What does the bread line mean ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

3 April

Living on the bread line.

What exactly is that, when one stops to ask ?

It means, as in Soviet Russia*, queuing for your bread, for hand-outs (and this administration sees no need for food banks : everyone, we are told, actually has more than he or she needs).

Somehow, however bad Rickshaw-Ditch wants to make it out to have been (why did his wife have no income, we wonder... ?), I don't think that he was waiting for hours, as people passing watched, for a loaf of bread !

And this charitable giving to the poor : just go, for example, to the Collegiate Church of St Mary in Warwick and see how the boards preserved there record provision in people's wills for giving to the poor and how people were considered then, centuries ago, not as lazy, scrounging scum, but worthy of care and consideration.

Think, too, of the long tradition of the Poor Laws, on which Wikipedia is far more knowledgeable than I can be, and look at what is happening in the name of Fairness in twenty-first century post-industrial Britain...



End-notes

* Which this Coalition is copying, by making accommodation fit the number of occupants and screw what happens to those already there, in what they fondly think of - whatever it may be - as 'home'.


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