Keir Starmer should reflect seriously on Frances Ryan’s article (The Tories have created a new poverty – one so deep and vicious it requires Victorian vocabulary, 24 October) before committing the Labour party to adopting this government’s approach to fiscal responsibility, which – as the new Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s research has shown – has doubled the number of people living in destitution in the past five years to 3.8 million, including more than 1 million children.
As an earlier editorial (31 August) advocated, there is a comprehensive, equitable and morally just case for introducing an “essentials guarantee” into the benefits system. This would lift children out of destitution and poverty, which – as Sir Michael Marmot’s review comprehensively evidenced – seriously damages their health, education and welfare, incurring both short- and longer-term personal and economic costs.
An essentials guarantee would also restore their human entitlement to dignity, which has been denied them by high levels of dependency on charity for food, clothes, warmth and bedding, as Ryan describes. Winning byelections should provide the Labour party leadership with a platform for addressing injustice and inequality, not colluding with the economics underpinning the Conservatives’ failed social policies.
Prof Mike Stein
University of York
• While Frances Ryan writes of the Victorian images that are conjured up by the destitution that haunts Britain in 2023, it is Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s analysis from the Edwardian era that reflects in a most chilling way what we see today.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Webbs wrote of the role that voluntary agencies had taken on to compensate for a lack of state protection against the many risks that afflicted poorer people. Food banks are clearly playing a similar role today in helping those whose circumstances are desperate and for whom there is inadequate or nonexistent support from the state.
What the Webbs advocated as an alternative strategy, to prevent rather than relieve destitution, was a state-backed “national minimum” underpinning a basic standard of living and upon which charities could play a supplementary role in helping people build toward a higher standard of living.
Such a strategy today would entail food banks developing into more cooperative models, like pantries or social supermarkets, which make life more manageable and enjoyable for people, as opposed to the constant grind of crisis or emergency food parcels made necessary by the absence of a national minimum.
Andrew Forsey
National director, Feeding Britain
• Frances Ryan’s litany of state deprivations is sadly all too accurate. However, the quite rightly dreaded Victorian workhouses (following the 1834 New Poor Law), though stigmatising and no doubt traumatising their residents, did house, clothe, bed and feed the most desperate Victorian poor.
Before Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1536, the church dispensed a level of basic poor relief and social care. Under the 1572 Vagabonds Act, vagrants were whipped and bored through the ear. The 1601 Poor Law banned begging on pain of punishment by whipping and being returned to your place of birth, where you would be subject to the vagaries of parish provision.
In the modern Tory state, those thrust upon hard times have scant recourse to even Dickensian levels of care. The feckless government response amounts to an official policy of truly Tudor standards of calculated depravity.
Austen Lynch
Garstang, Lancashire
• My grandfather, born in 1882 in Hampshire, where workhouses still flourished, remembered being so hungry as a little boy that he would dig a swede out of the frozen fields to gnaw on during the cold two-mile winter walk to school in the next village.
I used to tell my children about that when they were being picky about their food, trying to make them realise how lucky they were to live in a world transformed for the better in just three generations.
Now, reading Frances Ryan’s searing piece, I am weeping angry tears for the million children of this affluent first-world nation for whom the world never got better but is still, disgracefully, a place of Dickensian deprivation.
Alexandra Smithies
Oban, Argyll and Bute
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