Essay by Eric Worrall
Imagine being so poor you have to send your kids to school wearing dirty clothes. Because this is happening right now in Britain.
Teachers forced to wash school students’ uniform and install washing machines in schools due to ‘hygiene poverty’
16 November 2024, 11:59 | Updated: 16 November 2024, 14:05
By Shannon Cook
Teachers in some parts of the UK have been left to personally wash students’ school uniforms and install washing machines to combat students’ poor hygiene.
The findings were laid out in a survey by smol – a cleaning brand – and the Hygiene Bank charity.
The teachers believe that students’ poor hygiene can lead to increased bullying or isolation from peers.
40% of teachers who responded to the survey confirmed that they had washed a school student’s uniform themselves, meanwhile nearly 90% of teachers said they had assisted students with hygiene products.
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Lisa Cropper, a family support practitioner at St Cuthbert’s Academy in Blackpool, told Sky News that parents had confided in her that they felt they had to make a “choice” between washing and the electricity.
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Much of Britain tends to have cold, dripping wet winters, so It can be difficult to dry clothes without a fireplace or an electric clothes dryer (or an oil heater). Poor people are unlikely to have more than one or two school uniforms, so the inability to dry clothes likely means kids have to wear the same uniform for the entire week, perhaps longer in inclement weather.
Using an electric heater to dry clothes, even if they can afford the electricity, can result in a dripping wet home, especially in older buildings. It is a truly horrible sight watching a slug or snail appear behind your baby basket, crawling up a glistening wet wall near where your baby is sleeping.
People can live with wearing smelly, unwashed clothes and bad hygiene – our ancestors lived this way for centuries. But you cannot live without adequate warmth.
Thanks to Net Zero’s skyrocketing energy prices, Britain appears to be well on the way to establishing Victorian England levels of poverty in some communities. The poorest people in Britain have been forced to make a choice, between the humiliation of sending their kids to school in unwashed clothes, or risking their health in even worse ways by providing inadequate food and warmth.
In some ways it is worse today than it was in the late 1800s during Queen Victoria’s reign. At least the Victorian poor were allowed to burn scrap wood for warmth. Most homes in Victorian times had some kind of fireplace or hearth where people could burn wood or whatever else they could get their hands on to stay warm.
In today’s Britain, even if you have a fireplace, only expensive low sulphur smokeless fuel is permitted since a 2020 crackdown on burning firewood in urban areas. In any case, people who can barely afford electricity are unlikely to be living in a home with a safe fireplace. Lightning a fire in a hovel with a cracked and crumbling fireplace and chimney is unlikely to end well for anyone concerned.
Blackpool, which was quoted in the article above, has a thriving prostitution industry. While Blackpool tries to portray itself as a family friendly holiday destination, and a lot of families do visit and enjoy the seaside amenities of Blackpool, if you leave your hotel at night, you may find the streets filled with a very different crowd. It is not difficult to understand why people in impossible circumstances sell themselves to try to give their kids at least some of the necessities of life, or stop borderline criminal debt collectors from battering their door, trying to collect on the desperate high interest payday loans which have consumed their income. But with family home heating bills exceeding £3000 / year (US $3700 / year) for a one bedroom flat in some of the poorest quality properties, and all the competition from other desperate Britons, along with economic refugees from Germany’s train wreck economy and other financially stricken parts of Europe, that occasional Saturday night some mums and dads spend turning tricks to boost the family income likely just covers the heating bills and other basic necessities.
The saddest part of this for me is it is all so unnecessary. Blackpool is in Lancashire, which has one of Britain’s largest reserves of frackable gas. Test wells have been drilled which prove the viability of the reserve. But nobody is allowed to extract the gas, because Britain is committed to Nut Zero.
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