Child povety in Condem Britain as cuts begin to hit

Last Monday on BBc 1 there was a documentary shown called Poor Kids. these documentaries dont come on that often as we are distracted from the real reallities of what really goes on in parts of Britain today as the working class people realise the tories are back at the helm. Documentaries like this one shown last week are shown not because the ruling class wants the mass's to see such things but they are obliged to keep their state funding to show these sorts of programmes to remain somewhat balanced.
The programme was good and underneath i've placed the review of the documantary from our paper this week- the socialist which you can read more at www.socialistparty.org.uk

Three and a half million children in Britain live in poverty. The gap between rich and poor has never been greater. BBC One's "Poor Kids" filmed children in their homes and neighbourhoods and let them talk. What a sad, sickening picture of life in one of the richest countries in the world.

We're told we all have to tighten our belts; that we've all been profligate and now wasteful public spending has to be reined in.

We saw a boy who was bullied for wearing hand-me-down school clothes from his older sister, and a girl who had never had a holiday apart from a school trip to Scarborough. All the children filmed occasionally went without meals, and all of them were cold in the winter because their parents couldn't afford to properly heat their homes.

I normally hate programmes like this. we are very aware that our own children and many of their friends are in the poverty statistics, and I dread programmes that claim to show what it's really like. Aside from the fact that inevitably editorial decisions distort what we see, they also lift people out of their context. With very little commentary we are largely left to draw our own conclusions, and it would be very easy for some viewers to see these children's lives as the product of individual problem parents.

But that is clearly not the case. The statistics injected at various points in the programme showed that these children simply illustrate general conditions. When children talked about their asthma and eczema problems, we were told that poor children are two and a half times more likely to suffer chronic illnesses and 85% of children living in damp conditions suffer breathing problems.

What linked all the families shown was long-term unemployment. One was a single father, struggling to find work that would fit around childcare, while in his city five people chase every job. Officially, the poverty line for a family his size is £1,000 a month after housing costs. This family lived on £420 a month. The father explained that when he was in work their income was that amount a week.

Massive public sector cuts are going to make these conditions far worse. If the government realises its plans, job prospects are going to get much worse, benefits will fall, housing conditions worsen and access to decent children's services, limited as it already is, will be slashed. The happy ending for one child in the programme, when her damp block of flats was knocked down and her family was rehoused, is unlikely to be repeated for many children in this age of austerity.

In fact the people in the programme are the target of Con-Dem attacks. These are the 'scroungers' allegedly living in luxury at the expense of hard-working taxpayers.

The final statistics in the programme were probably the most devastating. On measures of child poverty, Britain comes 18 out of 22 European countries, with only Slovenia, Poland, Hungary and Italy worse. And child poverty is set to rise 11% over the next three years.

Of course the programme offered no solutions. It is up to the Socialist to provide that - to end the horrors of child poverty we must organise to defeat the cuts, and fight for a programme of full employment, and investment in decent housing and public services.


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In this issue


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Fighting the cuts

Strike 30 June

Workers tur

The pro's and con's to BBC's comic relief

So it is the time of year again where every celebrity with a record out in the charts or a new book to sell gets their ugly mug in front of the camara fora bit of publicity for waht is a good cause ultimatly.

Call my cynical in my not so old age but have we lost the meaning of things like Comic Relief and Children in need ? The format which hasnt changed for years focus's on certain parts of the world where people are dying or have problems getting by be that through disease or extreme povety.

As a socialist i need not remind people that the povety in the 3rd world as the capitalists like to call it even though we all do live in the same world even though you wouldnt know it sometimes. is all down to the obsurd system we live under called capitalism .

As Mahat Magandi rightly said we have enough on this planet for everyones need but not enough for everybody's greed. This is perfectly put i feel and strikes a chord with me and i hope you to. For years the western nations run charity projects like this there are so many from Oxfam to Children in Need even those that aim to cure crippling diseases like AIDS in Africa. The thing that gets me when i watch television charity fundraisers like this is how ridiculous our world is when we clearly do have the wealth and the means to abolish 3rd world povety by re addressing the balance of economic power handing the wealth to the many not the few but we never do.

People cry about how bad povety is yet capitalism still rules the way sadly. The only way we can eradicate povety in the world is by bringing abotu a socialist change a internationalisation of socialism which is not just a single socialist state which you might say Cuba is today socialism, for it to florish there must be a international solidarity feel to socialism this is where the CWI
Committee for a Workers' International
http://www.socialistworld.net/

comes about linking up socialism with lots of countries around the worlda nd spreading its word.

But going back to my original point showsl ike Comic Relief although highlighting the good work done by campaigners tryign to deal with povety it will only ever go so far. Our pledges of donations to these causes will only go so far it is a systematic change that needs to come about. Letting these countries play their part in the worlda and not having the West's trade restrictions holding them back.

I applaud every effort shows like Comic Relief make but we must remember to go further we must call for bigger change than just bigger donations.