Hate Mail - Thou Shalt Not Diss Britland

I once knew a wonderful woman, a very liberal Democrat, who was the wife of an Army captain.  She was, by heritage, Zuni, they had met while he was stationed in California, as a young man.  They lived in several places when he was posted in Europe, one of them Great Britain.   She told me that she'd seen poverty in a lot of places in North America, in Europe, in other places in their travels.  She told me that the worst poverty, the most grinding poverty she ever saw was in England, in the 1960s and 70s, after the Welfare State had allegedly replaced the Poor Law in the years after the Second World War.  She was led by seeing that to reading Charles Dickens, she probably knew more about his books, his life and the milieu of which he wrote about than some university based specialists.  I knew her quite well and knew her to be a very perceptive, very intelligent and minimally ideologically motivated person.  I'll take her word for it until someone shows me otherwise.   And she told me that about the time Margaret Thatcher was about to start tearing up the Welfare State.  I don't notice that anyone, Tory or "Labour" has put even that back in place.