Fifty years ago I went to a working-class school in Lambeth

[barryqwalsh]

Each of the 2,000 boys in that school got a job when they left that paid enough to keep a family.

I didn’t know a person who was unemployed throughout my 20s.

My generation has had the best quality of life in history: full employment, free health care, free education and, for those who couldn’t afford to buy their home, a decent council house to live in. Now that has all been wiped out.

So how do we get out of this mess?

Ken Livingstone How Ed Miliband can build us a better Britain - and we desperately need it - Ken Livingstone - Mirror Online

 

[Rikurzhen]

This graph uses US data but the principles apply just as much to the UK:

 

[Tom Sweetnam]

Many years ago The Economist wrote a telling piece on the disparity of wealth in the West. They warned that if the rich continued to hoard all the wealth and the poor continue to grow as a massive demographic, our free market system itself would collapse, because there'd be no middle class with disposable income to support it.

 

[Swagger]

Each of the 2,000 boys in that school got a job when they left that paid enough to keep a family.

I didn’t know a person who was unemployed throughout my 20s.

My generation has had the best quality of life in history: full employment, free health care, free education and, for those who couldn’t afford to buy their home, a decent council house to live in. Now that has all been wiped out.

So how do we get out of this mess?

Ken Livingstone How Ed Miliband can build us a better Britain - and we desperately need it - Ken Livingstone - Mirror Online

Emergency housing is meant to be temporary, not permanent.