The United Nations rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights squeezed onto a school bench alongside a dozen children in one of Glasgow’s most deprived neighbourhoods and posed a question: “Who should help poor people?”
“The rich people,” Soroush, one of the children, shot back. “It’s unfair to have people earning billions of pounds and have other people living on benefits.”
It was perhaps the frankest answer Philip Alston received on a two-day visit to Scotland, where a million people live in relative poverty, including one in five children.Note that 'relative' in there. These children are not 'living in poverty' at all.
Little Soroush isn't rooting through a garbage pile for enough to eat, or sleeping on the streets, or dying of a relatively-curable illness.
The children were asked to jot down what being poor might mean for a person. John Adebola-Samuel, 12, quietly penned: “He cannot afford meals. He cannot buy trainers. He cannot watch TV.”Remember when you could go to a Scottish school and quote children called Hamish & Morag? Are there any left?
While Alston met Sturgeon, Karen Reid, 35, a single mother of four in the deprived Pilton neighbourhood - close to affluent Stockbridge and the elite Fettes College public school - told the Guardian how she last worked nine years ago, struggled with depression and once drank so heavily she suffered permanent nerve damage to her hands and feet.
Her disability allowance has been stopped, costing her family £600 a month.And relieving the taxpayer of having to support a workshy drunkard. Sounds like a good deal to me!
Alston is in Belfast on Saturday before finishing his tour in Essex and London. He will announce the conclusions of his investigation at a press conference on Friday.Don't bother. I can already predict what he'll say.
8 comments:
Poverty is now defined in terms of the country's average income and has not absolute definition.
I'd like to know where this expert would put Scotland and Venezuela on a scale of, say, 1 to 10 for relative poverty.
"It's not fair!" was always derided when I was young with, "Snot Fair? When's it on & shall we go?
That stopped the whining!
Reading this sort of crap always brings to mind the history of my father's family. My Grandmother, Elizabeth, was left a widow in 1933 when her huband died of the lasting effects of being gassed in WWI. My father was 12 years old and was one of 6 children. Elizabeth (who I only remember meeting once, when I was very young) took on three jobs to support her family. Absolute poverty ruled their lives. My father once described how, when he was Christmas shopping with his mother he found a £5 note caught in the tram-lines, something that made that Christmas most memorable to him.
The 5 boys all fought in WWII and all survived; there's one photograph of all of them in uniform when they all came home. All 6 went on in life to succeed in their various fields. All bar the youngest, are now deceased but their families, including me, are very well aware of from whence we come and the debt we owe to the perseverance, hard work and parental ability of that one lonely woman, Elizabeth Brown
Soroush can fuck off, frankly. My Mum grew up with her four siblings in one ground floor room with a curtain down the middle. Her Dad got up every day at the crack of dawn to improve their situation. Piss on your "relative poverty" you little whiny shit.
Clicking on the link to the original story was a mistake. Having given up on CiF a while back I'd forgotten what an extravaganza of mental illness the Graun is.
I alway say, yeah, I've seen poverty back as a kid when I lived in Salford, and it wasn't a two year-old colour TV and 'only' a Playstation and just one holiday abroad a year.
I recall a family of eight, living in a two-up two-down with newspaper on the windows instead of curtains, no carpets and two dining chairs for the parents to sit on while the kids sat on the bare floor. Kids who went to school in the same clothes, every day without fail (if it rained tough, they hadn't got coats) and when the parents ate the kids were locked out of the house. For them, a meal was trip to the local shop for a bag of broken biscuits.
Admittedly this was the early 'fifties so no TV though they might have had radio. Dunno. Never fancied going in even at age six to see.
But those people never had UN experts descending on them to find out. Those people were just poor whites so who cared?
"I'd like to know where this expert would put Scotland and Venezuela on a scale of, say, 1 to 10 for relative poverty."
Probably put Scotland higher! Venezuela, after all, is ruled by the 'right sort'.
"....but their families, including me, are very well aware of from whence we come and the debt we owe to the perseverance, hard work and parental ability of that one lonely woman, Elizabeth Brown"
Parenting is the issue in most cases of modern 'poverty'. Either a total lack of it, or the wrong sort.
"Soroush can fuck off, frankly. "
Indeed. Useful idiots are looking younger each day, like policemen.
"But those people never had UN experts descending on them to find out. Those people were just poor whites so who cared?"
Spot on!
Stengle. You just described my childhood
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