Sci you have spent alot of time on that.
I was going to say, that was a pretty damn impressive (if slightly obsessive and manic) post.
Remind me never to argue with you again
Sci, you have a knack for handing people their asses.
Well thank you. What can I say? Poverty issues mean a lot to me. I get very angry at the general perception that people have that if you're not starving to death, you don't have a real problem-- nevermind that people who are poor generally survive from paycheck to paycheck, often are incapable of paying all of their bills, often end up with varying degrees of
food insecurity, have difficulty obtaining a proper education (in part because of a working poor culture that frowns upon an education out of resentment towards people higher-up on the economic ladder), and have an extremely difficult time moving up in life (far moreso than people from the middle class).
Anyone who's ever wondered how they were going to eat, or gotten an eviction notice with no idea where they could go, knows what a huge problem poverty is even if you're not destitute.
Sci you have spent alot of time on that.
I was going to say, that was a pretty damn impressive (if slightly obsessive and manic) post.
Remind me never to argue with you again
Sci, you have a knack for handing people their asses.
Slightly obsessive?
Seriously some people have too much time on their hands!
If using a fictional example made any oblivious middle-class poster here more aware of the severity of the poverty problem in the first world, I wouldn't consider it a waste of time at all.
Sci is correct though, Rose is poor, at least in terms of the UK. Is she poor relatively?
Um, yes she is. Again, you are confusing
destitution (or
extreme poverty) with poverty.
I bet Jamie lived in far worse circumstances (heck I bet Ian and Barbara did)
Jaime, sure. He was from a pre-Industrial society. Ian and Barbara? Bull. They were clearly from the middle class and clearly had more prospects than Rose would ever have had had she not met the Doctor.
Rose, of course, is presumably doing quite well now that her adopted father is super-rich and she's an aget of the People's Republic of Great Britain's Torchwood Institute -- just like Martha's doing better for herself now that she's working for the Unified Intelligence Taskforce and Jack's running the UK Torchwood. Obviously meeting the Doctor is a pathway to career advancement!
Seriously though I don't think Rose was quite at the bottom of the ladder, close to it yes but not the very bottom.
She's as far down as you can go without being destitute. Why do you think Jackie began immediately harping on her to get a new job once Henrik's was blown up? Because she knew they were surviving from paycheck to paycheck, and any disruption in that was incredibly dangerous for them.
One factual correction on your figures though, in 2005 Rose would have probably slotted into the 10% tax bracket that existed at the time (before Gordon deleted it).
Thanks, I hadn't found any information on 2005 UK income tax rates. Do you know what her council tax rate would have been, or what the average London council tax rate for someing living in a council flat would be?
You're also failing to take into account any benefits that Jackie might have been getting
I don't see any evidence that Jackie was getting any benefits as of "Rose." "The Christmas Invasion"'s reference to Jackie between better off twenty quid a week seems to imply such, but that's a year and a half after "Rose." My interpretation would be that Jackie went on welfare after Rose disappeared.
As for class bias in the UK? I can only speak for myself but I grew up in Thatcher's Britain, my dad was unemployed and we lived in a council house. I went to university (and didn't have to pay for the privilage) and now have a good job and all that comes with it (mainly debts damn it!) and I love the argument that there's no class bias in the States--people buy the American dream far too easily, social mobility isn't much different between the two in my understanding.
Actually, I agree with you that social mobility in the US is much harder than our culture tends to pretend it is. I have, however, gotten enough complaints about major class bias in the UK (especially accent-based) that I find myself skeptical of the idea that your experience would necessarily be representative of most Britons' experiences. But either way, people in the United States do not have that immediate, "Ooh, what a
chav!" reaction that people in the United Kingdom might have upon meeting someone from the working class, in part because our accents are more regional than they are class-based.
