In 70s I’d see Dickensian squalor, kids who’d never get a decent meal... and it’s still with us today
ON HIS TIME AS A SOCIAL WORKER
explains: “I had a lovely childhood and was really lucky. I had a big extended family and all of them were characters.
“I came from a big family of sailors and they’d come back from America with all these American comics and kids’ LPs and wine gums.
“But I went to school with some extremely poor kids. The thing with child poverty is that it’s not just about getting a decent meal – they don’t get to go to the cinema, to the theatre, to the fair. Christmas is miserable. It’s shocking and they get bullied because of this. Kids say ‘you’re a smelly kid’, a ‘filthy kid’ – I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Kids are cruel.”
And, after visiting a food bank with the Salvation Army in 2016, Paul saw how hard life was for their parents, too.
He says: “Most of the women who came in had jobs. There was one woman who had a cleaning job. At 5am, she’d go out cleaning and get back to take the kids to school and then she had another job. She still doesn’t make ends meet and she was humiliated at having to go to a food bank. She had two boys and she saw herself as a bad mother and that was obviously affecting her mental health.
“Working class people are proud and asking for help breaks their heart.”
The trouble, says Paul, is poverty is often cheek by jowl with extreme wealth, especially in the capital.
He says: “You come out of the food bank and across the road there are luxury apartments being built. In places like Tower Hamlets you have these fabulous flats on the corner of the street and you go a bit further down and there’s shocking old flats from the 60s, falling to bits.
“Meanwhile, down the road, there’s a kid who has only one change of clothes and hasn’t eaten. They’ve been forced into extreme poverty by these dreadful benefit cuts.” 1. Sign the Daily Mirror’s petition asking Prime Minister Boris Johnson to increase child benefit: Go to megaphone.org.uk/petitions/ increase-the-child-benefit-immediately
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