[Kizzy]

Originally Posted by 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.


Have you ever been to Blackpool, Jaywick or merthyr?
http://www.theguardian.com/society/s...st-deprived-uk

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

All of these seemingly eradicated diseases with the exception of polio are on the rise today.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/heal...n-the-war.html

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

If people are too poor to put electric in the meter it's safe too say they can't afford a holiday.

'When Finch started working for the National Pawnbrokers Association of the UK 22 years ago, there were 70 shops in the country – now there are 2,500.'
(2013)[/B]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/bu...s-8558926.html


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

Advances in health and safe working practices would have accommodated the difficulties associated with heavy industry. Outsourcing was an ultimately more costly solution.

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.

We are not discussing the world, the only comparison being drawn in the OP is the UK then and now.

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.

'HISTORICAL EVIDENCE
Similarly, temporal patterns of child health reflect differences in income and material wealth. Over the past 70 years the differences in infant and child mortality between the social classes have been wider during periods when income and material differences were wider, and narrower during periods of greater social equality'

http://adc.bmj.com/content/76/5/463.full

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.

'6. Zero hour contracts
Zero hour contracts are also known as casual contracts. Zero hour contracts are usually for ‘piece work’ or ‘on call’ work, eg interpreters.

This means:

they are on call to work when you need them
you don’t have to give them work
they don’t have to do work when asked'

https://www.gov.uk/contract-types-an...hour-contracts

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 .

' I heard from elderly members of church congregations who lived through the scarcity of the 1940s and 50s and wanted to help those facing hunger and poverty today. '

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics...odbank-dilemma