The Bishop wrote: On another point, I respect your honesty and the personal information divulged.
As bob Dylan wrote in Absolutely Sweet Marie "To live outside the law you must be honest"!
More to the point as Jesus said 'For ye have the poor [U]always[/U] with you; but me ye have not always'.
I've recently finished reading Coming Apart by Charles Murray and whilst it's a sociological study of the White Working Class in America, 1960-2010 there are strong parallels with what is happening in the UK.
The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness.
I then re-read William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out in which he argued that only soul-salvation will “clothe the naked” and “change their miserable hearts and make them happy.” As well as a bit of God-bothering the Salvationists opened homes for “fallen women” and orphaned “waifs and strays,” hunted down drunkards, and met released prisoners in at prison gates.
In spite of his efforts (the Army being one of the few charities I always give money to) and over a hundred years of social policy by Governments of
all persuasions the poor are still with us, as they are to a lesser or greater extent in every country on the planet.
I honestly believe that all Governments actually 'care' and indeed the Welfare Reform Act 2012 was brought in under the coalition, Lib Dems (oddly considering their name) not being known for their support for rampant 'neo-liberalism'.
I find it a great shame that opposition parties automatically 'oppose' rather suggest how changes might work better. With any system set up for literally millions of users there will always be people who fall through the cracks. People have to cancel weddings as the Passport Office have lost their applications, others are still trying to cancel their Sky subscriptions after years of correspondence.
In time the furore will die down and the caravan move on as it did with the Bedroom 'Tax' and Junior Doctors but even when everyone is getting the full amount they expect on the day they expect it, the words of Matthew 26:11 will still ring true.