A third of school staff have seen “physical underdevelopment” in students due to poverty, with schools in England stretching their budgets to buy basic household items such as cookers, bedding and clothes for pupils whose families are struggling.
A survey of more than 14,000 school staff, published at the National Education Union's annual conference in Harrogate, found that this rose to more than half of those teachers working in deprived areas, with warnings that things “can only get worse” after recent benefit cuts.
Teachers attending the conference said the malign impact of poverty went beyond malnutrition, with families needing help to navigate the benefits system and lacking necessities such as beds or tables.
No doubt, they will be called Marxists by ministers and the media for pointing this out.
After all, what else could promote compassion in the human spirit but revolutionary socialism?
It could be Christianity, too.
Or, just normal human compassion.
Or empathy.
A quote came to mind, from Aldous Huxley, that would appear to describe our ministers:
“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal.
"Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does."
They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”
He was right to note that.
Tolerance of the unacceptability of the lived condition of far too many in our society is evidence to support his suggestion.
We are living in what I can only describe as a fucked up world, and what is most worrying is that outr politicians do not even seem to have noticed.
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Spot on.
Do not expect no steer Keir and Rachel the non expert, to embrace a change of policy to give the poor a chance.
Remember the poor are ” undeserving, spongers and it’s all their fault”.
I despair.
I can see this all ending very very badly
Our society seems to be rapidly disintegrating morally, with major information sources corrupted, only held together by habit and the actions of those doing their best to plug the gaps e.g food banks, community help groups etc. The communal still resisting the wreckers it seems, but with little voice at national level, and the continual drip of evil (targeting migrants, disabled, neurodiverse etc). I do feel pessimistic.
If we carry on as we are, it is going to end badly.
UK’s fertility rate falling faster than any other G7 nation — with austerity thought to be ‘principal factor’
https://news.sky.com/story/britains-fertility-rate-falling-faster-than-any-other-g7-country-with-austerity-thought-to-be-a-principal-factor-13232314
‘I can’t afford a child on £53,000 salary’ — why fertility rate is falling
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g7x5kl5l8o
“There’s so many more people struggling than 10 years ago,” said Sophie Rowe, who’s with her daughter Chloe and granddaughter Mabel.
She added that she “is used to be being poor”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c74l89lgek2o
Fertility rates are falling across the economically developed world, and have been for some time. Economic policy — neoliberalism — is one of the main reasons. There are many reasons for it, but we live in a system that goes from crisis to crisis, and the so-called good times between each crisis, is never shared so that everyone feels they are benefitting. The worst thing is, the time between each crisis is less and less. The numbers left behind get higher with every crisis. For many, we now have a perpetual state of austerity in place.
It’s a joke that someone, on a salary of £53 grand a year, doesn’t feel confident that they can afford to have children.
But in London, the average rent for a one-bed flat is now around £2100 a month. The average price of property is £675,000. Some think that it is a sign of economic success.
But, Rachel does need to balance her books.
What does that say about the country we live in? Who cares enough about the injustices within the system, and its inherent failure to deal with the root causes of why we have so many crises.
They have their heads in the sand.
I’m not a Marxist, but I do think that capitalism in its current form is slowly shafting us out of existence, and it would appear that the facts support that conclusion.
I need to make a video on this issue
Couldn’t agree more. Love the quote.
The normal shifts, as neoliberalism bites deeper and ‘the market’ intrudes further into every aspect of our lives.
We tolerate what was once unthinkable.
Teachers don’t refer to services, because they know the child won’t meet the threshold for need – you’re on your own is the Neoliberal credo.
Meanwhile the plethora of English Academy CEO’s and their entourage rake in millions, – no evidence that Labour’s marketisation of schools works, but Neoliberalism doesn’t need to have an evidence-base. It’s only the workers who have to prove evidence of ‘efficiency’, so spend hours covering their backs filling in meaningless records, to survive the neoliberal dog eat dog world.
In today’s Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/apr/16/academies-fuel-explosion-in-school-costs
the IMHO de-facto privatisation of education has been costly.
Thank you and well said, both.
Thirty odd years ago, a person who later became chancellor of my university lobbied for academies, grant maintained schools. At the same time, he ran a company that made school uniforms. As academies took off and some people emphasised uniforms and one even introduced curtseying, sic, he made a fortune. Not long after the premier league started, he teamed up with some clubs and had club crests inside the collar of school shirts.
Thank you for sharing 🙂
“Physical underdevelopment”?
Jesus. In the 21st century, in one of the richest countries in the world, are we seeing the return of stunting in the UK?
We are….
It’s the quality of the food as well. The cheaper foods aren’t worthy of the name. Plus kids cooking for themselves as their parents are working two or three jobs.
I agree with the whole trajectory. But.
The reasoning is circular, tautological! ( I learned a new word reading Late Soviet Britain 🙂 ).
As noted the politicos we have are embeded in “normal” society – thus they are functionally incapable of breaking out of this (fiscal rules you know old chap!). As for the poor, trite phrases such as “they are always with us” coupled to cognitive dissonance does the job. (“thank god its not our kids edith – oh darling do pass the Bolly would there’s a dear”).
Broken record starts: 2500 years ago the Greek playwrights wrote tragedy with the aim of generating empathy, humanity seems to have spent the intervening failing to embed this in society/politics. That said, the neoliberals & their utopian ideology made sure that empathy was excluded.
Whenever you research a school, find out the salary of the top executive in the Multi-Academy-Trust.
Then compare it with that of the caretaker who keeps the school functioning, the TAs who provide SEND 1:1 supervision, or the cleaners, or the newly qualified ECTs.
MATs are often asset-stripping corporate behemoths enriching their managers at the expense of their children.
Thank you and well said, Richard.
Some data going back a couple of years or more:
https://www.itv.com/news/2023-06-21/british-children-shorter-than-other-five-year-olds-in-europe (2023) and
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/victorian-disease-gout-rickets-vitamin-d-mumps-scurvy-measles-malnutrition-nhs-hospital-admitted-a8795686.html (2019)
Richard: “What is most worrying is that our politicians do not even seem to have noticed.” May I suggest that many, if not most, do not care. I reckon that goes for Whitehall, too.
I think it’s funny that politicians talk about war with Russia and China and making the UK an AI and defence industry super power, electric vehicle manufacturing hub etc. What with that unhealthy, unproductive and ageing population? Are young Britons inclined to fight for that ruling class? The UK may soon learn what happened in the initial stages of the second Boer War, where ancestors and their relatives in the Orange Free State fought*.
*My ancestors and others were sent to a camp, Forbach, in Mauritius. Maria meet Raphael in a sugar cane field, did not return to what became the Orange River Colony after the peace of Vereeniging, and married Raphael.
I think even conscription would now fail
This fucked up world has already been diagnosed by the Greeks my friends – our society is infected with Pleonexia:
‘Excessive or insatiable greed, avarice, covetousness, the desire to have more, a greedy desire for certain goods.
A psychiatric disorder characterized by greediness an excessive desire for acquisition of wealth or objects.’
That is what has driven privatisation, mergers and acquisitions in the face of lies about ‘competition’ – the rich want the government’s assets held in trust for us all, and by Jove, they’ve been given them, and are still after more. Because they want to create monopoly rents, they want personal security at our expense.
This is not democracy nor is it a political order of any kind. Any kind of political order depends on the balancing of conflicting/competing interests.
Where is the balance then? I do not see any – do you?
Now on the blog
Thank you
Wow! Pleonexia! What a fantastic word! I was going to “do” Italian next on Duolingo (“done” Welsh & Latin – both not full courses and not now supported). Currently on French & Maths), but I think I’ll take a look at if they do Greek. I like to plan courses ahead of finishing the ones I’m “doing”!
Going back to what I wrote yesterday about Aletheisthenes, I’ve read his 2nd essay, and am half way through his 3rd. I have to take at least one break while reading each (long) essay to allow my (so-called) brain to try to take it in. It’s all pretty scary and horrifying. He keeps saying he hopes he’s wrong, but his thoughts seem feasible to me.
But I’m finding a cuppa Lapsang Souchong tea is very comforting.
This may well be off topic, but with the Right to Die Bill coming up soon (?) Sky News interviewed a very courageous lady today, who took her husband, who had motor neurone disease, to Dignitas in Switzerland, so he could have an easy death. She’s now under investigation by the police. It’s very sad, but well worth watching.
https://news.sky.com/story/widow-has-no-regrets-over-assisted-suicide-of-husband-despite-ongoing-police-investigation-13350002
I see that the Right to Die Bill has been put off until after the local elections. I wonder why. Feels like an excuse to me. Putting it off over arguments probably means thousands of people will die in pain and/or with awful symptoms. The Commons should just get on with it.
https://news.sky.com/story/assisted-dying-debate-delayed-after-controversy-over-bill-amendments-13344574
Also a rather superb description of Trump and all those who cling to him as if he were some kind of superhuman, rather than a very cruel, nasty, fraudulent, lying, ignorant, hypocritical, loud-mouthed, fuck-pig that he is.
I love that quote. Essentially, if you think this is normal, you’re crazy. My autistic son will enjoy that. He is often baffled by neurotypical behaviour, and we laugh at how, in the face of their irrational actions and unreadable intentions, he is considered to be the non-typical one. If you can look at a child in poverty and think that the Market will feed and clothe them, if only their parents will obey it, then you are insane.
I am with you and your son…
But as the muskrat would say:
‘The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.’ https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-yes-musk-said-171900322.html
Totally agree with the Article – Interesting Quote. I’m pretty sure Huxley and Orwell were on the General Studies reading list for all undergraduates in the Seventies. I believe this was to serve as a warning to us about how we could spend our working lives screwing things up.
Then along came Thatcher and Regan and we ignored all of the warnings and allowed a grocer’s daughter and a B-Movie actor to permanently set the economic course for the last 40 years.
To be fair you could claim that hindsight has 20/20 vision, and Neoliberal management of Western economies has been a slow growing cancer that is only now entering “Stage 4 conditions.” However you did not need to be a genius to work out that free-market capitalism with constant and successful lobbying for diminishing regulation was always going to see wealth moving up the social order and set us on a course back through history through Dickensian Britain and a return to the times of colliery and mill owners being able to prey upon the general population.
I feel the conditioning of the populace to accept Neoliberal policy as normal is almost complete, particularly as the last of us who grew up in different circumstances are all heading for the Nursing Home or the Grave.
But here’s the rub. Those of us who should have known better have stood back for 40 years and did nothing about this and we are now in our dotage. The information and communication of your messages is excellent but I’m not sure 160K Subscriptions to your YouTube channel is going to lead to a movement that will secure the changes that need to take place.
I believe the chaos that is going on in America presents the UK with an opportunity to work with like -minded partners in Europe and the rest of the world to fight the war that Trump has effectively unleashed on our way of life. But the question is how do we wake up the numpty we have in No 10 Downing Street to the threats and opportunities our current situation represents?
I have a few ideas:
1) Co-operation between activists. For example a united front between Richard J Murphy and Gary Stevenson would reach a wider audience and provide Gary with the Tax-Raising ideas has campaign sadly lacks. I’m sure if that campaign were to reach out to others of a similar mind such as Yanis Veroufakis and possibly even Jeremy Corbin it would not be long before we had widening support and a strong and growing movement.
2) Multiple submissions to all Labour MPs – particularly the newbies advising them that their leader is asleep at the wheel and they need to educate themselves wrt to Keynesian Economics and act now or Labour will follow the Torys into electoral oblivion and Reform will be free to apply Trumpism here.
3) Get on the streets and into the news with rallies meetings etc. It’s encouraging that somebody like Gary Stevenson has made it onto Question Time to explain the problems we are facing. But that needs to be followed up by people like yourself Mr. Murphy who can communicate the fact that there are tried and tested solutions to the hopelessness that Gary Stevenson has highlighted.
So I appeal to anyone reading this to get their ideas on here and ask how do we mobilise a grey revolution to rectify what we should have prevented all those years ago. If we continue to moan in isolation nothing will change and we will simply be repeating what we have done for the last 40 years.
1) Noted. I have taken action.
2) Keep trying them
3) The BBC know where I am – so do QT – I have done the Scottish version
I disagree that we have been conditioned to live under neoliberalism. The loneliness/sadness/mental health epidemic would say otherwise.
@Tom B.
That’s a good point. The fact that people recognise that they are suffering – though, as often noted here, the cause of the suffering is often mis-attributed – does suggest that the conditioning isn’t complete.
I will point out, though, that behavioural conditioning designed to “convert” or “adapt” a built-in attribute of a person often leads to trauma which, in turn, can lead to the same suite of symptoms.
Yep, utterly, totally with you.
Housing inequality is also back to Victorian levels – literally – levels not seen since 1901.
Your mention of Marx prompted me to think how funny it is that we all thought he’d got capitalism wrong when our welfare states and very high levels of marginal taxation seemed to be making it all work relatively well – but 40 years of less regulated capitalism, allowing massive accumulation for a few and the impoverishment of many, seems now to suggest he wasn’t so far off the mark at all…
I have lots of reasons to not be a Marxist. It is an ideology that does not care. But, he was right in that he said capitalism would destroy itself, and it is.
We are in a mess to say the least! Just reading Steve Keens book on Debunking Economics, gives a good explanation of why most economists live in a neo-classical fantasy world and most politicians think they are right so pursue inane policies.
Great book
I looked for Steve Keen’s book in Lewisham Waterstones just now. It wasn’t there, which is no surprise as it was published a good while ago. But there was a copy of The Deficit Myth, which I turned to face frontwards, and also a copy of The Joy of Tax, which was already facing frontwards. You are getting through!
Wow….
I know it still sells
Debunking Economics
http://digamo.free.fr/keen2011.pdf
I saw all this happening 8-13yrs ago, from my foodbank manager’s role – not that my Tory MP believed me, or admitted to believing me.
I imagine it’s getting press coverage now because it is much more widespread.
In those days the Tory line was:
– Foodbanks create the demand by providing free food to allcomers
– Short term cash flow problem
– Very uplifting thing, charity
– Relative poverty doesn’t matter and absolute poverty doesn’t exist
– Work is the best route out of poverty
My records showed that was all garbage.
The school was doing laundry and providing (our) food parcels on the quiet.
Althpugh I’m not doing that any more my sense is that the gov’t now is even MORE callous about absolute poverty and ill health now than it was under the Tories.
Thanks
Aldous Huxley was influenced by the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, who said in 1960:
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”
….which seems to me to be a polite way of saying we’re living in a fucked up world. I know I bang on about cognitive dissonance – the mind’s inability to hold two fundamentally conflicting cognitions simultaneously – but that is essentially what is being forced upon us. And the psychological distress resulting from that dissonance leaves us no option but to resolve it, by reframing one side and rationalising it.
Hence, perhaps, the massive fault lines in our society. To remain functional, people inhabit silos with others who think the same way. There’s very little meaningful interaction between the silos, because that would involve causing ourselves further psychological distress; we’d come face to face with what we’ve had no choice but to shut out.
By far the most impenetrable silo is the one containing the Government. They don’t look out (because they daren’t) and we can’t see in.
Every bit of evidence in every area shows beyond reasonable doubt that children are starving; that absolute poverty levels are rising; that vulnerable people are terrified; that inequality is everywhere; that people are dying of neglect; that loneliness is rampant; that Victorian diseases are resurfacing; that social services are overwhelmed; that anxiety and depression are affecting millions; that young people have no hope.
Yet in the soundproof Government silo, Ministers only see the country through the rose tinted spectacles donated by Lord Alli.
Very good and much to agree with.
Thanks. It just flowed off the biro.
I might try and turn it into yet another letter which won’t get printed!
The poorer you are, the quicker you age biologically, the sooner you become ill and the more you cost the NHS. So cutting benefits for the poorest only stacks up their long term health costs, and often by far more than you save on benefits. That is fcuked up thinking by the powers to be.
It’s an interesting dilemma as to how children should grow and our perception of poverty.!
My perception comes , growing up in the family of an impoverished tie farmer , who re-located due to the poverty in farming. That was 45 years ago.
Yes things have changed! But maybe we forgot to scale up with regards to , the needs base?
But that’s not what capitalism is about!
There will always be dysfunction and the stripping of services will not help matters
! . Be that mental healthcare, the NHS, education, or the welfare of SOCIETY or IT’S SELF!!
Duplicate comment submission? It’s an interesting dilemma as to how children should grow and our perception of poverty.!
My perception comes , growing up in the family of an impoverished tie farmer , who re-located due to the poverty in farming. That was 45 years ago.
Yes things have changed! But maybe we forgot to scale up with regards to , the needs base?
But that’s not what capitalism is about!
There will always be dysfunction and the stripping of services will not help matters
! . Be that mental healthcare, the NHS, education, or the welfare of SOCIETY or IT’S SELF!!
The use of the “F word” in the title surprised me… not in your usual vocabulary… but is TOTALLY appropriate.
The Huxley quote is not one I knew….. but is so apposite today. I will try and remember it.
I only swear occassionally – especially here
But sometimes it is appropriate to convey sentiment – and it did here
[…] me offer another Aldous Huxley quote to add to the one I offered a few days ago. It is […]