[Nedusa]

I think if you want to carry out a proper comparison of poverty now and in the 1940's you need to compare living standards. If you look back at life for working class and below in those times and compare with today you would be shocked at how little we had back then.

With sometimes huge families they would be housed in small substandard housing sometimes with no bathrooms and outside toilets . To have all the children in shoes would be an achievement in itself.

Ill health , malnutrition were commonplace as was rickets and scurvy, polio and TB.

Holidays were few and far between and pawnbrokers were a way of life.

Working conditions were awful with low pay and terrible conditions leaving people in some industries with chronic conditions like miners lung and asbestosis .

Yet compared to today's world the lower working classes are certainly not in the same situation . Most people have bathrooms and inside toilets , all children are fed some might say considering the access to cheap junk food, rather too well fed. In fact considering the levels of childhood obesity access to food is certainly not a problem.

Also the general health and well being of children has improved vastly with innoculations for most children's diseases and screening program's to assess children's health generally.

We collectively take more holidays home and abroad have far more leisure time and children are not allowed to be exploited for work with legislation regulating the hours Children can work.

So I think because food banks have pricked the public's conscience due to their use as a political tool, we should not be fooled into thinking that as a Nation we have regressed to the poverty levels of the 1940's when clearly we haven't .