People who are reared by their grandparents tend to have the attitudes of that generation.
In the main, I was brought up by my mother’s parents, and they did an excellent job at the parenting thing the second time around.
They had reared a family of four through the tough times of the Great Depression in an environment of institutionalised bigotry and anti-Irish racism.
What they consider to be the good old days down Ibrox way.
One of my earliest memories in terms of intergenerational learning was my maternal grandfather telling me that we were indeed fortunate as we had a dinner to eat every single day.
Looking back at it now, I realise that was because he had grown up in an age of genuine poverty and food insecurity.
The other side of the house was in my beloved County Mayo.
On summer holidays, my paternal grandmother, Cumann na mBan veteran, would speak of the fight against the Tans but wouldn’t say a word about An Gorta Mór.
Even as a young strap, I knew what the Brits had inflicted on us in Black 47 and how Mayo, above all other counties, had suffered terribly.
Yet, she would change the subject when I brought up An Gorta Mór.
As an adult with a post-grad in psychotherapy to my name, I had a grasp of what inter-generational trauma can do to people.
She was convinced to her last breath that it was right to fight the British.
When the Brits controlled the whole of this island, a million starved while we exported food to Britain.
It is that genocidal crime that they find so hilarious at Ibrox.
Everyone anyone…
We still do not have the same population on this island that we had in 1840.
It was the next generation that propelled the liberation struggle, which is why these words blink to life in a part of Ulster that is not under Westminster’s rule.
In the era of Harold Wilson et al., my politically engaged shop steward grandfather often said, “No one goes to bed hungry in this country”.
It was like a statement to his earlier self.
He was reminding himself that things HAD got better.
I reckon that it was my grandfather’s settled view as he observed the building blocks of the new post-war welfare state that food poverty was now a matter of history and not a contemporary problem for his young grandson ever to contend with.
For the first half of the 1990s, I was a frontline social worker in two of the most deprived areas of Glasgow.
In the Deprivation Olympics, my operational area was right up there with anything else on the island of Britain.
I know for a fact that there is no such entity as a foodbank in existence on my patch.
Occasionally, through my colleagues in the home help section, I had to organise a food parcel for a family that had no money to buy food.
In such instances, some underlying cause had always created that situation.
It was that somehow household income had been swallowed up by feeding an addiction rather than their children.
This was because even people on basic welfare benefits had more than enough money to buy adequate food.
Consequently, the very idea of widespread food insecurity in a developed economy like Britain was simply unthinkable.
Then, today, I looked at this.
Professor Sir Michael Marmot lays it all out with quiet authority, and this seems to be the key point:
“Essentially, Britain has become a poor country with a few rich people, and at the very poor end of the distribution, it’s worse to be poor in Britain than most other European countries. Poor people in Britain have a lower income than Slovenia. It really is bad to be poor in Britain.”
That is a truly damning indictment from an authoritative voice.
The featured image of this piece was my instinctive response on Twitter/X.
This news on the re-emergence of Victorian-era poverty in Britain was being discussed even as the Brits were putting on a maritime Durbar in Yemen.
In the post-Brexit world, the Empire Reunion Tour has replaced protein with “sovereignty”.
Looking at this appalling vista from my vantage point on an Irish hillside, the lumpen herrenvolk who glug down this imperial Kool-Aid are truly pitiable.
The blue passports of Ibrox and the Famine Song make for a horrifyingly fascinating combination.
The professor in the clip……not enough money being given to the needy……really
25% of the UK is on disability benefits.
Finding people willing to work is a nightmare, I had a great opportunity for the right person to help me and a friend/employee take on a massive project on a large ex cinema building I own.
6 hours a day. £80 a day, cash in hand, 5 days a week. Just handing up bits and bobs. Not doing anything risky and learning some skills too. Ideal for a young lad to earn £400 a week without the communist govt taking away a chunk of that.
No takers.
Two of us. One aged 40. One aged 50. Done it all ourselves pretty much, over 5 month period.
Prior to that was a 4 months house project, on my garden front and back. Again. No takers. Would have learned slabbing, assisting us. Groundwork g etc.
Anyone who works with me. Always does less than me and does less risky stuff than me.
I am a grafter for sure. This next comment will irk some. It may not. I am fortunate in life to have a hard father who gave me a head start in life.
I can accept I have had many advantages, I have. Had the odd idiot even try mock me for this. I sound like any ordinary guy on the street. I don’t know where my privilege is when I am risking my life on a 70ft high walll repairing it (it’s an old cinema with 12 inch thick walls)
As a second gen immigrant from Asian subcontinent, we were worked as kids and told. Stick in. In my travels I have been unemployed and at the bottom usually. Away from family and more. My story is complicated.
What I will say is this. The ignorance.idleness etc has got worse.
A final thought. It’s worse In ireland. That euro project was a calamity. Sad to see these pricks sell the sovereignty that was so brutally fooght for . In 18 and 1900s.
There ain’t a politician anywhere going to fix this. Across Western Europe. And more. We have destroyed our communities. Few want to work and the decades of stagnation l. Deliberate has meant that the issues get worse. We are destroying our own people here and elsewhere too. Not a politician. Anywhere I see in the world that could change this. It’s sad
400 a week cash in hand? Sounds a bit dodgy to me. You’re not a tax dodging Sevco fan by any chance?
No. 😆😂. I limit what I pay govt. even council tax etc. still a. Lot but I limit it.
less govt. means more stuff gets done. The less well off use my leisure facility because it’s cheaper than anyone else. Including the big players.
We have a system in Uk and indeed Ireland. Where multi national companies have an advantage of dodging tax and getting away with it. The loopholes are there and are aggressively used.
Amazon. Apple. Starbucks And the rest. Its communism/fascism.
Not capitalism. Definitely not socialism.
Time for an uprising. Just look at the farmers all over the world.
Why not employ somebody properly?Anything else and you are asking them to break the law. You are also advertising that your working practice is to avoid PAYE and NI.
Too many bad employers not a lack of good workers.
For this job. I was not going to be able to pay someone properly. It’s how business goes sometimes.
I’m not a massive corporation. Not even a large enterprise like a football club.
My customers. Want crazy cheap services and in return they keep coming.
This is how it is and how it’s been for my living. The staff are all paid through books but this project had to be cash. Now. Through the books and whoever would have taken it. Walked out with £350
Where’s the £50 going? What on earth are the govt doing with it? It’s not alleviating poverty. It’s trapping people on benefits. These are hard truths. Nobody wants to hear them. But these are hard truths.
It’s getting worse.
Finally. When you shut an economy for. For the flu…..things will always get worse. Not to mention climate change and the rest. All crap.
James O’Brien – How they broke Britain – absolutely nails this..
And yet the British electorate are content that inflation is falling, food prices coming down, and energy prices falling………….. all in an election year.
Then there is the double assault on the psychology: a military campaign.
So after 12 years of austerity with the last three being the harshest, prices sky rocketing suddenly everything is looking up.
Thank goodness I’m not a cynic.
This nation has sleep walked into a crisis: infrastructure crumbling, health services in tatters, and the richest get richer and the poor within our society in desperate need.
In the early eighties there was a theatre group called 7:84 which stood for 7 percent of the population own 84 percent of the wealth. I reckon if that theatre group was about today they would be called 4:92.
The gap widens with each passing year.
Prices aren’t falling; they’re just rising less quickly…but still rising
I’m approaching 69, far too rapidly actually, but I look at the world in general, and I don’t think, that at ANY point in my life, have I been more worried about a WWIII. It’ll only last about 25-30 minutes, and in that time around half of the humans on this once beautiful little planet will die. Everyone in Europe and North America certainly, also probably, a right good chunk of Asia. They might just end up being the lucky ones. Those left alive could face untold horrors.
Mans’ inhumanity to man.
The intelligent species. Really!!
I’m approaching 69, far too rapidly actually, but I look at the world in general, and I don’t think, that at ANY point in my life, have I been more worried about a WWIII. It’ll only last about 25-30 minutes, and in that time around half of the humans on this once beautiful little planet will die. Everyone in Europe and North America certainly, also probably, a right good chunk of Asia. They might just end up being the lucky ones. Those left alive could face untold horrors.
Mans’ inhumanity to man.
The intelligent species. Really!!
It’s very clearly signposted at any airport customs check for flights into the unkind kingdom ‘Third World Countries’ this is just the beginning.
Top man Phil 👏👏👏.
Yet another brilliant read Phil but hits a very raw chord with those in Britain who believe they deserve just for being British and working is optional. I’m Scottish, living in Ireland and know exactly what it’s like to have the square root of zero but know what it’s like to work hard, show respect and take nothing for granted. Across at ibrokes where their bigoted and sectarian songs come full of those who take it for granted that their king will give them just for being Brits. Shameless!
Welcome back to serfdom.. Thatchers bankers have played a blinder, for the rich.
The MSM, stenography corp, didn’t question once where the unemploymed Lizzie Saxe Coburg, a lady with no corporation or discernable talent for £30bn from.
Anyone else would be seeing that sort of wealth taken under the proceeds of crime laws
Thatcher certainly started it but don’t forget the parts played by Bliar and Brown (stuff).
They allowed “light touch regulation” of the banks which led to the banking fraud, alluded to as a “financial crisis”. They were wrapping debt up with more debt in a convoluted fashion, selling it on and making fortunes, and the Credit Reference Agencies were giving them top ratings. All FRAUD. Austerity was created as the tax-payer bailed out the banks and NONE of those bankers or CRA staff were prosecuted and they were allowed to keep their frqaudulent gains. One might ask why. The NHS is intentionally being broken in order to give American companies access to all that “business” as they ‘fix’ it for us. Starmer knows all this and, even if he gets elected, will do nothing as him and his ilk are part of the theatre of ‘democracy’. The once tory MP Rory Stewart told the truth when he said the UK was an elected dictatorship and, like him or otherwise, he’s no mug.
100% agree. Labour aren’t the party of the workers now, they represent the establishment and the bankers now and will change nothing.
Systematic and monetary collapse is coming, it is unavoidable now.
Ah ,don’t fret Phil . There will always ,always be plenty of money for War and bombs and conflict and killing of innocent civilians as a matter of urgency .We can’t be spending any amount of effort and time worrying about how young parents can feed their children and clothe them and keep their homes warm and safe ..can we now ? There are too many houses to be bought for the rich guys portfolio ,or his /her flashy watch collection ,not to mention adding another Ferrari to the old jalopy collection . Something is going to burst – very soon and the damage will be financially catastrophic ..for the entire world .Showdown at big sky !Bboooooommmmmm!