Back to the Poor Laws

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                                                   BACK  TO  THE  POOR  LAWS



        We have been moving back to the world of the 19th century, when the Poor Laws ruled and those deprived, hungry and unable to pay rent, were herded into workhouses.  Even then, there were not as many sleepers on the streets as now, when record numbers are reported.   Families all over the country are relying on food banks, run by volunteers giving out groceries collected from churches  and other charity dispensers.   Low wages do not provide families with enough to live on.  The unemployed are vilified for not searching hard enough for a job.   In addition, if they have a spare second bedroom in social housing, they have to pay extra for it even if it is being used for grandchildren or a partner with a disability.
      Writing about the present situation, Jeremy Seabrook, author of a history of poverty in Britain, says the present government "looks deep into a punitive past for inspiration" in its plans to appoint new overseers of the poor into the hands of private providers.
       The workhouses of the 19th century became a public scandal, opened up by campaigners like Joshua Hobson, who built his own printing press for his pamphlets describing the conditions he had found in the local workhouses in Huddersfield.    In 1833, At the age of 23, he was sent to Wakefield prison for publishing an "unstamped newspaper" and in 1835 and 1836, jailed again.   It seemed that enthusiasm for imprisonment was at the same level as today, when our prison population has been the highest in Europe. 
        Prison did not stop Hobson, originally a joiner from a local family in the Fixby district of Huddersfield.   H went on writing and speaking about the workhouses and the poor, opposed the  Poor Law acts and joined the Chartist movement, publishing radical material in the West Riding and nationally    In his "Book of Murder" attacking the Malthusian doctrine of dealing with over-population, he writes:  "The framers of the New Poor Law........appear to act, either upon the principle that the poor have no hearts, or upon a determination to break them.  Let them be wary: patience generally yields sooner than the heart."     The condition of the country's poor - diseased and short of food - he said was solely owing to human rapacity and human ignorance, to the want of wise and just laws for protecting the labouring poor "from the rapacity of the capitalists, who not only underpay the labouring poor, but divert their labour to useless or improper purposes, and of laws for enforcing the proper employment of a just reward for labour."
     This could be a message for today.   As Jeremy Seabrook writes:  "The fate of the most vulnerable people - in children's homes, prisons, care homes, rehabilitation centres, adult care homes and probation services - is increasingly in the hands of private providers, just as they were when known as orphans, felons, the lame and the halt, and the aged."   Those who suffer, he writes, will be people whose lives have already been blighted and many of whom were born to an inheritance not of  'hard-working strivers, but of despair.'
    Be careful if demonstrating against all this.  Now, as in Hobson's day, there might be arrest and imprisonment.   With the mass surveillance of society which has been revealed, protesters will be marked down before they even start.


ends