An insult to our national intelligence
EVEN if you’ve never read a word of Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist, you’re probably familiar with the scene when little Oliver, ‘ desperate with hunger and reckless with misery’, dares to approach the workhouse boss, Mr Bumble, to ask for more.
His reward is not a bowl of gruel, but a savage blow on the head with a ladle. Such was life at the bottom in Dickens’s Britain, where millions lived in filth, disease and grinding poverty, with virtually no help from the state and no chance of escape.
According to the UN report by Philip Alston, pictured below, such is life at the bottom in Britain today.
The findings were based on a visit here lasting precisely 11 days. Most of us have had longer holidays. And although we do have too many pockets of poverty for comfort, the comparison with the Victorian era is so absurd as to be worthless.
In Victorian times, millions of men, women and children lived in conditions that are hard to imagine today. On the streets of London, one reformer estimated there were 30,000 ‘naked, filthy, roaming, lawless and deserted children’, with no homes, no families and no prospect of escaping poverty.
Indeed, as Charles Kingsley, the author of The Water Babies, put it, many people lived among ‘narrow, brawling torrents of filth and poverty and sin’, more akin to the slums of the world’s poorest and most dangerous countries than to modernday Birmingham, Manchester or Glasgow.
Today’s politicians often talk of a 21st century housing crisis. Yet in mid-19th century London the reeking slums were so overcrowded that as many as 30 people would share a single room. ONE
journalist wrote in 1859: ‘Tyndall’s buildings is a court containing 22 houses. The basement storey of nearly all [of them] was filled with foetid refuse, of which it had been the receptacle for years.
‘In some, it seemed scarcely possible that human beings could live: The floors were in holes, the stairs broken down, and the plastering had fallen… In one, the roof had fallen in: It was driven in by a tipsy woman one night, who sought to escape over the tiles from her husband.’ And there was worse. Sanitation was simply appalling: As the investigative journalist Henry Mayhew reported, many poor Londoners drank water from the local ditch, into which they also emptied their waste and effluent.
‘As we gazed in horror at it,’ Mayhew wrote, ‘we saw drains and sewers emptying their filthy contents into it; we saw a whole tier of doorless privies in the open road, common to men and women, built over it; we heard bucket after bucket of filth splash into it.’
For those in work, conditions were hellish. In the great coalfields of the North, children often started work at the age of four, dragging carts on their hands and knees for 16 hours a day. Boys and girls were beaten until they could not stand. When falling debris severed one poor little boy’s toe, his
loader insisted that he continue working ‘ in the greatest pain’. Pregnant women were expected to be back at work in the mines within days of giving birth.
There was, of course, no recognisably modern welfare state, while medical standards were terrifying. At the beginning of Victoria’s reign, about 7,000 people died from tuberculosis every year, while one in five children died before the age of five. FOR
most people, illness and unemployment were near-fatal calamities. In state-run workhouses, established in 1834 as homes for the destitute, conditions were deliberately harsh.
Inmates were condemned to backbreaking jobs such as grinding bones for fertiliser, while boys like Oliver Twist were beaten with rods if they broke the infamously strict rules. Desperate to retain their independence, many girls, like Oliver’s friend Nancy, resorted to selling their bodies instead. Some historians think there were as many as 80,000 prostitutes on the streets of Victorian London, risking their health every night in the cold and rain, among them thousands of teenagers.
By these standards, does today’s Britain look so bad?
Yes, we have problems and we should never allow ourselves to be complacent.
But you’d never guess from the UN report that in reality, Britain is one of the richest countries in the world, with near-full employment, a generous welfare state and a comprehensive health service free at the point of use.
In this context, to claim that we are returning to the conditions Dickens described is simply ridiculous. And I suspect most ordinary people will see the UN report for what it is: Not just a waste of time and money, but an insult to our national intelligence.