Not wishing to come across all Daily Mail but …
Watched the previous weeks edition and found i couldn't help but agree with the politician !Probably a first for me .But when the woman was complaining about what she didn't have , what she did have was telling .Laptops,Mobiles kids with Nintendos each not between them .Hardly poverty living .
Then the woman with only £150 to spend on food shopping taking £40 of that for cigarettes just beggars belief .When i was working 60 hours a week i couldn't have imagined having that sort of money to spend on myself even if i had wanted to .Maybe the answer is specific food tokens so at least the kids get looked after .Oh and maybe take the dogs away so that they don't have to be fed as well .

Maybe the answer is specific food tokens so at least the kids get looked after

what like milk tokens which *must* be spent on milk. except the supermarkets take them and fiddle them for other peoples milk, to encourage people in.

if there is s sytem it will be fiddled.

£150 to spend on shopping? A week or month? How many in the house?

tower block of what?

So oldfart – can you answer my question???? I wanna know how much these people have!!!

It was per day.

I think oldfart's generalisations are a bit selective, but I hear what you're saying.
Austin Mitchell and his wife are fantastically bad though 🙂

I bet your definition of luxury is very different to 20 years ago too.

£150 to spend on shopping? A week or month? How many in the house?

I think there was 6 of them including the MP

We spend £120/week on food for 6 in our house

So they have £150 a week for 5 people normally?

We spend around £100 a week for two adults and two babies including the nappies etc.

I bet your definition of luxury is very different to 20 years ago too.

Good point – I think that's why the current recession never really seemed to "bite" even like the one in the early 80's many of us grew up through as the "normal" standard of living is so elevated from those days that the buffer to proper poverty is quite large.

Exactly this time last year I was in Swaziland with a group of UK school kids. Our school has a partnership with a rural school in Swaziland and for the last 3 years has raised a wedge of cash (£20-£30K a year) to invest in this school. The money goes into big building projects and our kids pay out of their own pocket to go out there partly for the experience and partly to help. Last year our kids dug 2km of trench to install running water and electricity at the school. I got to become a bore hole and pump installation expert! This year they are going out to paint the orphanage that has been built in the intervening time and extend the water to an irrigation system so they can grow their own food. When you have seen first hand kids walking barefoot to school, up to 2hrs each way, who only get fed one meal a day (and only then if the school has supplies) and whose idea of living it up is being handed an old tennis ball between 30 for a game of football you start to remember what real poverty looks like. When you then remember 40% of them are HIV positive and 20% are orphans due to their parents having died of aids your compassion'ometer gets well and truly reset.

You had money, and a house?
Pah, We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt. But we were happy.

When we were kids, we would get up for work two hours before we went to bed.

I watched it last week and was quite surpised by that woman's attitude.

As far as I can remember he (the politician) did the shopping for the family for the week & managed to get it all for £103 or thereabouts which they were well impressed with, given that they'd given him a budget of £150.
They then took the rest of the cash from him & spent it on cigarettes – £160 a month on cigarettes!! That's nearly £2k!

Have to agree about Austin Mitchell .I had hoped that he was going to be the face of the person in the street .Turns out to be a complete knob .

Yeah, I had similar expectations and disapointments.