Poverty is not a meritocracy

Poverty is not a meritocracy

I used to like the Guardian. I spend more time writing responses to it's anti-poor and anti-Corbyn rubbish than anything else these days. Deborah Orr wrote a "piece" about the "deserving" poor. This was my response. 

"Deserving" 

" Human progress isn’t measured by industry. It’s measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life. A life without privilege." Doctor Who

 What makes them deserving? What makes them devoid of enough humanity to cast them aside as human waste? Poverty breeds bad choices. It breeds addiction and desperation. 
In Victorian Britain they blamed booze. If those feckless poor could just stop drinking themselves to death, then it would be acceptable to help them. The alcohol was cheap calories, it numbed the pain in the body and mind. The physical abuses, the lack of opportunity, the lack of basic human dignity and safety. 
Poverty is the same sickness for all the nice white smart phones the sickness endures and it is man made. It is easy to demonize the poor because no-one is really speaking for them. It is criminal that the taxes that huge corporations don't pay could solve this. It's not complicated. 
Poverty isn't a meritocracy. It is a social sickness, one that affects a great many and contributes to physical illness and even climate change. Will there be people that break the law, absolutely, but actually at a much lower rate than those in privilege positions. The reasons they break those laws (like stealing food from supermarket bins) are generally about survival. To say that because they are poor and "bad" they are less deserving" (by which you mean less human) is absolutely vile.