Welfare vital

YOUR ‘Focus’ piece (Advertiser, January 23) on welfare and charity was a brave article to appear in a newspaper serving a community largely ‘conservative’ in its outlook. Reading it, I was reminded of the words of Nye Bevan, the architect of the NHS after the Second World War. He said ‘Private charity is no substitute for public responsibility’.

The provision of welfare, as the article pointed out, is simply the acceptance, by us all, that we have a responsibility towards those who, through illness, infirmity, youth or poverty, cannot adequately care for themselves. In other words, the strong should care for the weak.

Charity is to do with the private decisions of individuals.

Welfare is to do with government leading on the construction of the ‘good society’.

There are many places around the world where public responsibility is not given practical expression through government action. Where someone living in a penthouse apartment, with all the luxuries of modern living, can be but a mile away from cardboard slums from which families scrabble for a living on public refuse dumps. Charities are not going to fix these gross inequalities.

The images used today to denigrate the welfare state are the same as those conjured up more than 150 years ago at the framing of the New Poor Law, which ushered in the workhouse.

Then as now the ‘scroungers’ the ‘workshy’ and the ‘irresponsible’ were paraded to highlight the folly of anything except the most meagre provision.

Anything else might be provided by the charitable impulses of the few. We should be wary today lest by degrees charity comes to be seen as a substitute for proper welfare.

G WILLIAMS

Bishops Castle

 

NHS praised

MY partner is an inpatient at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital just now. Quietly and efficiently, the NHS saved his life last week.

Sadly, the patients of the future may not be so fortunate. The NHS is being steadily destroyed by privatisation and cuts. As a front line health worker, I see first-hand the damage inflicted on the NHS as a deliberate act of government policy.

Adrian Kibbler (Advertiser January 23) is right to ask what kind of society we want to live in. The NHS and the welfare state are there for all of us. It’s easy to demonise and caricature benefits claimants, but most of us are in reality just a step or two away from disaster.

A patchwork of charities, however good, cannot possibly substitute for an NHS and welfare state that we all pay into and that we all own – a gift from society as a whole to society as a whole. If we do not urgently demand a change to government policy, we will lose something very precious.

GILL GEORGE

Corve Street

Ludlow

 

De Greys missed

I very much enjoy having delivery of the Ludlow Advertiser on Thursdays. Last week, a different story. A sad story: The closure of De Greys on the front page. This really brought home to me, and I’m sure many others, the loss of this wonderful business. It was more than a business, with its delightful staff, delicious food, coffee and tea, and a shop with so much on offer. How marvellous it would be if there was someone able to take it on.

LADY HUNT

Ashford Carbonell

Ludlow