Community
St
David's Day, 1st March
Poverty hasn't gone away
Do so many need to go to prison?
March's Spring equinox
St
David's Day, 1st March
Poverty
hasn't gone away
Two
reports published recently, comparing poverty-related
social ills a century ago with the situation today,
indicate that social deprivation is still unacceptably
prevalent in
One,
from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, acknowledges that
today's 'poverty line' of 60 per cent of median household
income is much higher (in simple terms of purchasing
power) than the measure used by Seebohn Rowntree in 1899
(which was based on the minimal cost of food and housing).
But if one measures by average current earnings, the
picture is depressingly similar.
The
biggest single group living in poverty is those
households with a working adult on a low or irregular
wage, but there are now fewer households in this category
(down from 55 per cent to 3l per cent). On the other
hand, the number of main wage earners out of work
in this sector has risen from two to nine per cent. And
although illness or old age as a key cause of poverty
among wage earners was just two per cent a century ago,
the figure now is 26 per cent.
The
poor families interviewed by Rowntree a century ago were
all tenants, whereas today only 25 per cent of British
households are renting. Now many poor households are
owner-occupiers with a large mortgage, not benefiting
from subsidised 'social housing' rents. Progress is being
made, but increasingly polarised pay-scales in an ever
more cut-throat global economy threaten to undermine
short-term successes. An ageing population could require
more social spending, leading to tax increases and thus
reducing the political will to fund anti-poverty policies.
The
other report, commissioned by Barnardo's to mark the
centenary of Dr Barnardo's death, finds that while 600,000
children have been lifted out of poverty since 1999,
three and a half million are still classed as living in
poverty – now assessed by a complex formula based on
household income and what an average home contains (appliances,
car, TV etc). Infant mortality is still 70 per cent
higher in low-income areas than in more affluent places.
As Dr
Barnardo said to his wife as he lay dying in 1905, “there
is still much to do.”
* As a
child, Barnardo was considered a troublemaker. He became
an apprentice to a wine merchant when he was 16 but
shortly afterwards he became a Christian and planned to
be a missionary. Studying medicine in
Do
so many need to go to prison?
Every
prison in
“Criminal
justice is certainly top of the political agenda, and
will be even more so in the run-up to the next election,”
the Bishop of Worcester, Dr Peter Selby, told me (he is
also the Bishop to Prisons). “It is crucial
that it should be high on our priorities at every level
of Church life. The Roman Catholic report,
“I
am convinced that we should all feel deeply within us the
awesome nature of a sentence that deprives someone of
liberty, and therefore the imperative to defend their
human rights and provide the maximum possible resources
for their rehabilitation.”
According
to research by the Prison Reform Trust, sentencers say
that they are able to resist pressures to 'get tough'
from the media and the public (and believe it is
important to do so) but at the same time they feel they
have a duty to ensure that their decisions reflect the
norms of wider society. Changes in the law and new
guideline judgements are other factors that keep prison
numbers rising.
What
can be done to change the situation? There is a need to
improve sentencers' and the public's awareness of
community penalties and their benefits. The courts could
make more use of fines, freeing up probation resources
and deferring the time when the 'last resort' of
imprisonment has to be used. The Probation Service should
be more adequately funded.
It
costs far more to keep a man in prison (£38,000 a year)
than a pupil at
March's
Spring equinox
On 20
March we have the vernal (Spring) equinox in the northern
hemisphere and the autumn equinox in the southern
hemisphere. What does this mean, exactly?
According
to the
The
equinoxes occur in March and September when the Sun is
'edgewise' to the Earth's axis of rotation so that (neglecting
the effect of atmospheric refraction) everywhere on Earth
has twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of darkness.
The
solstices occur in June and December when the Earth's
axis is at its extreme tilt towards and away from the Sun
so at mid-day it appears at its highest in one hemisphere
and at its lowest in the other.
These
four events repeat every 'tropical' year (365 days, 5
hours, 49 minutes), so they become later by about six
hours, or (if there has been an intervening leap day)
earlier by about 18 hours, from one year to the next.
They are not equally spaced in the year, because the
Earth's orbit around the Sun is elliptical, not circular.
