Ian
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pm | | deserving poor to scroungers (26th Nov 12 at 6:55pm UTC) | | | William Beveridge paved the way for the welfare state 70 years ago. But do people now think more in terms of "scroungers" than the "deserving"? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20431729 | |
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Ian
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Ian
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Ian
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Ian
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pm | | Re: deserving poor to scroungers (12th Jan 13 at 10:36am UTC) | | A lifetime's journey from postwar hope to impotent rage
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/11/lifetime-postwar-hope-impotent-rage
As a middle-class, white, half-Welsh woman of 92, I was in on the birth of the social contract (Suzanne Moore, G2, 10 January). I am already struggling with impotent rage as I witness its bland destruction. I was a civil servant in London in 1942 when the Beveridge report came out. We read it all avidly as a heartening message of hope for a better future. Bombs had been falling mainly on docks, railways, industrial areas and the poorer parts of many towns. The blitz had revealed dramatically the appalling inequalities in British life. The wartime coalition government laid out the practical ways we should go forward in peace. We all voted in the landslide Labour government of 1945. Admittedly, many people assumed that Churchill would still be prime minister and were surprised that meek Mr Attlee was leading us into our brave new world. But he did.
My husband had survived years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, so the continuing food rationing seemed a feast to him. We had our first baby the year the wonderful new National Health Service began. I am told by an elderly doctor that we never could have afforded the NHS, we were more bankrupt then than we are now. It always had to be supported strongly by the government and wanted by the people.
I watched Frank Skinner recently on TV say that he thought the NHS was Britain's greatest invention and that was confirmed last summer with Danny Boyle's moving pageant. It seems a wicked irony that our bunch of ignorant millionaires, in two years, have sold off large parts of our dear NHS, not just to Americans, but to those very same rightwing insurance millionaires who fought so hard to prevent Obama's attempts to improve their own health service.
I've spent the last 50 years futilely protesting against nuclear weapons (starting with a small women's march in the rain in May 1957), assuming that our basic social contract was secure under any government, and voting Lib Dem at elections. I was so heartened by Danny Boyle and the 70,000 happy volunteers that I stupidly thought there might be some change of heart in central policies. So, still remembering those hopeful 1950s, where am I to put my failing energies now?
Anne Piper
Wytham, Oxfordshire | |
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Ian
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Ian
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Ian
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Ian
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Ian
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Ian
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Ian
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Ian
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Ian
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Ian
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howie
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pm | | Re: deserving poor to scroungers (8th Oct 13 at 6:39pm UTC) | | Wonder if Cooper managed 
Also, how did he manage to get more than me  | |
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Ian
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Ian
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