Making Ends Meet
SIR.—I have read with great interest the articles and correspondence in your columns entitled Making Ends Meet. I am an ordinary worker living in the midst of an essentially working-class district, and have read your very intetesting journal regularly now for ever ten years. I should imagine that the great majority of your readers belong to the professional and middle classes. and I should be very glad if any of them could enlighten me on the following two points which have always greatly perplexed and intrigued me, and to which I have never succeeded in getting any satisfactory reply: (1) Why arc the middle classes totally unable to " make ends meet and apparently living in direst poverty en incomes whic:a are beyond the wildest dreams of the vast majority of the ordinary workers of this country? Neither my own income nor those of my fellow-workers comes to one-half of the figure of £800 after deduction of tax enjoyed by the retired headmaster, yet most of us " make ends meet " without undue difficulty or, at any rate, without excessive grumb.ing and self-pity. (2) Why do the middle classes possess. or imagine that they possess, God-given rights to amenities and services not enjoyed by the workers and which, indeed, it is apparently wicked and immoral of the workers to expect?
The most annoyin3 and infuriating thing about these people with their handsome incomes and comfortable pensions is the way in which they assume that they are magnanimcusly " making sacrifices" for the worker. Are these retired professional people aware that their pensions are a charge on production, and that production depends entirely on the workers, who alone can give real value to the money amounts of these pensions ? That, in fact, the workers are " making sacrifices" for them rather than the reverse? Are they aware, moreover, that no pensions await the majority of these workers on retirement other than the meagre State pensions, and that these are only assured to them by the Welfare State, at which contributors to the Spectator never seem to get tired of sneering ?
It would be interesting, for purposes of comparison, to publish an article showing how one of the many aged couples in this district manage to " make ends meet " on a weekly income of £2 12s. per week, and , how their budget compares with that of the retired headmaster with his £800 per year and the parson with his £250. But, of course, these people . are inarticulate. They cannot write articles for the Spectator. 'there- fore, presumably, they just don't count.—Yours faithfully, 41 Gill Street, Netherton. Dudley, Worcs. F. BAWL
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