Poverty?

[Thomas]

I like the one about Waitrose helping the Middle classes to appreciate the taste of poverty by introducing a special new range of thrice cooked premium crisps at £3.99 a packet....they are called "Value brand spaghetti hoops and stale bread" flavour. You get a 50 pence piece for the lecky meter taped to the back!

ten bob for the lecky meter?

Hey deppity do you ever remember they tellys you put ten bob in the back ?

My grannie had one i shit you not , and every week the box was getting chibbed off the back to get the cash out of.

[DeppityDawg]

some great posts deppity , and a brilliant way of putting it.....canonising the poor.

Pretty much sums it up.

The underclass estates of glasgow and bristol are no different to anywhere else  , and as you know as i do , some people need a wee push  to get on in life , but many more love life in the gutter.

Poverty is a complicated issue of many contributing factors that exists everywhere in the world , but i stand by what i said yesterday , if you are going to be poor , scotland and england is the best place to be.

I like the one about Waitrose helping the Middle classes to appreciate the taste of poverty by introducing a special new range of thrice cooked premium crisps at £3.99 a packet....they are called "Value brand spaghetti hoops and stale bread" flavour. You get a 50 pence piece for the lecky meter taped to the back!

[Thomas]

I don't know about Scotland, but the poor in England would disagree with you, because of the hostile environment towards them by the government, the DWP and DWP contractors and JobCentre Plus.

maybe the government should give them a one way ticket to somalia or some such place and trade their poor for yours and have a wee comparison of what its like to not just be unable to afford the new playstation , but a roof over their heads and food to see what i mean.
"
You have a long record on these forums of "canonising the poor" and being over dramatic when talking about poverty and its definitions , so its nothing i havent heard before from you over the last ten years so save it pappy.

[papasmurf]

if you are going to be poor , scotland and england is the best place to be.

I don't know about Scotland, but the poor in England would disagree with you, because of the hostile environment towards them by the government, the DWP and DWP contractors and JobCentre Plus.

[Thomas]

I'm sorry I automatically went into Spiritual mode in that in the eyes of God we are all equal. We all have different talents and skills and we all have the ability to use or abuse them. So in that sense I believe we are all equal. Those who are able to create wealth have a duty (before God) to aid others but each one of us also has a duty to provide as far as possible for ourselves. That leaves the truly disabled/infirm/elderly in a position to be cared for properly by the rest of society. That is the concept that I feel is currently being undermined.

some great posts deppity , and a brilliant way of putting it.....canonising the poor.

Pretty much sums it up.

The underclass estates of glasgow and bristol are no different to anywhere else  , and as you know as i do , some people need a wee push  to get on in life , but many more love life in the gutter.

Poverty is a complicated issue of many contributing factors that exists everywhere in the world , but i stand by what i said yesterday , if you are going to be poor , scotland and england is the best place to be.

[Borg Refinery]

Fair point, it was Boris semi quoting and invoking Thatcher..

"
Johnson then told the Centre for Policy Studies think tank, which helped lay the basis for Thatcherism in the 1970s: "The harder you shake the pack the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top."

Johnson moved to associate himself with what were seen as the excesses of 1980s Thatcherism as he said: "I stress – I don't believe that economic equality is possible; indeed some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.""

https://www.cps.org.uk/blog/q/date/2013/11/29/is-greed-good/

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/27/boris-johnson-thatcher-greed-good

Well isn't he just too generous, not wanting to set fire to banknotes in front of the homeless. The poor sod is just too generous, we deserve better.

[Sheepy]

would still be the wealthiest entitled running the show and making a balls of it

Well, they usually do alright out of it, so they cannot be doing so badly in their eyes.

[Borchester]

Thatcher

you had Thatcher saying quite openly that "greed is good",
[/quote]

Actually she didn't. That was Gordon Gekko in the Lizard of Wall Street

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVxYOQS6ggk

[T00ts]

We are not all equal Toots, and we never will be. There will be people far more intelligent, or far less, than you or I. There are gifted athletes and there are the physically "challenged" (fat bastards  ). Each of us have our own strengths and weaknesses, and a part of getting on in life is recognising them

I know we've had this conversation numerous times, but my family definitely fell into the "disadvantaged" bracket. My old man was a docker, a heavily unionised industry at the time, and a typical big mouth about "industrial actions" and collective bargaining. I'm sure you can imagine the kind of bloke. He'd happily have been a shop steward if the branch had been stupid enough to make him one, but this is a man who frequently never came home on Friday night (pay day) and often left his family without food because he'd drunk or lost half his wage before Saturday morning came around. He might have been an extreme example, but shortcomings like his (and other vices and character defects) were not unusual on our estate. Drink, drugs, whores, gambling, theft, fighting, you name it. Its often said that these things are a "result" of poverty and lack of opportunity, but hand wringing liberals will NEVER observe how they also contribute to it

Dockers then didn't earn a fortune, but he earned enough to have a reasonable standard of living, and plenty did. If they could do it, why couldn't he? That's what I always asked myself before ever listening to the estate socialists who claimed the "bosses" had it in for us all.

I'm sorry I automatically went into Spiritual mode in that in the eyes of God we are all equal. We all have different talents and skills and we all have the ability to use or abuse them. So in that sense I believe we are all equal. Those who are able to create wealth have a duty (before God) to aid others but each one of us also has a duty to provide as far as possible for ourselves. That leaves the truly disabled/infirm/elderly in a position to be cared for properly by the rest of society. That is the concept that I feel is currently being undermined.

[DeppityDawg]

Looking at your island thing yeah probably right and the 10% would have a fair few who are good with their hands,fast forward a few hundred years though and find many of their descendants couldn't change a lightbulb and would still be the wealthiest entitled running the show and making a balls of it.

That is probably a fair bet too (and you know how I like a bet  ), but you'd also have an entrenched group with a victim mentality at the other end too. "Poverty", or what constitutes it in this case, is I guess an emotive subject. But you will always get people who "do" and people who "don't". My point was that if you "reset" everything, you'd eventually end up back where you started

The alternative is we follow the orthodoxy of "equality" (where all human beings are precious little souls who just need a chance), or worse, some form of rigid communism, where absolute uniformity is enforced on us all. For me anyway, there isn't much doubt that would lead to a miserable dystopian future far worse than we already have.

Anyway Ken Clarke. You know I'm a fascist and I'd have all you liberals transported to that desert island if I could 

[DeppityDawg]

At last the point has been made. Who knew it would be by you? For decades we have been persuaded that everyone is equal and yes we are but we are all different too.

We are not all equal Toots, and we never will be. There will be people far more intelligent, or far less, than you or I. There are gifted athletes and there are the physically "challenged" (fat bastards  ). Each of us have our own strengths and weaknesses, and a part of getting on in life is recognising them

I know we've had this conversation numerous times, but my family definitely fell into the "disadvantaged" bracket. My old man was a docker, a heavily unionised industry at the time, and a typical big mouth about "industrial actions" and collective bargaining. I'm sure you can imagine the kind of bloke. He'd happily have been a shop steward if the branch had been stupid enough to make him one, but this is a man who frequently never came home on Friday night (pay day) and often left his family without food because he'd drunk or lost half his wage before Saturday morning came around. He might have been an extreme example, but shortcomings like his (and other vices and character defects) were not unusual on our estate. Drink, drugs, whores, gambling, theft, fighting, you name it. Its often said that these things are a "result" of poverty and lack of opportunity, but hand wringing liberals will NEVER observe how they also contribute to it

Dockers then didn't earn a fortune, but he earned enough to have a reasonable standard of living, and plenty did. If they could do it, why couldn't he? That's what I always asked myself before ever listening to the estate socialists who claimed the "bosses" had it in for us all.

[cromwell]

I guessed that this thread would follow the familiar pattern of "cannonising" the poor into a single homogeneous mass of unfortunates who can do no wrong and are of course, all victims to the last man and woman.

Think of it this way. Imagine you put 1000 people chosen at random onto a remote (but habitable) island, gave them basic tools and implements and an equally divided method of exchange, and left them to their own devices for 50 years. In other words, they all began with equal wealth and opportunities. At the end of those 50 years, you could bet your house that 10% would own 50% of the wealth, and that the bottom 10% would blame everyone else for their position. That's not to say poverty is always self inflicted, it's an observation that "poverty" isn't always inflicted by others either.

Asking what actually constitutes poverty is a real good question Toots. Just that knowing what this forum is like, it's probably not the best place to ask 

Oh hello Don Juan you're back.......gone awhile,those decorations you were putting up was it Oxford St?
Looking at your island thing yeah probably right and the 10% would have a fair few who are good with their hands,fast forward a few hundred years though and find many of their descendants couldn't change a lightbulb and would still be the wealthiest entitled running the show and making a balls of it.

[Borg Refinery]

Well heck, I guess Gini coefficients don't stand for much then, and some countries aren't more equal than others, and we are all like Brazil or South Africa.. But I guess inequality is perfectly normal and ok in this country, you had Thatcher saying quite openly that "greed is good", and yet she went on to refute her own belief system in 1993 on television on Larry King saying she expected the rich to be more generous instead of hoarding their wealth. Many humans have lived in remarkably equal societies throughout history, never equal, but not anywhere near as inequal as the ones we see today. All of this history is whitewashed (literally..) and brushed under the carpet and revised so you never see any of it unfortunately,.





Looks like our country is more inequal than Greece, that takes some doing, but that's what years of Nu Labour and Tories have done to us.

Edit:

The um, red wall, the corn basket now sadly filled with corny politicians (that's a swear word now ..), seems to be a basket case of inequality. And yeah we have fattened incompetent top dogs in unaccountable positions of power (or ex positions of power), completely useless at everything and unable to do their jobs - In numerous positions -many of them rather corny and rhetorical with the extra flourish of 'helping' people. But the north south divide needs badly to be equalled out; because lots are suffering up there, and there is a huge brain drain too.

[papasmurf]

I guessed that this thread would follow the familiar pattern of "cannonising" the poor into a single homogeneous mass of unfortunates who can do no wrong and are of course, all victims to the last man and woman.

That is something I have never done. When I am certain, stress certain, someone or group of people are frauds, I report it and not anonymously, 100% track record, so far of being right.
Part of the current problem is middle class people who descend rapidly into poverty after a life changing event, which often drops their income to zero.
The majority of long term poor are very good at budgeting but only takes a small disaster to tip them into severe problems.

[T00ts]

I guessed that this thread would follow the familiar pattern of "cannonising" the poor into a single homogeneous mass of unfortunates who can do no wrong and are of course, all victims to the last man and woman.

Think of it this way. Imagine you put 1000 people chosen at random onto a remote (but habitable) island, gave them basic tools and implements and an equally divided method of exchange, and left them to their own devices for 50 years. In other words, they all began with equal wealth and opportunities. At the end of those 50 years, you could bet your house that 10% would own 50% of the wealth, and that the bottom 10% would blame everyone else for their position. That's not to say poverty is always self inflicted, it's an observation that "poverty" isn't always inflicted by others either.

Asking what actually constitutes poverty is a real good question Toots. Just that knowing what this forum is like, it's probably not the best place to ask 

At last the point has been made. Who knew it would be by you? For decades we have been persuaded that everyone is equal and yes we are but we are all different too.