Poverty isn't a lack of character it's a lack of cash.

How fantastic to hear from Posters who really understand! So many have absolutely no concept of the poverty trap and how it effects people. Brilliant article. The 'but....phones/flatscreen TV's etc!' brigade really gets my goat. It is pointless explaining why people have them, because they don't really want their view to be changed.

May7 I wasn't being ironic about a proper welfare state. I think one of the reason many poor families did well in the post war years was because they had good welfare support. It wasn't ideal, but it met the needs of the poorest better than anything we have now. Add to the present lack of real support the huge gap between the rich and poor and the reasons for failure seem obvious.

trisher, I have to disagree, having experienced the welfare state first hand in the fifties and sixties.

Marydoll In the fifties you had free education on to higher ed. You had support for poorer childen in the form of clothing grants, and educational allowances after 16. You had free prescriptions and health care which included child welfare clinics. and district nurses. You had free school meals for children whose parents were unemployed all year including in school holidays. You had free milk, vitamins and subsidised baby milk. We all benefitted from the welfare state. I'm sorry you feel your experiences were not good, but consider how much worse things would be today.

Lemongrove: ”^I would have thought that some sort of citizenship class which includes money management, high interest loans (and resulting debt) the importance of voting etc. Would really help teenagers think about life after school.”^

I agree in principle. Citizenship was introduced in the school (state secondary) where I worked. However, this had not been planned and funded properly. We did not have qualified staff to deliver the subject, there was very little teaching material and what there was had to be shared with several classes. I, a language teacher, was just allocated a class and more or less expected to get on with it without any support at all. This, as I see it, is so often the problem we have: the idea is good but when it comes to implementing it we fail miserably.

Teaching money management in schools, although a good thing in itself, is just sticking plaster on the much wider problem.

Trisher, because my father was receiving invalidity benefit, it was the only income in our home apart from family allowance.
I received the absolute minimum grant to go to university. If I remember it was £90 a term, of which my mother demanded the majority of it.
Grant applications in Scotland were based on parental contribution, so the government deemed that as they were already supporting us, I was entitled only to the minimum grant and my parents were supposed to support me. It was laughable. Support me with what?
On the other hand my two friends, whose father was the managing director of a national company, living in a huge country house, both got the full grant, because their father got his accountant to cleverly fill in the applications. Damned already, too poor to need or afford an accountant. They were so smug about it.

I went to a grammar school, where the uniform and the supplier were prescribed. My mother got into terrible debt every year, trying to pay for it. If you tried to wear a cheaper item, you were sent to the headteacher for a rollicking!
I never got a clothing allowance, as again, the government were already deemed to be supporting us with a pittance.

I did get free school meals, what a shameful process that was.
Despite knowing this, the nuns asked for my lunch money every day and made me stand up in front of everyone to say I received free school meals. It was humiliating to say the least.
There certainly weren't free schools meals in the holidays.
Because of my father's ill health, the house had to be kept warm, one coal fire and a fortune spent on fuel. When my mother couldn't afford coal, she burnt anything she could find. Then it became a smokeless zone and nothing but the more expensive smokeless fuel was allowed.
There were wardens, checking for smoke coming from chimneys and if you were caught, a fine. (which of course you couldn't pay).

If my father had been alive nowadays, there would be all sorts of benefits available, including a carer's allowance, PIP, winter fuel allowance. Fortunately, we still have free prescriptions here in Scotland
My mother lost her career and a very good income, I don't think she would praise the welfare system post war.

I could go on and on...., but I'm getting so annoyed and upset at the memories this thread has awoken and I don't want to get into an argument.
Let's just agree to respect each other's post, without any animosity.

Yes trisher I totally agree and understand everything you said in your post. I said I suspect you were being ironic and added a wink emoji so that you would know that . It was the sentence in your post The concept that actually poverty is the thing which could be eradicated and in so doing we would get rid of many of the problems which exist in our society is revolutionary that led me to believe you were being ironic. It wasnt meant as an insult or even a criticism.
Sometimes it is easy to read into something that isnt actually there it's just an interpretation (mine)

Maryydoll I really do not understand why you would get a minimum grant. The grant was purely assessed on income for the previous year. If your parents were on benefits this was just entered as income. I know this because I remember the forms and my parents half way through my course became dependant on benefits. My grant remained the same as their income had always been low. Clothing allowances were actually issued by the local authority (as were grants). and I certainly had one. Schools in my area certainly opened during the school holidays to provide free meals
Can you expain to me why the government would be involved in your grant and other things when they were administered by local authorities?

In Scotland, certainly at the time I was a student in the 1960s, our grant, if we got one, came from the Scottish Education Department, not from LAs which gave grants to English students.

How's this for a scenario?

A highly qualified young woman acquires injuries that, in addition to other neurological consequences, results in her having unpredictable seizures. When she left hospital (after 8 months of treatment) she began receiving Disability Living Allowance, but this was stopped and she was asked to apply for the replacement benefit, Personal Independence Payment. She was turned down for this, although her medical condition remains the same as when her claim for DLA was approved, and it is now more than a year since she began the process of Mandatory Consideration and Appeal.

During the waiting time she receives standard Universal Credit payments of £73.10. Because of her medical condition she needs to be in supported accommodation, and although her rent is paid by UC she must pay the 'support' element of the rent herself. This is £16.

So, this left her with £57.10 a week to pay for gas, electric, water, phone/broadband, food, toiletries and clothing; she has given up her broadband and now uses the library computer, but must keep a phone in order to respond to instructions/queries from the DWP regarding her Universal Credit.

In reality if she pays her bills (which she does) she has no money left over for anything but the absolute bare essentials and often this does not include adequate food. It doesn't matter that she had a good education or that she is frugal and manages her money to the best of her ability. She lives in abject poverty and often (worryingly often) thinks that her life is not worth living.

Every day I work with people who are in this position and sometimes (most times!) I have no words to address the hopelessness of their lives. Poverty kills people; in the last six years at least 69 deaths have been formally linked to problems with benefit claims, but in fact the number is known to be considerably higher. I just hope and pray that none of my clients ever become one of these statistics.

varian and Marydoll it seems the Scottish system was different to the one in England I apologise for my post. I really didn't know Scotland was so different. It doesn't seem fair.

Your work is so important * grannyactivist". You are seeing the true picture and it needs to be shouted from the rooftops.

Would it not be a good thing if the right wing press told their readers these true stories?

Apology accepted trisher, it wasn't fair or easy, but I got there in the end.
I'm not bitter about it, it made me a much stronger and more resilient person.
It also gave me an insight into what my pupils and their parents lives were like. Parents in my school knew I was on their side and that I would fight for the best education and support for their children, many of whom were damaged by drug addicted or alcoholic parents. Sometimes both.
I am evangelical about education, as a way out of poverty.

My husband had the same impoverished background, one of eight children and a father too old get a job, when the local car factory closed down. The mills, the jam factory and the soup factories had already closed down.
The only difference between us was that, my husband's parents encouraged him to go to university.

One last anecdote. I got a pupil into Primary seven (12 years old), who messed about, was not interested in learning. He was one of the cleverest pupils I had ever come across, but was totally disengaged.
I saw his potential and tried every method I could think of to engage him.
That boy is now a medical student and hopefully destined for higher things, having come from a very deprived background.

Grannyactivist The history of that young woman is appalling. We supposedly live in a civilised society, one of the richest in the world and yet that can happen.

On another thread I wrote about the source of Labour Party voters (middle class educated professionals, immigrants and the young) The response from one or two Gransnetters was that they didn't want to lose what they had worked for to inheritance tax and that they were only interested in looking after their own family.

The welfare state came into being to help everyone in need. You never know when you are going to need it.

Good article Gagajo but surely we should all know this already. Of course there are some who mismanage what they have, but many don't have enough for basics. That's why we have food banks. People would never choose to use them. (on the increase)
I also watched his Ted Talk about a guaranteed basic income to lift people out of poverty, and although I'm not sure what I think of that idea, he talked about a town in Canada, where it was given as an experiment and was very successful. People became richer, healthier, crime fell, people stayed in their jobs...

Lemongrove reminds me of the lady who came out to give my mum a chit for children's shoes in the 50s. She also told her to mix half margarine with the butter to make it go further (like we ever had butter!).

Excellent post grannyactivist Mon 24-Feb-20 20:25:17
I would like to see politicians live on that amount of money for at least a year and see how they manage.
I've heard it said that people have to choose between heating and eating.
The true amount of people who have taken their own lives in this same situation will never be known.
It's a bl---y disgrace. Because of austerity there has been no increase in benefits for a least 5 years. I only hope Boris does something about it.

Report out today that indicates life expectancy is actually falling for the poorest women, first time in 100 years. Surely politicians should be hanging their heads in shame. The last 10 years have been a disaster for some. The effects are long term will be felt for the rest of their lives.

When I was teaching, we had a presentation by the Chief Medical Officer for Scotland, who happened to live in our town.
He and his team had carried out research on children from birth to two in our town, tracking the development of their brain, as well as growth etc.

It was fascinating, to say the least. The brain scans from the most deprived children, who lacked nurturing, physically and emotionally, were different from those who came from more affluent families.
In some of the children from more deprived areas, there was an area of their brain, which at two years old hadn't developed as much as those children whose families were able to fulfil their physical and emotional needs. I can still picture those scans in my head.

Another factor affecting child development was nurturing (or lack of) of emotional and mental wellbeing. This is not a criticism of the parents, who were ground down by abject poverty and despair.
The researchers concluded that poverty and deprivation did impact on the ability to learn and consequently impacted on the ability to reach baseline targets when starting school.

So even if you do want to get an education to escape poverty, you are already disadvantaged at the starting line.
I was so interested in this research that I wrote my dissertation for a post grad, based on overcoming barriers to learning.

I introduced different initiatives into my school to try and help to redress this imbalance. (My colleagues thought I was mad) Finding out how the brain works and how to create new neurol pathways became my passion.

Of course, there is so much more to this, but I don't want to bore you all!

Interesting Marydoll.
I was from a very deprived background but was among the top scorers in IQ tests at age 10. Sadly I couldn't get to grammar school even though my headmistress offered to buy the uniform. This was early 60s. I could go into detail about being one of the poorest pupils in the school because I still remember vividly but suffice to say that as the article states you need to take families out of poverty. Providing education is not enough.
Surely children deserve to be given the best chance posssible.