Re Beth Steel’s article (I’m from an English working-class town. When will society stop looking at us through the rearview mirror?, 6 September), I too have been concerned about my home town. I live about half a mile outside it and I am regularly shocked by the Dickensian (sometimes more Hardy-esque) conditions that former acquaintances live in.
The deprivation is alarmingly similar to what I saw as a child. I don’t understand how the inequalities in our society haven’t declined in the past 40 years. So much else has changed.
I am reading The Parish of Myddle. It was published in 1701 and is considered one of the best primary sources describing the civil war. The author, Richard Gough, was proud of his family’s ties to the locale – like other ordinary people, his loyalty in the war was neither royalist nor parliamentary, but with his countrymen and environment.
How little life has changed for the most vulnerable since then. Elderly people often became beggars, which could see them jailed or forced to work. Women and children were traipsed from village to village because no one (the parish councils) wanted to take responsibility. I’ve seen family members go through the exact same. In the last five years.
Life has changed in some ways. But the laws that govern us were meant to keep us desperate for work. It’s a type of indentured service. Every subject must earn their keep. This country was never ours.
Samantha Brennan
Dunstable, Bedfordshire
• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
