Equality?

I found this item online: https://theconversation.com/food-poverty-agony-of-hunger-the-norm-for-many-children-in-the-uk-116216?fbclid=IwAR1VclzXXoOp4WUMDo5sph1562i9V-K0OceYDqEM5A3ua7s3jW6cTSSad0w

It's by an academic at the university of Kent (yes, it has poverty too) and it's worth a read. Some of us know what poverty is. I'm told my family was part of the 'urban poor' 60 years ago, except we didn't know it. We thought we were just like everybody else. We had crap houses but we had jobs and we certainly had enough to eat.

Later, as a teacher, I worked in the area of Glasgow I used to live in. That was in the 1970s. Again, the parents of my pupils were part of the 'urban poor'. Jobs were scarcer but no one went hungry. We had the welfare state - never referred to then as 'welfare' or as 'benefits.'

So what has happened? How have we reached the point where 4.1 million children are living in poverty in the UK, with kids stealing left-over food at school to take home for later?

The first clue is Thatcherism. Tebbit told us that people without work should get 'on their bike' and go looking for work, obviously not realising that the working class has been doing that for centuries.

My family seems to have wandered from Ayrshire to Dundee to Leith to the St Rollux Works in Springburn and the shipyards of Govan, with some of them emigrating to Canada for work. This wandering, of course, leads to the family being split up: my 3 times great grandmother married twice and had 9 children but when she got too old to work, none of her kids could take her in and she spent her last years in the poorhouse at St Leonard's in Leith.

Now we have a Tory government. Its policies would be beyond belief to my parents and grandparents. Austerity only seems to hit the working poor, keeping wages down, and victimising (I choose the word carefully) those least able to fight back: the disabled and the unemployed - and now the old.

The Tories started talking about the old before the last general election: pensioners had had a good run, they said, with lots of extras like bus passes, a fuel allowance and a pension that rose as the cost of living did. That would have to stop. The outcry was huge: the UK already has one of the lowest retirement pensions in the developed world and the Tories wanted to take away more benefits?

Now the Tories are back on the case.

I have no axe to grind on the subject of the state pension. I don't get a state pension. Well, on paper I do. I have a work pension that I paid into for 35 years but it just so happens that the income tax (no, you don't stop paying income tax just because you retire) is the same amount as the state pension, so all those years from 15 to 60 when I paid into a state pension were wasted - and, worse, I suffer the insult of being told my state pension (which I don't get, remember) amounts to a 'benefit.'  No wonder my great-aunt Agnes saved up half crowns and stuffed them in her mattress.

Last week, I happened to hear a talk about tax on BBC Radio 4. I was in the kitchen searching the freezer for something to tempt my appetite (I'm in a CFS crisis right now and really nothing looks appetising). There was talk of how the top earners in the UK object to the idea of raising income tax for them from £450,000 to £700,000 a year. There was also some talk of people who might have to pay £4,000 a year in national insurance contributions.

I had so many questions: how many 'top earners' are we talking about here? How much are they actually earning? How much do you have to earn to pay £4,000 a year in national insurance contributions?

The word millions was bandied about. The name of Alan Sugar came up. I would so like to know what the top earners do with their earnings. Do they re-invest their cash, thus bringing jobs and prosperity to the UK? How many houses, cars and yachts does one person need?

How much money do any of us actually need in a lifetime? I promise you this isn't jealousy. I don't envy the rich - I don't even think about them. I've never had the money-making gene, but I do my best with what money I have and I don't plan to leave a lot. I hate the idea of these old biddies who die leaving a few million to an animal charity when they could have done a lot of good in the community in their lifetime. So I'll keep on giving to the Scottish Greens and the South West Glasgow Foodbank and occasionally to fundraisers. But I really want the rich to think of something other than how to hang on to their cash.