Задание № 7 BRITISH STATISTICS BARE CREEPING POVERTY
by
William J. Pomeroy
London.
April 6
(By
airmail).- Studies made recently in Britain all point to the same conclusion:
poverty is steeply on the increase and the gap between higher and lower income
groups is steadily widening.
While
the wealthiest 1
percent
of the population have had their holdings diminished to some degree since World
War II,
the
concentration of riches in the hands of the following 9
percent
has actually increased: today three-quarters of total personal wealth is held by
the richest 10
percent,
while the poorest 50
percent
possess literally no savings.
Prof.
Peter Townsend, leading Labour theoretician on social welfare problems,
estimates that those with income within the poverty range number around
3,500,000
or
nearly 7
percent
of the population.
The
poverty range includes the long-term unemployed, old-age pensioners, the
disabled, and fatherless families, but the most-pertinent statistics are of
families in which the father is engaged in full-time work.
The
problem of rising child poverty (600,000
children)
has drawn much attention in recent years.
Those
suffering in officially-defined poverty (3,5
million)
are only a portion, however, of the people whose lives hover in deprivation. A
stady made in 1966
by
the Ministry of Social Security showed that in addition to those considered as
poverty-striken, there were more than twice as many whose incomes were less than
$-
5 above
the official poverty line. This would bring the total of very poor to over
10
million,
or about 20
percent
of the population.
Some
of the worst off are the old-age pensioner?. Such social security pensions in
Britain average between $
6 to
$ 12
per
week which is about one-fifth of the average industrial wage.
Over
half of old people live alone in miserable rooms, with incomes that cannot be
stretched to cover food, rent and heat. It
is
estimated that nearly 40,000
old
people die each winter from lack of heal
In
the British economy there is a sharply increasing tendency to push people
into retirement, which is a policy of helping to
finance
a higher paid class in 1919 only 47
percent
of men retired at 65,
but
in 1969 the number jumped to 70 percent.
Other
studies reveal that price rises of 8
percent
a year in Britain hit the poor harder than the rich. Between 1955
and
1966
prices
on items bought by the poor increased by 4
3 percent
more than prices on items bought by the rich. The price rises were highest of
all, proportionately, for the pensioner.
These
trends have been studied for the years of the last Labour government. Under the
present Tory government the tendencies are infinitely worse. Unemployment, by
deliberate policy, has gone up by around 200,000
since
the Tories took office last June, and now stands at nearly
800,000:
it
is generally forecast to hit one million by the end of the year.
The
Tory government also deliberately fosters price rises while at the same time
slashing social welfare items (such as eliminating free milk in schools and
increasing the price of school meals). (Daily World, 1971)
