra foodstuffs for The Trussell Trust foodbanks. Tonight the temperatures outside are dropping to 2 degrees above freezing. Julian House in Bath will be working wonders while the rest of us turn on our electric blankets and watch a film or the latest bulletins on May and Brexit. And we’ll be sighing from inside our centrally-heated homes. 

Why are we being plunged back into the 1840s? Some at the top should re-read A Christmas Carol or watch An Inspector Calls.
Both works show how heartlessness and penny-pinching drive people into the gutter.
Have our leaders learned nothing about giving someone a hand-up?


Four cheers for Polly Toynbee who simply went for George Osborne on a recent TV panel discussion. Do such leaders - past and present - feel nothing for their fellow man and woman - literally - on the street? 

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