I don't know what poverty is any more, or at least I don't know how everyone else measures it these days. When I was a child I thought that we had it bad, there was always somone else who had more than us, yet my bestest mate while growing up came to my mothers funeral & told me how she fed him when his family had nothing in the pantry.
If we have never had it so good, how come I hear first hand that a lot of my friends wives are now involved in food banks rather than doing a few hours at the mental health charity shop?
Has the stairway to heaven moved from a High St charity shop to a shed behind the library?
I think that what I most want someone in political power to tell me, is why my mate who has terminal cancer, has to mention to his mates, that dealing with the system & getting his benefits takes up most of his time? We wheeled him out this Sunday lunchtime to talk our ****** & sort out the world & all he could do was moan & whinge about how long he's on the phone because one dept' doesn't know what the other dept' is doing & 40mins on hold, 4x a day, is time that adds up to a bloke who wants to take his dog & his beautiful grandaughter a walk before he can longer manage it.
Tell me how one branch of our civil service can tell him he has between 8 & 18mths to live & another branch insists he drives 15mls to a work assesment interview?
WTF has happened to this world full of pish & gobshoites that stand on a pedestal & tell me that everything will be better tommorrow . . . .
Great post.
Statistics and graphs mask the human side of poverty and the current toxic climate of benefits, PIP assessments and universal credit.
This country would be a better place if people looked beyond the Daily Mail blaming it all on 'benefit cheats' and had the courage to have a quick read of the endless stories people with terminal cancer that have to wait 6 or 8 weeks for any universal credit payment.