The Poor

Jesus said there will always be poor people, and of course he is right. The simple truth is, in what ever society there are winners and losers, even within socialist countries there are poor people and rich people. Karl Marx wrote about communism and probably dreamed of a more equal society, but of course as we all know the reality is totally different from the dream. But this does not mean that those of us who are rich should ignore the poor, it does say in The Bible that to ignore poverty, and injustice is a sin. Within every country there are rich and poor and of course if you compare our western society to the third world we are rich, but that does not mean there are not poor in this country, it is all relative.

I believe we should all do our little bit, whatever that is. I could write about; buying fair trade and supporting charities, helping your next door neighbour or traveling to a poor country and working. I could write about many things to do with poverty but I wanted to focus on something which maybe you haven't thought about.

In every town and city you will find areas that are poor, within these areas (and lets be honest they are usually council estates)you will find drug problems, crime, single parents, and problem families. If you go to an estate which has large private houses, you will generally find these places do not have the problems council estates have, that is the simple truth. Within my town of Diss (a relatively quiet rural town of about 7500 people) we have what is called the Taylor Road estate, this is an area of council and ex council housing which has lots of social needs and my church is working on this estate to help those in need. You only have to travel about 1 minute to an estate which has lovely big detached houses and no real social problems.

Over the years I have sat and listened to many people, whether that is politicians, councillors, social workers, charity workers, youth workers, etc talking about the need to help the poor, and I believe we need to. The problem is I think we have been going about it the wrong way. Gordon Brown said he wanted to eradicate child poverty, you can't argue with that, they are great aspirations, and being a Minister in Government gave him the opportunity to do something about it. But as we can see after all those years in power he created an underclass that does not know what it is like to go to work. There are many people in this country who get more money for not working than working, so of course they don't work.

What I have always found interesting is that those who are the decision makers in our society usually come from quite good backgrounds. You only have to look at the Prime Minister (educated at Eton) and Deputy Prime Minister(educated at a private school which cost £23,000 a year) to make you realise that those who sit in power have generally never known what it is like to be poor. I am not criticising them for this but I do believe this can create problems because they have no real understanding of the problem.

One of the ways I believe people can better themselves is through education, (if you want to see what I think about our education system please go and look at a previous post written in May). And I believe the destruction of our grammar schools has been one of the worse policies ever created. Many politicians who did not go to private schools had the opportunity to be educated at a grammar school, and through this where able to better themselves. We now have the situation in which many bright children will never have that opportunity. Many people have argued over the years about equality and social mobility and have then thought about the best way of bringing this about is by setting targets for universities to take those from state schools. This to me sounds completely daft as you then reduce the quality of the intake to meet some target set be central Government. I do find it ironic and incredibly hypocritical that one of the great advocates for equality, social mobility and the destruction of grammar schools was Harriet Harmen who was educated at a private school and sends her two children to St. Paul's independent school for girls.

One of the reasons I am against the destruction of grammar schools is that generally those who have the money can either send their children to a private school or move to an area which has a good state school. This means those on low income are educated in the worse schools which means they don't get a good education and carry on the cycle of poverty. I would like to cover this in greater depth but I also want to quickly look at another issue to do with the subject of the poor.

If you have read my blog before you will know that I do not agree with the policy of mass immigration, I do not want to go over old ground but I want to quickly look at this issue in regards to the poor.

Mass immigration has brought huge social problems within our society and many people are not affected, but many people are, usually the poorest within our society, so I am going to quickly look at some issues here and then at a later date look at them in greater detail.

JOBS
Many people have argued that mass immigration has been good for our economy, this has been shown over the years to be nonsense. The majority of immigrants who come to this country are unskilled so they do the jobs that the poor would traditionally have done, they are willing to work for a low wage, and employers love this, so employ many immigrants rather than British people. British people cannot afford to work in the factories and less skilled jobs, this then creates a downward cycle of poverty. An MP, doctor, lawyer, etc does not have these problems(I have covered this issue in greater depth in an earlier post).

HOUSING
Immigrants generally live on council estates or those estates with greater social needs, I would think it is highly unlikely that an immigrant family is living in a nice middle class housing estate. This of course puts more pressure on local housing stock, thus affecting the poor who can neither afford to buy a house or rent somewhere, they are then left to live in the worse houses, this continues the cycle of poverty. In conjunction with this, many areas which have a lot of immigrants has seen the number of multi occupancy housing increase, this then puts added pressure on local services; health clinics, hospitals, social services, etc.

SCHOOLS
I have covered this above, but I wanted to add this, as I have said above, most immigrants live in the poorer areas. They then send their children to the local school which they are entitled to do, this then means that those schools end up with more pupils who cannot speak English which then puts more pressure on the teachers. This then means the time given to every other pupil is then reduced, thus bringing down the standard of education. I have mentioned in a previous post about a school in Peterborough which has as many as 27 languages spoken in it. There is of course the added expense of employing a teacher or teaching assistant who can speak Polish for example, as has happened in my sons school.

CRIME
As you can imagine crime affects the poorest and most vulnerable the most, as most people who commit crime live in the poorest areas. It is highly unlikely that an area of extreme wealth will have a drug problem. There are some estates in the UK which fire crews do not go onto without a police escort, those who are wealthy do not have these problems. Again this is not a criticism of those with money, but I do think this can create problems as those who live on these estates have no real understanding of societies problems. I was watching a programme last night in which a man was arrested for stealing a brand new car from someones drive, he was fined £100, given a 3 month suspended sentence, and 120 hours community service. This to me is not a deterrent to criminals; crime will increase unless criminals are given proper sentences in proper prisons.

The issue of the poor is a massive subject, and over the years I have watched successive governments try to do something to improve the situation. I believe that unless these issues and many others are tackled head on we will continue to see the problems gets worse. I haven't covered the issue of family breakdown and fatherless children, which is a huge subject within itself. I believe these issues need to be debated, I believe that those in power need to start listening to peoples concerns and stop accusing them of being bigoted or extremists. I think it would do many of our; MP's, councillors, judges, lawyers, top council wage earners and those who set policy some good if they went and lived with their families on one of our problem housing estates for 3 months or more. It might make them realise the size of the problem, and they might then have some understanding of the pressure so many people live under.