The young , the old and the sick

Dot Gibson, the general secretary of the National Pensioners Convention, an umbrella group representing more than 1,000 small organisations, said: "It's a national disgrace that at least one in four pensioners are living below the official poverty line, and millions more are struggling to meet the rising costs of living . Today's increase in the basic state pension doesn't go any way near far enough to help protect pensioners against the economic crisis."

Save the Children's Colette Marshall was reported as saying : "Benefits simply haven't been enough and with rising food costs it means that families cannot afford to give children proper decent food. We think we are heading towards malnutrition happening here in the UK."

"People in deprived areas of England are more likely to die after heart surgery than those in richer areas", The Mirror reported. It said that a study of 45,000 patients found that poorer people had a higher risk of dying. Even when risk factors associated with social deprivation were taken into account, such as smoking, higher BMI and diabetes, poverty remained a significant independent risk factor.

It is sometimes argued that the kind of destitution and abject poverty that existed in the 1930s and earlier is no longer to be found in developed capitalist countries like the UK. Nowadays, the argument goes, workers take holidays abroad, have homes with several TVs and computers, and can spend large parts of their leisure time on shopping expeditions.

Firstly, that workers are in fact by no means as well off as the above stories show .
Secondly, how well off workers are in terms of wages is not the whole picture. The insecurity caused by redundancies and the fear of redundancies, the short-term temp contracts now widespread , the boring dead-end 'McJobs', the ever-present fear of production being out-sourced and moved to other countries - all these undermine workers' sense of well-being.
Poverty and worry about the future are built in to capitalism as far as the working class are concerned. Systems of state social welfare do not change the exploitative character of capitalism or even touch the surface of its symptoms. This is the way the world is. But it should not and need not be this way. Instead, the world could be run on Socialist lines, without rich or poor, without wages or money, without countries or governments.

SEE What is Poverty