Shame on you if you have forgotten where you come from

Have a good look at this image published in today's Independent to illustrate an article celebrating 100 Years of the British Census. Just look at the title of the link and then  look into the eyes of the mother and her two children.

1921: This Woking family were reduced to living in a pig shed

Spend a little time exploring the image. Note the pieces of fabric loosely hung behind the bed in an attempt to create a home for the two children and what appears to be a picture hanging behind them, and the white sheet that has been stretched across the bed, and the obviously best clothes and neatened hair probably combed and brushed specially for the camera. Who are they looking at to the right of camera with their blank faces? 

Just think what it was to be that family in their pig shed home with the photographer and the lighting illuminating your poverty, a poverty that no matter how much you tried to make a home left you exhausted and without hope. It's 1921, so perhaps her husband was killed in the Great War that ended 2 years earlier, perhaps he's drunk, or holding the photographer's lighting or looking for work, or was never there anyway. 

And this is Woking, Surrey in the  Home Counties not the Black Country.   Woking, which in  May 2010 elected Tory Jonathan Lord with 26551 votes, followed by Rose Sharpley LibDem with 19744 votes and Thomas Miller Labour a distant third with 4246 votes.

And think forward to today, how the descendants of  the children in the photograph, perhaps reading the Daily Mail, driving their second hand Mercedes and BMWs, regarding at least one overseas holiday a year as a right,  owning homes,  following the value of their property week by week, while castigating the Labour Party and the Unions. 

Just imagine a country ruled by Old Etonians, with a monstrous gap between the poorest and the wealthy, a country with little or no welfare, a country that depends on low wages and a mass workforce with few rights, Unimaginable? Perhaps not.

At the end of the 19 century the Privy Council ordered an inquiry into the "Food of the Poorer Labouring Classes". In Dorset, the County closest to Devon, the typical menu was>

Breakfast: Water broth, bread, butter, tea and milk

Dinner: Husband has bread and cheese; family take tea besides

Supper: Hot fried bacon and cabbage or bead and cheese.

This was typical of the time, and apart from the tea, when earlier it would have been ale, this is a diet familiar to labouring families for generation upon generation. So where have we come from.? The following table is taken from a brilliant book called History of the Homeland by Henry Hamilton, published in 1947 as No 4 of Primers for the Age of Plenty.

  This analysis was made at the end of the 17th century, but look at the chasm between the income of the very few rich families at the top of the list and those with the lowest income. We in the 21st century are descendants of the families that made up this stratified and deeply unequal society.  It was only in the 20th century, that the curse of  inequality and injustice was systematically challenged by government and broadly acknowledged within society, a process spearheaded by the Labour Party and the Unions.  That's why the antics of neo-cons and their fellow travellers, the fake virtue of the  right and so-called centre  in government and those who believe and vote  as if they have a monopoly of moral superiority, and the right to make judgmental decisions on the welfare of the weakest  should make you feel ashamed of what is being done to this country.