feeding the poor

Mary's Meals, a Scots-based and Argyll-based charity, provides school meals in 16 of the world's poorest countries is now feeding half a million children.

Founder, Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, said "There are still one billion children living in poverty, so our work is not done yet."

Sad to say that the work will never be done.

The necessity and prevalence of charity in a world capable of producing a sufficiency of food, clothing and shelter to easily satisfy the needs of all, is an obvious indication that something, somehow, somewhere, is rotten to the core. The socialist claims that it is capitalism. Capitalism automatically produces poverty which in its turn perpetuates charity. Eliminate the cause, and you eradicate the disease. Rather than deal simply and directly by providing ready access to storehouses of goods, as would occur in a sensible world, there are those who prefer instead to deliver the great mass of wealth to the privileged minority and present tear-drenched appeals for charity for the impoverished majority.

Charity! Sweet charity! Upheld as evidence of the innate goodness of man. Providing an outlet for the energies of people who feel that something ought to be done and who might otherwise find time to think about doing things really helpful. Indecent, unwholesome charity! Preying on the natural willingness of ordinary people to help one another, even to the extent of depriving their own of needed things. Charity! Symbol of a society that neither intends nor desires to end the conditions that ensure its existence.

One day the means for producing and distributing the needs of life will become the common property of all the people and will be operated for no purpose other than to provide abundance to all the members of society. On that day a socialist society will be established, bringing an end finally to exploitation, along with all the other abominations of capitalism, including charity.

schooling

Save the Children's head of Scotland, said: "Poverty kills childhood and severely affects life chances. Too many children in Scotland are not reaching their potential at school simply because they are poor. Poverty continues to be a key determining factor in how well a child will do at school and this is absolutely scandalous.Many of Scotland's poorest children live in sub-standard housing, have fewer books and educational games at home, lower aspirations and less confidence in their own ability to achieve their dreams.At every stage of school, children from poorer backgrounds do far worse than their better-off classmates..."

Children from wealthier homes in Scotland perform around 60% better in exams on average than those from poorer backgrounds who get free school meals.

the poor decay

A third of three-year-olds living in poverty in Scotland suffer from poor dental health, a new study has suggested. The research team from the University of Glasgow Dental School assessed children living in Greater Glasgow for decayed, missing or filled teeth. They found evidence of decay in at least 25% of cases. However, amongst those from deprived areas, the incidence of decay was even higher, with a third of those surveyed exhibiting evidence of cavities.

Andrew Lamb, Scottish director of the British Dental Association, said "...this study highlights the depressing fact that poor dental health and inequality are closely linked from very early in life... it's unacceptable that social deprivation is still such a strong marker of poor dental health."

poverty and disability

The charity Contact a Family, which supports and advises families who have a child with a disability, said the impact of the global recession meant families who were already under strain were now at "breaking point".

The charity asked 88 families in Scotland about their financial situation as part of a UK-wide survey.
A total of 19% said they had gone without food to try and make ends meet, while 14% said they had sacrificed heating. Three-quarters missed out on days out, while two-thirds said they did not go on holidays. Nearly half - 46% - said they had fallen behind with loan payments, with 24% saying they needed to borrow money for basic household goods.
42% admitted borrowing money from family and friends to pay for groceries, household goods and heating. Meanwhile 44% of those surveyed said they feared their future financial situation would get worse. The charity said there were a number of reasons why families with a child with a disability were likely to suffer financial hardship, but a key reason was the difficulty of juggling caring and work.

"Time and time again research shows that families with disabled children have an above-average risk of living in poverty. Steps must be taken to address this imbalance..." Ellenor Anwyl, director of Contact a Family Scotland said

The Scheme - Poverty Porn ?

The Scheme , a 4--part series ( the final two episodes of the series have been postponed indefinitely because a 17-year-old male resident featured in the shows had been charged with assault) is a fly-on-the-wall documentary of life in half a dozen households in Onthank, a housing estate in Kilmarnock. Condemned by some as little more than "poverty porn", it has provoked debate.
In its depiction of six families in the Ayrshire community, a myriad range of social problems have been shown on screen, from poverty and unemployment through to addiction and anti-social behaviour. In the north-west pocket of Kilmarnock where Onthank lies, the statistics make for even more alarming reading. There, compared with other parts of East Ayrshire, four times as many children live in households where no adults work; almost three times as many adults are unable to work due to disability or illness; and nearly twice as many adults die as a result of heart disease.

Douglas Hamilton, head of Save The Children in Scotland explains "The face of child poverty in Scotland has been brutally exposed in The Scheme. For many viewers, I am sure that this programme has been an eye-opener to the experience of some of the poorest children growing up in Scotland..." he added "It is shameful that 95,000 children in Scotland live in families surviving on less than £33 per day."

However , many community leaders have called for The Scheme to be taken off air.
Social commentator and Herald columnist Pat Kane described it as 'poverty porn' and 'middle-class BBC television'. He told Newsnight Scotland: "I thought it was cartoonish. I thought it picked people who social work would clearly have to embrace over a long period of time and concentrated on them" .
Local MSP Willie Coffey condemned the series saying it lacked balance. He said: "The danger with programmes like this is that they give a misleading impression of an entire community..."

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found that nearly two-thirds of the British public think poverty is either an inevitable part of life or related to an individual's own laziness but the organisation also predicts that, in any 10-year period, half the population will live in government-defined poverty for at least 12 months.

Similar deprivation and destitution can be experienced by other people on other housing estates in other cities and towns. Many people will readily condemn those who live off Social Security and the benefits system when they could be working, but yet will vigorously defend the rights of those people who live in luxury yet never work because they own capital.
We need a revolution because the reformers, social workers, charitable individuals, priests and other well-meaning folk have all failed. They are like medics on a battlefield, all they do is to keep wrapping on the bandages as the bloody slaughter continues around them.

The death of capitalism will be the beginning of a truly human society where we can relate to each other as members of a real community.

scottish child poverty

The number of children living in poverty has risen for the first time in more than a decade, figures have revealed.

Official statistics showed there were 210,000 youngsters in Scotland who were classed as being in relative poverty in 2008-09.

That is a rise of 10,000 on the previous year and means 21% of children are now affected by the problem.

Another success for the reformers !!!

Children at risk ?

A series of studies published reveals child poverty may be more serious for many families than had been previously believed.the Scottish government's latest estimate is that 20% of children live below the low-income threshold ( calculated at £17,000 a year for two adults living with two children or £13,000 for a lone parent with two children.)

But researchers on the Growing Up in Scotland programme, which has been tracking children of 8,000 families since 2005, said the figure was actually higher-they calculate it at 24%.It showed that children growing up in poverty are more likely to be obese, suffer more accidents and injuries, and are more than twice as likely to suffer behavioural, emotional and social problems.Also found was that a third of Scottish mothers suffered mental health problems in the last four years.

The cuts - the real meaning of cutting back

Clare Simpson, project manager, Parenting Across Scotland , said: "The results of our survey show that the recession is having an adverse effect on families.Some people are losing their jobs, others have less money to spend because hours are being cut or overtime is no longer available while, for many, there is fear and worry about what the future might hold."

A survey carried out by PAS found that 55% of families reduced their spending on food and heating as a result of the recession. Parents were also less likely to spend money on their children, the survey found.One third of parents also claimed the recession had put a strain on their relationships.

The Shame of Scotland

The number of children living in poverty in Scotland remains at an "unacceptably high" level. Save the Children found 95,000 young people, almost 10% of all children in Scotland, were living with families that had less than £33-a-day to spend. The charity found the poorest families were, on average, £113-a-week short of enough money to cover essential costs.Youngsters in single parent households were about three times more likely to live in severe poverty.More than two thirds of those included in the figures lived in families where no adults worked.

The charity described government promises to end child poverty by 2020 as "increasingly hollow"

Douglas Hamilton, Save the Children's programme director in Scotland, said: "We are absolutely outraged that so many children have to go without essentials - we're talking about winter coats and proper shoes, real basics that families just can't afford...."

No work , No hope

Almost one in three households in Glasgow have no wages coming in, official statistics have revealed.

Figures released by the Scottish Government show 62,000 households in the city - 28.9% of all homes - had no working-age adult in employment last year. That puts Glasgow behind the national average of 24%. The stats also reveal a shocking 22,900 children in Glasgow live in a workless home.

The director of the Glasgow-based Poverty Alliance, branded the figures a "scandal".

"There is little doubt that unemployment means that people will struggle to afford the basics in life. For these families heating their home and putting food on the table is the challenge. In the 21st century that is quite clearly a scandal. We know that children in workless households, living in poverty, will have less chance in life than children from better-off backgrounds.We know that their education will be adversely affected and they are more likely to suffer health problems. The danger is that we perpetuate a cycle of worklessness and limited opportunity."

Capitalism cannot be reformed for the benefit of the working class and sooner the well meaning realise this fact , the sooner , we can begin the dismantling of the capitalist system .

Malnutrition in the UK ?

“We think we are heading towards malnutrition happening here in the UK.” - Save the Children’s Colette Marshall told the BBC. "Benefits simply haven’t been enough and with rising food costs it means that families cannot afford to give children proper decent food. "

Children are being deprived of dietary staples and instead are being raised on cheap packaged food high in fat, salt and sugar. The Grocer magazine shows food prices rising by almost a fifth over the past year, with basic essentials such as rice and milk among the worst hit.

Homelessness and hopelessness

Sixty children become homeless in Scotland every day, according to housing campaigners Shelter. A study by the charity suggested 22,000 young people a year were affected by homelessness and poor housing - enough to fill every secondary school in Fife. The number of homeless families with children rose by 18% over five years. The report also found a 27% increase in the number of families with children in temporary accommodation over three years.

Shelter Scotland's director Graeme Brown said: "A decent, warm, safe home is crucial to all aspects of children's well being. Yet the facts show thousands of Scotland's children have to wake up every day in cold, damp, overcrowded homes, uncertain about their future."

In a separate study, researchers from Glasgow University suggested homeless people were four times more likely to die prematurely. More than 6,000 homeless adults in Glasgow were tracked over a five-year period and their mortality compared with 13,500 non-homeless residents. By the end of the study, 7% of the homeless group had died compared to 2% of the non-homeless group. The most common causes of death among the homeless subjects were drugs, alcohol, circulatory diseases and suicide.
Dr David Morrison, from the research group, said: "This study has shown we have a large population of young, vulnerable homeless people who are in terrible health."

The study indicated Glasgow residents living in the most deprived areas were three times more likely to die than their affluent counterparts. Being homeless increased the risk of death another threefold.

we don't need no edookashun

The report confirmed what official statistics already indicate: that children from deprived backgrounds tend to do worse at school .

By analysing a long-term study of 14,000 young people in England, it found that youngsters in certain neighbourhoods were less likely to stay on in full time education after the age of 16.
The areas with the lowest educational aspirations, termed "low horizons" by the researchers, were characterised as deprived, close-knit cohesive communities with high levels of social housing and a history of economic decline.
The areas pinpointed by researchers were mainly those formerly dominated by heavy industry, often in the north of England. However there were also clusters of neighbourhoods in isolated rural areas of East Anglia and the west country.

An analysis of the 2008 GCSE results showed that only one in six white boys who are entitled to free school meals obtained the government's benchmark of five good GCSEs.

Poverty makes you thick

A Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience study was described as a "wake-up call" about the impact of social deprivation.
Normal nine and 10-year-olds from rich and poor backgrounds had differing electrical activity in a part of the brain linked to problem solving. The brains of children from low-income families process information differently to those of their wealthier counterparts.
Since the children were, in health terms, normal in every way, the researchers suspected that "stressful environments" created by low socioeconomic status might be to blame.
Dr Mark Kishiyama, one of the researchers, said: "The low socioeconomic kids were not detecting or processing the visual stimuli as well - they were not getting that extra boost from the prefrontal cortex."
Previous studies have suggested that children in low-income families are spoken to far less - on average hearing 30 million fewer words by the age of four.
Professor Robert Knight, added: "This is a wake-up call - it's not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status."

American poverty

It is not just third world African countries that has difficulty in feeding its people .
Almost 700,000 U.S. children lived in households that struggled to put food on the table at some point in 2007, according to a federal report.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's annual report on food security showed that those 691,000 children lived in homes where families had to eat non-balanced meals and low-cost food, or even skip meals because of a lack of money. The number of children struggling to feed themselves adequately rose 50 percent from 430,000 children in 2006.

Nearly 36.2 million children and adults struggled to put proper food on the table in 2007, according to the report. Of the 36.2 million, nearly a third were not able to eat what was deemed a proper meal.
The other two-thirds -- 11.9 million people -- changed their eating habits by eating low-cost foods, participated in federal food and nutrition assistance programs, ate less varied diets or obtained emergency food from pantries or emergency kitchens, according to the report. That number is up more than 40 percent since 2000.

Families headed by single mothers, Hispanic families, African-American families and households with incomes below the poverty line struggled the most, according to the report.

More on Child Poverty Levels

Research by the Campaign to End Child Poverty found that in 174 of the 646 parliamentary constituencies across the UK, more than half the children live in poverty or are in families struggling on low incomes. An estimated 98% of children living in two zones in Glasgow Baillieston - Central Easterhouse and North Barlarnark and Easterhouse South - are either in poverty or in working families that are "struggling to get by".

Of the 13,233,320 children in the UK, 5,559,000 - more than a third - live in low-income families or families in poverty.

"A child in poverty is 10 times more likely to die in infancy, and five times more likely to die in an accident. Adults who lived in poverty as a child are 50 times more likely to develop a restrictive illness such diabetes or bronchitis." Campaign director Hilary Fisher said

The research was compiled from Government statistics and also includes the numbers of children in families on Working Families Tax Credit.The campaign classes households as being in poverty if they are living on under £10 per person per day.

The British Epidemic of Poverty

An 'epidemic of poverty' in Britain is having a dramatic impact on the survival rates and health chances of children from poor families, an influential coalition will warn this week in a major report that casts doubt on government efforts to close the inequality gap.

The report, based on a wide-ranging analysis of government data, finds that children from poor families are at 10 times the risk of sudden infant death as children from better-off homes. And it reveals how babies from disadvantaged families are more likely to be born underweight - an average of 200 grams less than children from the richest families. Poorer children are two-and-a-half times more likely to suffer chronic illness when toddlers and twice as likely to have cerebral palsy.

'Poverty is now one of the greatest dangers faced by our children,' said Nick Spencer, one of the report's authors and professor of child health at the University of Warwick. 'If poverty were an infection, we would be in the midst of a full-scale epidemic.'

The End Child Poverty report highlights how socio-economic factors affect the entire life of children born into poverty, from foetal development and early infancy through to teenage years and adulthood.It found that children living in disadvantaged families are more than three times as likely to suffer from mental health disorders as those in well-off families and that infants under three years old in families with an annual income of less than £10,400 are twice as likely to suffer from asthma as those from families earning over £52,000.The report also suggests the health consequences of being born into poverty continue well beyond infancy. For example, adults who came from deprived families were found to be 50 per cent more likely to have serious and limiting illnesses, such as type two diabetes and heart failure.

'From the day they are born, children's health and very survival are threatened by family poverty,' said Donald Hirsch, co-author of the report , 'It is one of society's greatest inequalities that poor health is so dramatically linked to poverty. Children in the poorest UK families are at least twice as likely to die unexpectedly before their first birthdays than children in slightly better-off families. This is a huge injustice for the children in one of the richest nations in the world.'

British Inequality

According to this BBC report , after 30 years of unprecedented economic growth, the British are richer, healthier - but no happier than in 1973. The main reason for the rise in wealth has been the increase in house prices. But the growing wealth has not led to greater happiness.

In 1973, 86% of people said they were satisfied with their standard of living, while in 2006 85% were satisfied. And one in six UK adults reported that they suffered from a variety of mental health problems in the latest survey, of which the largest category was "mild anxiety and depression."

The amount of goods and services purchased by UK households has risen by two and half times in thirty years.

But that increase in spending was not evenly distributed among the whole population, with the income of those in the top 10% of the income distribution going up much faster than that of households of the bottom 10%. In 1979, the real disposable income of the top 10% was three times greater than the real income of those in the bottom 10%, but by 2006 that had grown to four times greater.

And social mobility also appears to have declined, according to studies cited in the report. Children born in 1958 to poor parents coming to adulthood in the 1970s, were more likely to have moved to a higher part of the income distribution than those born in 1970, who came of age in the new millennium.

And child poverty has remained stubbornly high, with 22% of children living in relative poverty in 2005/6, compared to 27% in 1990/91.

A caring society ??

THE number of Scottish children in care is at its highest in two decades and youngsters are being pushed on to the streets at just 16, leaving them vulnerable to addiction, violence and homelessness a new report from Scotland's Commissioner for Children and Young People .

The report highlights the gulf between children brought up with their families – who are increasingly staying at home until well into their twenties – and those who are in care.Although Scottish Government policy dictates that children should leave at 18, six times as many are leaving at 16, often coerced by social services.The report found that children with "challenging behaviour" are those under most pressure to leave. More than one in 10 reported episodes of homelessness. Some were sent to bed-and-breakfasts - at least one youngster had to share accommodation with a convicted murderer. Senior social work sources said 16-year-olds were being squeezed out to make way for an army of needy children

Author of the report ,Ms Marshall, said: "In many cases children and young people in care are seen as a troublesome burden rather than a vulnerable person to be nurtured. At 16 - the time they need help to cope - many are all but completely abandoned with little, if any aftercare."

The report states that the level of 15- to 18-year-olds who are homeless "represents a shocking failure in corporate parenting".It claims authorities are either failing to keep under-18s within the care system, or not supporting them afterwards in accordance with the legal duty that extends to the age of 19. Although the laws and the policy in place supported the children and prioritised their interests, there was a gulf between that and practice.

Tam Baillie, the assistant director of Policy and Influencing at Barnardo's Scotland, said: "Nowadays, most young people stay at home well into their twenties, yet most looked-after young people leave care aged 16 or 17. We need to ask ourselves why our most vulnerable young people are expected to be fully independent at such a young age, often in very difficult circumstances..."

Elsewhere , we read more than a quarter of drug addicts due to receive treatment have been waiting for more than a year .

spoiled kids or a spoiled world

The media will no doubt concentrate the headlines on over-indulgent parents , the liberal minded permissive mum and dad who won't instill a sense of discipline in their kids but for those of us who seek deeper understanding other parts of the report come to our attention . The problem lay with parents who were struggling with little or no help to bring up their children in a heavily commercialised world.

The report urged the government to tackle the commercialisation of culture head-on.

Research author Maurice Galeton said: "It is particularly acute where people are living in violent neighbourhoods. ..Very young parents in violent and deprived neighbourhoods without the network of support that others get ... have a huge level of stress in their lives."

Schools indeed reflect society in general .