The truth of what we are
Shows us but this. I am sworn brother, sweet,
To grim necessity, and he and I
Will keep a league till death. William Shakespeare, Richard II V i 19-22, Richard to Queen
If they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely; but they think we are too dear; the leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularise their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them. Let us revenge this with our pikes ere we become rakes; for the gods know, I speak this in hunger for bread not in thirst for revenge. William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, first citizen
The miners are not broken – they continue to fight; their destiny is in your hands. An embargo on blackleg coal and a levy on all workers must be adopted to save the miners from defeat.
And to the miners who are fighting I say: Every honest worker in the world admires your courage and loyalty in the fight which was forced upon you by the rapacious mine-owners, who have at their service the banks, the press and the resources of the press. A J Cook, foreword to The Miners Struggle and the Big Five Banks
You know as well as I do the terrible conditions in the coalfields, and the suffering of the women and children. I have been compelled to do the most unpleasant tasks of begging for food, money, boots, and cast-off clothing. Practically every day young men, stranded, call for food, clothing and shelter at my office. I have done my best for them. Every day the post brings letters to me and Mrs Cook begging for help, especially from expectant mothers, terrible epistles of agony and despair.
I have heard their cry for help, and have done all I can to give assistance. I have helped all I can, begged all I can, till I have been almost demented and in despair, because I hate charity and reliefs which make us all beggars ...
I now want remedies instead of relief. The more poverty increases, the more our people sink into despair and become the hopeless prey of all the most reactionary influences and movements. A J Cook, open letter to Arthur Horner
According to the World Health Organisation 4,000,000 children under the age of five die each year from respiratory diseases caused by indoor smoke. And many millions of women die early from cancer and lung disease for the same reason. No refrigeration or modern packaging means that food cannot be kept. The fire in the hut is too smoky and consumes too much wood to be used as heating. There is no hot water. We in the West cannot begin to imagine how hard life is without electricity. Martin Durkin, The Great Global Warming Swindle
If you were to ask a rural person to define development they’ll tell you yes, I will move to the next level when I have electricity. Actually not having electricity creates such a long chain of problems because the first thing you miss is the light. So you forget that they have to go to sleep earlier because there’s no light; there’s no reason to stay awake. You can’t talk to each other in darkness. James Shikwati, economist & author
The pavement and the road are crowded with purchasers and street-sellers. The housewife in her thick shawl, with the market-basket on her arm, walks slowly on, stopping now to look at the stall of caps, and now to cheapen a bunch of greens. Little boys, holding three or four onions in their hand, creep between the people, wriggling their way through every interstice, and asking for custom in whining tones, as if seeking charity. Then the tumult of the thousand different cries of the eager dealers, all shouting at the top of their voices, at one and the same time, is almost bewildering. ‘So-old again,’ roars one. ‘Chestnuts all ’ot, a penny a score,’ bawls another. ‘An 'aypenny a skin, blacking,’ squeaks a boy. ‘Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy – bu-u-uy!’ cries the butcher. ‘Half-quire of paper for a penny,’ bellows the street stationer. ‘An ’aypenny a lot ing-uns.’ ‘Twopence a pound grapes.’ ‘Three a penny Yarmouth bloaters.’ ‘Who’ll buy a bonnet for fourpence?’ ‘Pick ’em out cheap here! three pair for a halfpenny, bootlaces.’ ‘Now’s your time! beautiful whelks, a penny a lot.’ ‘Here’s ha’p’orths,’ shouts the perambulating confectioner. ‘Come and look at ’em! Here’s toasters!’ bellows one with a Yarmouth bloater stuck on a toasting-fork. ‘Penny a lot, fine russets,’ calls the apple woman: and so the Babel goes on.' Henry Mayhew, Victorian social essay
The tenants cannot now ask for repairs, for a decent water-supply, or for the slightest boon in the way of improvement. They must put up with dirt, and filth, and putrefaction; with dripping walls and broken windows: with all the nameless cedents, were they known, would make a careful householder nervous about asking them into his hall if there were any coat and umbrella about. George R Sims, Legislation Wanted, Not Almsgiving
We walk along a narrow dirty passage, which would effectually have stopped the Claimant had he come to this neighbourhood in search of witnesses, and at the end we find ourselves in what we should call a back-yard, but which, in the language of the neighbourhood, is a square. The square is full of refuse; heaps of dust and decaying vegetable matter lie about here and there, under the windows and in front of the doors of the squalid tumble-down houses. The windows above and below are broken and patched; the roofs of these two-storied eligible residences look as though Lord Alcester had been having some preliminary practice with his guns here before he set sail for Alexandria. All these places are let out in single rooms at prices varying from 2s. 6d to 4s. a week. We can see a good deal of the inside through the cracks and crevices and broken panes, but if we knock at the door we shall get a view of the in-habitants. George R Sims, How the Poor Live, and Horrible London
The poor are set to labour – for what? Not the food for which they famish; not the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels; not those comforts of civilisation without which civilised man is far more miserable than the meanest savage – no: for the pride of power, for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of one hundredth part of society.
Employments are lucrative in inverse ratio to their usefulness. The jeweller, the toyman, the actor gains fame and wealth by the exercise of his useless and ridiculous art; whilst the cultivator of the earth, he without whom society must cease to exist, struggles through contempt and penury, and perishes by that famine which, but for his unceasing exertions, would annihilate the rest of mankind. Percy Bysshe Shelley, notes to Queen Mab
The new face of poverty: hard working families struggling to make ends meet. And how millions of families are missing out on Britain’s economic recovery. Tonight: The Rise of the Working Poor, ITV 2014
There are 1.4 million minimum-wage jobs in Britain. ibid.
Tonight – struggling to make ends meet on low pay. The families forced to make heartbreaking decisions. Britain’s low-pay hotspots, and the companies named and shamed ... Almost six million working people are still struggling to survive on low pay in Britain today. Tonight: Does Work Pay? ITV 2015
How close are you to food poverty? Communities fighting back. Families on the brink. And are foodbanks really part of the solution? … Britain is one of the world’s richest nations but it now has more foodbanks than ever before as well as an ongoing debate about how to ensure the nation’s children are properly fed … Now there are more than 2,000. Tonight: On the Breadline: Foodbank Britain? ITV 2021
Kids in poverty: Britain’s shame. Families struggling … Children needing clothes, food and having to share their beds might sound like something from the inner city slums of a bygone era but is the sad reality for many children in modern Britain. Tonight: Kids in Poverty: Britain’s Shame, ITV 2024
There’s too much money here. Nobody should be hitting the Lotto for thirty-six million when we got people starving in the streets. That’s just not idealistic. That’s just rape. That’s just stupid. Tupac Shakur, The Killuminati Theory
One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That’s the American ideal. Poor people don’t like talking about poverty because even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor people and have, like, ten dollars in the bank, they don’t like to think of themselves as poor. Jay-Z
The burden of poverty isn’t just that you don’t always have the things you need, it’s the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you’d do anything to lift that burden. Jay-Z
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. James A Baldwin
Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness. George Bernard Shaw
The greatest of our evils and the worst of our crimes is poverty ... our first duty, to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor. George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara
We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us. We have not yet reached the goal, but, given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, and we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation. Herbert Hoover 20th August 1928
Poverty kills. Professor Peter Townsend
cf.
We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet. Ronald Reagan, TV speech 27th October 1964
The United States has some of the best programs and laws in the world to protect its children but, as Unicef has pointed out the US also has one of the highest rates of the industrialized countries for poverty and hunger among children and also for child mortality. A recent story in the Washington Post noted that ‘despite this time of record prosperity, one in every six American children is poor; one in three children of colour. No other developed country has anything approaching US child poverty rates’. Mary Robinson, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2001