Children in Poverty

The number of children in “severe poverty” went up by 260,000 to 1.7 million between 2004 and 2008. This is 13 percent of Britain’s children.

The Save the Children charity produced the report.

It defines those living in households with less than the average income, who do not have basics such as a bed and a winter coat, as suffering from severe poverty.

 

In Scotland the rise has spiked beyond the national average and government agencies are flapping in this election year. The recession has only added to the burden, there are families who have to decide between heating their homes or feeding their kids.

 

The Labour government are still banging on about trying to create a ‘classless’ society which it absolute drivel to the people who live in an area like Drumchapel in Glasgow- where the age expectancy can be as low as 55 years of age and yet fifteen streets away in leafy Bearsden the age expectancy can be as high as 76 years of age.

 

There is no more evidence of a class system that that statistic.

 

Mini mansions with outdoor swimming pools and three cars in the drive way is the norm in Bearsden, children attend private schools and enjoy a more balanced lifestyle than their Drumchapel counterparts.

 

Labour minister Harriet Harman has been paying lip service with her anger towards the ‘unfairly privileged’. Yet Gordon Brown has always advocated aspiration, and now wants to punish the very people he encouraged to ‘get rich’. The Labour Party are suffering from an identity crisis, they want the money grabbing attributes of the Conservatives but cant deal with the guilt of the greediness it brings.

At least Thatcher never turned shamefaced at the greed is good mantra.

 

Any country that lives in a free dynamic economy will always have some people getting richer but where it becomes an issue is when the poor inevitably get poorer and the wealth stays unfairly distributed.

 

The welfare dependency in the UK is reaching peak numbers, Labour has fashioned a system which basically created a form of permanent poverty and there seems no end to it this year.

 

It is hardly surprising that the British National Party are gaining seats in some constituencies. With a climate of fear surrounding discussing immigration and an overburdened welfare system, people turn to a party who advocates sending home immigrants. The BNP represent everything that is vile to me as a human being, yet they are gathering strength as poor people who are struggling to buy winter shoes for their children are under the illusion that more immigrants are being housed and supported by the UK tax payers. This doesn’t sit well with people who need reassured that ‘their’ needs are being met first and foremost by ‘their’ government.

 

In actual fact the majority of immigrants who come to the UK are taking the lower paid jobs that the average British worker won’t take, but the climate of fear and poverty is being manipulated to suit some politician’s needs.

 

The UK is paying for a war which is basically illegal in my opinion, yet it cannot feed its own poor children. These latest findings will send a warning shot to Gordon Brown, but I believe the Conservatives will use it in their election propaganda but deliver nothing when and if they get to power.

 

As always it’s the hungry, poor and disenfranchised that suffer in today’s Britain.