John Prescott Quotes
What government has been doing, we've got major programmes now, of billions of pounds, which are directed by central government into these areas of deprivation.
Prescott, John. Interview by David Frost. Breakfast with Frost, BBC News, 31 Oct. 2004.
The Pool Laws provided economic and food relief for the very poor—an early type of welfare. Malthus and other conservatives hated the Poor Laws, but many like Malthus felt it immoral to terminate what was then the only social safety net. And none of the critics could suggest anything better and especially anything that would eliminate poverty altogether. The same issues were to be fought out in America during the Hoover Administration when the Great Depression struck. Hoover’s refusal for government to be the social safety net together with his inability to improve the economy, led to his ousting and the establishment of the New Deal with FDR.
When he wrote this article, America was in the middle of the Great Depression. In its first 3 years, President Herbert Hoover, a great believer in private charity, was so rigid in his ideology, that he refused to allow the Federal Government to provide some relief to the vast number of people in need who had overwhelmed the capacity of private charities. At the same time, the more affluent whose generosity funded the charities, had seen their own fortunes slashed by the depression and the themselves were often failing. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected, he was much more flexible and when Flexner was writing this article, the Federal Government was performing many functions that before were only provided by private organizations.
John Leslie Prescott, Baron Prescott is a British Labour Party politician who served as Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007. He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Kingston upon Hull East from 1970 to 2010. He was seen as the political link to the working class in a Labour Party increasingly led by modernising, middle-class professionals such as Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson and developed a reputation as a key conciliator in the often stormy relationship between Blair and Gordon Brown.
