Half a Million Children in Britain Live Below Minimum Health Standards

The scan: The Week v6 no23.pdf (PDF, Marxists Internet Archive, opens at this page)

Uncorrected machine reading. This text was read by machine (Tesseract OCR) from a scan of a stencilled typescript and has not been corrected. Expect misread words; titles in particular are often garbled where the issue printed no contents list. Quote from the scan, not from this page.
How this article was cut and titled: capitals heading; heuristic; title from the OCR of the heading.

from a special correspondent At an "Abolishing Poverty" teach-in, arranged by the Child Party Action Group at the Friends' House, London, last Saturday, successive speakers described the increased poverty which had been growing up in Britain since 1960. Professor Abel-Smith, Professor of Social Adninistration at the London School of Economics, said that the growing mumber of large families were responsible for the rise. To put the problem in perspective, he pointed out that it could be effectively remedied by an expenditure of 0,1 per cent of the national income, or roughly the amount that it costs to run the fire service. Dr. Harriett Wilson, a Birmingham University sociologist, emphasised the environmental effects. Poor children, she said, were more likely to be premature and lighter at birth. Their mortality rate was three or four times that of the children of the professional classes, and the results of their infant infections were liable to be more serious. "Often they have no toys, and when they come to a nursery we have to show them how to play. They have no daily routine, no personal possessions, no private property." Dr. Wilson * was describing her research amongst families whose incomes were below the Ministry's poverty line. "Mothers of such families were often tense, worried and overburdened, and sometimes they could not send their children to school becasse they had no shoes and clothes. They were unable to give their children a treat without raiding the rent money, and many said they smoked in order to cut down their own appetite and reduce food consumption." Professor Peter Townsend, of the University of Essex, said that we wre only - just beginning to see the need for an attack on poverty. "The Labour Gov ernment faces an inescapable test of its own moral integrity, now that Ministers have learned from a special study that half a million children live below the poverty line." The Professor hoped that a decision could be could be reached before Christmas.