This week the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, defended the choice to cut benefits, declaring that people should think to work for what they have rather than relying on handouts. True enough in essence but people claiming benefits don’t do so because they enjoy the humiliation of weekly visits to the job centre, or because they’re unwilling to work but because of a variety of often government led policy that is hellbent on keeping them on their knees, things like a National Minimum wage that is below the the National Living wage and an increase in zero hour contracts resulting in more working people relying on benefits than ever.
Hogarth’s nightmarish scene is set in the slum known as the Ruins of St Giles and includes a drunken mother dropping her baby to take a pinch of snuff, the burial of a naked woman, mass brawling, and a man and dog fighting over a bone.
RA collection
What Hogarth’s print doesn’t show is the socio economic factors that led to it, in 1751 economic opportunities in the countryside were dwindling so people came to London to find work but the lack of housing, poor quality of food, little clean water and general lack of public sanitation in the over crowded city led to slums full of people who were ridden with disease and numbing themselves with gin. It was really easy back then to get a license to distill your own gin, and King William actively encouraged the production of British Spirits, you just had to post a public notice saying you intended to produce gin and ten days later you could begin production. Further the British were at war with France and the countries finances were incredibly strained which led to the government putting extremely heavy import taxes on any foreign spirits and lifting the duty on British spirit production thus ensuring there was a market for home grown grains despite their often poor quality. This led to 6000 houses in London selling gin to the public and 10 million gallons of gin being distilled in London every single year by 1730 with the average Londoner drinking an estimated 14 gallons. A glass of gin went for a few pennies and soon the population became addicted. The money made through the sale of gin funded the war but also led to scenes such as that Hogarth depicted in Gin Lane. Then like now it is poor government policy that values profit over people that leads the most vulnerable members of our society into impossible situations.
Last year Boris Johnson’s Conservative government, knowing the additional financial struggles many families faced due to the Covid 19 pandemic which resulted in having the schools closed for most of the year, voted against extending free school meals over the summer holidays. Some of the reasons they gave for deciding not to feed hungry children included the theory put forward by the Conservative MP for Mansfield, Ben Bradley in now deleted Tweets that Free School Meal Vouchers were too often sold on by parents who are mostly illiterate and live with their children in crackdens or brothels. Many of the Tory MP’S echoed the comments made by the Prime Minister today, Danny Kruger, MP for Devizes in Wiltshire said his vote against extending Free School Meals came from his conviction that, “generous, unconditional, universal benefit entitlements trap people in dependency on the state and rightly enrages people who are working hard for themselves.” Reading the comments made then and now, it seems the Tories will only be happy when the workhouses are reopened.
I was moved to share this poem that was written in the 50s by Charles Causey, I first came across it in the poetry anthology Poems that Make Grown Women Cry as journalist Dame Joan Bakewell’s choice
Timothy Winters
by Charles Causey
Timothy Winters comes to school
With eyes as wide as a football pool,
Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters:
A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.
His belly is white, his neck is dark,
And his hair is an exclamation mark.
His clothes are enough to scare a crow
And through his britches the blue winds blow.
When teacher talks he won’t hear a word
And he shoots down dead the arithmetic-bird,
He licks the patterns off his plate
And he’s not even heard of the Welfare State.
Timothy Winters has bloody feet
And he lives in a house on Suez Street,
He sleeps in a sack on the kitchen floor
And they say there aren’t boys like him any more.
Old man Winters likes his beer
And his missus ran off with a bombardier.
Grandma sits in the grate with a gin
And Timothy’s dosed with an aspirin.
The Welfare Worker lies awake
But the law’s as tricky as a ten-foot snake,
So Timothy Winters drinks his cup
And slowly goes on growing up.
At Morning Prayers the Master helves
For children less fortunate than ourselves,
And the loudest response in the room is when
Timothy Winters roars “Amen!”
So come one angel, come on ten:
Timothy Winters says “Amen
Amen amen amen amen.”
Timothy Winters, Lord.
Amen!
The government knows that children won’t starve because people and communities who have next to nothing themselves will work together to make sure they don’t. There are Angels who walk among us, people who are kept up at night because of the injustices that so many face in this country face and in the morning are filled with righteous anger ready to fight their corner. Ultimately money and status is the only language the government talk and after some bullying from footballer Marcus Rashford they relented and decided to feed the children.
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