When
I first reported on child poverty in Britain, I was struck by the faces
of children I spoke to, especially the eyes. They were different:
watchful, fearful. In
Hackney, in 1975, I filmed Irene Brunsden’s family. Irene told me she
gave her two-year-old a plate of cornflakes. “She doesn’t tell me she’s
hungry, she just moans. When she moans, I know something is wrong.” “How much money do you have in the house? I asked. “Five pence,” she replied. Irene
said she might have to take up prostitution, “for the baby’s sake”. Her
husband Jim, a truck driver who was unable to work because of illness,
was next to her. It was as if they shared a private grief. This
is what poverty does. In my experience, its damage is like the damage
of war; it can last a lifetime, spread to loved ones and contaminate the
next generation. It stunts children, brings on a host of diseases and,
as unemployed Harry Hopwood in Liverpool told me, “it’s like being in
prison”. This
prison has invisible walls. When I asked Harry’s young daughter if she
ever thought that one day she would live a life like better-off
children, she said unhesitatingly: “No”. What
has changed 45 years later? At least one member of an impoverished
family is likely to have a job -- a job that denies them a living wage.
Incredibly, although poverty is more disguised, countless British
children still go to bed hungry and are ruthlessly denied
opportunities.. What has not changed is that poverty is the result of a disease that is still virulent yet rarely spoken about – class. Study
after study shows that the people who suffer and die early from the
diseases of poverty brought on by a poor diet, sub-standard housing and
the priorities of the political elite and its hostile “welfare”
officials -- are working people. In 2020, one in three preschool British
children suffers like this. In making my recent film, The Dirty War on the NHS,
it was clear to me that the savage cutbacks to the NHS and its
privatisation by the Blair, Cameron, May and Johnson governments had
devastated the vulnerable, including many NHS workers and their
families. I interviewed one low-paid NHS worker who could not afford her
rent and was forced, to sleep in churches or on the streets. At
a foodbank in central London, I watched young mothers looking nervously
around as they hurried away with old Tesco bags of food and washing
powder and tampons they could no longer afford, their young children
holding on to them. It is no exaggeration that at times I felt I was
walking in the footprints of Dickens. Boris
Johnson has claimed that 400,000 fewer children are living in poverty
since 2010 when the Conservatives came to power. This is a lie, as the
Children’s Commissioner has confirmed. In fact, more than 600,000
children have fallen into poverty since 2012; the total is expected to exceed 5 million. This, few dare say, is a class war on children. Old
Etonian Johnson is may be a caricature of the born-to-rule class; but
his “elite” is not the only one. All the parties in Parliament, notably
if not especially Labour – like much of the bureaucracy and most of the
media -- have scant if any connection to the “streets”: to the world of
the poor: of the “gig economy”: of battling a system of Universal Credit
that can leave you without a penny and in despair. Last
week, the prime minister and his “elite” showed where their priorities
lay. In the face of the greatest health crisis in living memory when
Britain has the highest Covid-19 death toll in Europe and poverty is
accelerating as the result of a punitive “austerity” policy, he
announced £16.5 billion for “defence”. This makes Britain, whose
military bases cover the world as if the empire still existed, the
highest military spender in Europe. And the enemy? The real one is poverty and those who impose it and perpetuate it.
This is an abridged version of an article published by the Daily Mirror, London.
John Pilger's 1975 film, Smashing Kids, can be viewed at Smashing Kids | 
