A book I have focuses on deprivation in Hackney, east London. In a chapter entitled Schooling for Failure, the author discusses the cramped conditions in which too many children were living as he researched his book and the effects these had on their development, at play and in study.
I mention this because an article in The Guardian draws attention to the persistent problem of accommodation overcrowding. It also offers a comparison between attitudes towards overcrowding of humans, particularly children, and the cramped conditions chickens endure.
It offers a contrast between what politicians are doing about the chickens (a lot) and what they are doing about the children (little).
It is a strange priority, although that is not to say that the welfare of chickens should be ignored.
Shelter points out that, despite the building booms of the past 20-odd years, one million children in the UK live in overcrowded conditions. This is 50,000 more than in 2007. In London alone, there are 330,000 children cooped up in cramped housing.
Worse, despite promises by this government to update the definition of overcrowding, the one drawn up in 1935 remains intact. To wit, kitchens are reasonable sleeping quarters.
Politicians, whose only somnolent association with the kitchen is likely to be when they are lying face down on the floor drunk, are plainly putting chickens first. For a Labour government to be complicit in this is a pusillanimous dereliction of its party's raison d'être.
Fortunately, Shelter is attempting to put overcrowding back on to the political agenda and has launched a petition to lobby the government to revise its outdated definition.
Oh yes, the book I mentioned at the top of this blog is called Inside the Inner City and was written by Paul Harrison. It was published a generation ago in 1983.
Plus ça change.
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