:clap1::clap1::clap1: Nothing 'flippant' at all in your comments Matt - the article and headline is a load of B.S.

What is regarded as 'poverty' today is NOWHERE near the REAL poverty of the 40's, 50's, AND 60's.

I KNOW - I lived through part of the 50's in REAL POVERTY.

Poverty as defined by our 21 century AAA rated world power status naturally.

Aye, the 70's were hard as well Kirk.
I can remember my mother trying to batter a tin of peas one Sunday, we had nothing else in the house to eat....mind you we had the excitement of watching the peas escaping from the batter in the hot fat.
She worked full time but never enough money to go around:shrug:

:laugh: I love yer Smudgie. You have to laugh - Do you know that until I was in my late teens (and in charge of my own destiny :laugh:) I thought 'Scallops' were a slice of potato coated in batter and deep fried, because THAT is what my old man told us they were when he made them that way for us as a 'luxurious treat' when we were kids.

Remember 'bread pobs' - bits of stale bread soaked in gravy? :laugh:

And my mother had three jobs and the old man was a coal miner. :shrug:

Haha At the Scallop potatoes.
The batter made them bigger and more filling..wise parents back in the day.
I hated them as I am not a potato fan.

And there are "starving kids in Africa" who would kill for a deep fried battered potato or a bit of bread soaked in gravy.

Comparing ye-olde-timey poverty to modern poverty in an attempt to make it seem like poor people today "have it easy" is both arrogant, and completely pointless. The social and economic contexts are completely different. You're right in that it "doesn't compare" but only because it flat out can't be compared. It wasn't "as bad as" or "easier" OR "harder" - it was an entirely different situation.

Wow...I was a bit shocked that you think like that to be honest.

I've not read all the responses as its been a long day so forgive me if I repeat something someone's already said.

I think modern poverty is very different to the poverty of old. Back then survival for the poor was their only purpose in life. So long as they could put bread on the table and have a suit to pawn to get them through to pay day, they just buckled down and got on with life.

Today we are driven by our aspirations and those aspirations go much further than putting bread on the table and a roof over our heads. We all engage with it, we are surrounded by it; our life is full of material things we think we need.

If you're poor in the modern world you can still have a wide screen tv. Modern poverty can come and go because a lot of people, including the hard working ones, can't manage to sustain comfortability for long. With minimum salaries that haven't kept up with inflation, zero contract hours that give unpredictable earnings and a position of never being able to save because whatever they earn is swallowed up by the cost of living; there are many people in Britain that are okay today but may not be okay tomorrow.

Poverty is subjective. I would consider someone living on baked beans and fears turning the heating up poor. I would consider someone who doesn't own property, has no savings and becomes unemployed poor and I would consider a homeless person to be extremely poor.

Our going back in time comparing our lives then to now has nothing to do with arrogance TS, it is no different to your little tale of your hard times:shrug:
We have all bad them, or at least fear that we will at some point in life.
The gist of the thread has been the difference in poverty in the 40s and modern day, so hearing people's actual experiences in the years in between is more real to me than reading some statistics written down by somebody I don't know a thing about.

No,what is being said (quite explicitly) is that poverty "in those days" was real poverty and that the idea of poverty today is somehow laughable in comparison. A sort of "they wouldn't know hardship if it smacked them in the face, we knew REAL hard times" sort of thing. It's dismissive, disrespectful, arrogant, and shows a huge misunderstanding of how different the issues faced by people in poverty today are compared to yesteryear. Neither has it easier, it's completely different.

Incase you're going to suggest that's not what was being implied:

It wasn't just implied it was stated outright.

The thread isn't a comparison to the 40's in terms of how relative poverty is to then, but the attitudes to poverty and how the public respond to those in need.

Wow, amazing post, well said and even if I was looking to, which I am not,I could not be able to find a thing to disagree on as to it.

Your last paragraph totally spot on and a really fair presentation of the issue.

My take on it is that no matter if the country is in boom times or recession, there will always be those that are homeless or not know where the next meal is coming from.

On top of that we have aspirations and expectations today that just weren't a consideration in previous generations, but as poverty bites, it all boils down to basic survival in the end.

Governments were considered uncaring and aloof in previous generations and the same applies today - conservative or labour, we really haven't progressed, we just wrap it up better in sound bites and give an illusion of care, but the same contempt exists.

So my conclusion is that poverty is just as bad as it was in the 40's and it really hasn't changed in generations since, nor is it likely to change any time soon in the future

Right, I think the public have a better attitude in some ways.
The food banks show that the public are charitable and try and help people who are struggling.
Soup kitchens and charity cafes try to help as well. So some people are making an effort.
Back in the forties the work house was still going strong, it changed name at some point but didn't shut fully until forties.
Family and friends were in similar situations back in the workhouse days and couldn't help out in a lot of cases.
The benefit system, while not being fantastic, has to be better than the options back in the day so attitudes will naturally be different nowadays.

...obviously none of us can compare through actual experience of the 1940s because t'was before our time but whatever our own 'back in the day' is, it's still hard to do because we tend to look back more with nostalgia and of being younger/rose tainted glasses, type thing..so of times/decades when we were children, our view of less or more poverty would be through a child's eye or a young person's eye, whereas now we're looking through the eyes of adults, so more 'reality/more responsibilities', I guess...as a child for instance, I never really had much 'new'..t'was the world of second hand Rose for many people, which still is as well, siblings inheriting from older siblings/clothes/toys etc...but obviously getting new stuff more..I guess an equivalent to 'second hand' now, would be Ebay..not everyone Ebays, some people give to someone they know for no return financially but many people do Ebay, so selling rather than giving...nothing was wasted in terms of food and many other things etc...but many people owned though in terms of their own house/flat etc...at a much younger age than they do now...now it's much more difficult to own at young ages and even for those that are fortunate enough to, it'll most likely mean a huge mortgage/debt...and on top of student loans debt as well...and because people did own back in the day at much younger ages, that's meant for many a generation of 'inheritance'...which I doubt will be the case with the younger generation now and a possible inheritance for their children ...



...anyways, these are just some musings and have no relevance at all to the article but one part of it is quite interesting...


Children were reported as dirty, inadequately clothed and badly behaved, and their parents were blamed as lazy and incompetent. Politicians and media reports supported this analysis.



..this was about evacuees, so still even in a 'pulling together' of wartimes, such judgements of parents/parenting and those judgements of 'laziness' being supported by the media..sound familiar..:laugh:...so not a lot really changed then from that view...and when we look at minimum paid jobs and things like that/exploitation type things of today...that could also be compared (maybe)...with those evacuees of the 40s, in that they weren't all homed through a sense of caring, some children were treated extremely badly/very bad living and care conditions for the only purpose of being 'free help'...and had some very wrong/cruel and unhappy experiences...and they had them old 'yanks' back in the 40s as well, coming over here, charming our ladies with their nylons and chocolate...'taking what is ours'.../and completely different again but still the 'old foreigners' coming over and taking 'our benefits' etc...


..anyways, there are just musings and thoughts more than anything else because comparisons are quite difficult..one of the big things though is the power of the internet and judgements being enabled to be made more en masse, rather than more, just within a community..but as the article says, there was still media influence to add then as well...I personally don't think media influences most people unless it's their leaning to be influenced anyway/their own personal thought process...but yeah, just musings really...

[QUOTE=Toy Soldier;8523727]And there are "starving kids in Africa" who would kill for a deep fried battered potato or a bit of bread soaked in gravy.

Yes - and there were "starving kids in Africa" who would kill for a deep fried battered potato or a bit of bread soaked in gravy" back in the 40's and '50's, only far, far more of them, and because we did not have widespread television and the internet, 'Public Perception' and 'Awareness' was extremely LOW, and because Beveridge's 'Welfare State'' was in it's infancy and the poor here had their very own 'fight to survive', the 'Working Classes' ability to 'contribute' aid to "starving kids in Africa" was virtually non-existant.

Over the past 40 years Africa has received $400billion of aid from the developed world and that figure does not include the hundreds of millions of pounds of 'non official' donations given by the public and raised by events such as Band Aid etc.

The "past 40 years" means from the late 1970's onwards, not the 40's, 50's 60's and early 70's - and this is solely due to the reasons outlined above - because 'Public Perceptions' to poverty HAS increasingly greatly improved over the past 40 years.

"Comparing ye-olde-timey poverty to modern poverty in an attempt to make it seem like poor people today "have it easy" is both arrogant, and completely pointless. The social and economic contexts are completely different. You're right in that it "doesn't compare" but only because it flat out can't be compared. It wasn't "as bad as" or "easier" OR "harder" - it was an entirely different situation."

I'll tell you what is 'arrogant' T.S. - 'Arrogant' is when one person denies, or denigrates the GENUINE DIRECT PERSONAL EXPERIENCES of another person without having shared those experiences.

I LIVED through the end of the 50's and through the early 60's and I was not some unintelligent or unread or unaware little kid trapped in a unique 'bubble' of poverty - I was POLITICALLY AWARE from a very early age, and aware of the great SOCIAL INEQUALITY which was prevalent at the time.

MY EXPERIENCE of poverty was not 'peculiar' to my family, because there were countless rows of squalid Victorian crumbling red brick, 'two down three up' terrace houses where families existed in poverty - DESPITE one or BOTH parents working hard for a pittance.

The windows were draughty Victorian sliding sashes where ice clung to the INSIDES during Winter. The interiors were lit by gas mantles, and hot water - such as it was - was provided by a tiny steel box back boiler heated by a coal fire in an open range fire.

And a 'Bathroom'? LOL. A galvanised tin bath half-filled with tepid water (the best that the small coal-fired back boiler could do) placed in the only living room in front of the coal fire, and a piece of old flannel and bar of carbolic soap was the 'Bathroom'. Oh, and we kids HAD to get in the previous kid's bath water.

Coarse old khaki army blankets and even a couple of army greatcoats were used to keep warm in bed - because shared body heat from 2 to a single bed wasn't enough to do the trick.

A coal fired 'Set Pot' - a huge cast iron inverted bell - was used to boil clothes one day and for cooking potato 'stew' in the next. Wet clothes were put through a hand 'mangle' wringer prior to being put out to 'dry' on a washing line strung across the rear access 'road' because we had no back gardens - just a 'coal house' and OUTSIDE toilets, where the 'toilet roll' was cut up squares of old newspapers hung by a nail on the ill-fitting planked door of the loo.

All cooking was done on two cast iron paddles fixed to the fire grate on which one stood pans or the kettle and which then were pushed over the fire.

Baking was done in an oven which was incorporated into the fireplace.

No fuel - no cooking.

There were NO fitted carpets, just 'damp, uneven, Yorkshire slab floors over which 'Peggy Rugs' - home made rugs fashioned from cut up strips of old clothing punched through a piece of old gunny sackloth - were laid.

There was no central heating - just the coal fire which filled the dingy rabbit hutch of a room with toxic smoke every time the wind blew down the chimney.

Mice, cockroaches and 'bed bugs' were prevalent - in the cleanliest of households.

I will never forget the chorus of severely violent coughing at 4.30 am every morning as numerous miners awoke to get ready for their shift at the local 'pit', or how I clutched a mug of tea with no milk and no sugar as I watched from my window at them them cycling down the street under the street gas lamps on their way to work with their metal 'snap tins' of pork dripping sandwiches, or 'potted beef' if they were really 'well off', in their saddle bags.

Mortality rates among the poor 'working class' were much higher then than now - I lost two sisters, one at birth and one in early infancy - and it was never due to heroin overdoses and rarely due to chronic alcoholism. Diseases which killed the poor in their thousands do not do so now.

TV's, Playstations and Designer Fashion clothes and accessories were unknown, as were take-away meals and holidays.

Do not make me laugh by accusing me of arrogance or by maintaining that the poverty we know in the UK today is worse, as bad as, or is 'different' to that which I KNEW in the late '50's and early '60's, because THERE IS NO COMPARISON. What is deemed poverty today would have been sheer 'middle class' bliss back then.

:clap1::clap1::clap1: Superbly written.

I've never seen a person here in the US that was on food stamps (welfare) that looked like they were starving. in fact usually they are more obese than rich people.

I specifically said that it was different. That's my entire point. And that's why using it as an example to make it seem like modern poverty is "nothing", or even "luxury", is arrogant and completely ignorant to the differences between the two situations.

Its just one big "lol what are people moaning about they are lucky" when they are anything but lucky, and often live miserable existences.

You initially misinterpreted the article Ammi in the OP the reports in the Guardian in 1943 did not fuel public perception of the poor they changed it. Due to those women travelling to the areas the kids were being evacuated from seeing ,where,when and how they lived and worked.
As you say we view those in poverty through the magic of television and trust what we see is a true representation instead of seeing the issues faced like these women did in 43 for themselves.
It's not a case of are you influenced, but to what degree.

..I didn't misinterpret anything, I posted some thoughts and musings/some possible comparisons that could be made or not etc...to be either interpreted or misinterpreted as anyone chooses...

Sorry but you did, as the reports in the media were not supporting they were exposing which to all intents and purposes is the opposite of what we have now in some newspapers.

..there are many 'exposing' balances now of any slanting, we just have to choose to and be inclined to look at all of those balances...which is why it's so great to have access to so much more information in the present day...and of course, 'see for ourselves' in so much as we're able to/gather our own information...anyways I could choose to pass the while away in dissecting my musings further or I could not and get along with my day...I choose the not to, ya'll have a good day....

It is interesting that the unlike the 40s there is all this new media with which to help shape attitudes. Yet unlike the 40s when confronted with the truth and the reality of situations many aren't compelled as they were then to advocate change.

Its a very neo-liberal attitude and I'm not surprised its happened. Margaret Thatcher once said, "you all middle class now". Those words really didn't help the 'working poor'. What Margaret Thatcher did was open the door to the working class and invite them to join the middle classes but inevitably some people were going to get stuck in the cracks.

Our aspirations changed. Most of us believe the worlds our oyster and we all have the opportunity to achieve great things if only we try, therefore, those at the bottom of the pile are the undeserving; the none tryers. If however, we find ourselves in that 'undeserving' category its because policy has put us there and if we find ourselves unsympathetic towards the poor, its the way modern society has been designed.

People don't choose to be poor so how do they end up there?