Sleeping rough was a rare sight in the 1970s

Rabbi Margaret Jacobi recalls a decade when street begging wasn’t part of our society, while Rita Gallard and John Parkin reflect on the 70s housing market and the Austin Allegro

I welcomed Polly Toynbee’s article giving us a positive picture of the 1970s (Are the 2020s really like living back in the 1970s? I wish …, 20 November). However, she omitted what is to me one of the most important and visible differences from now. I was a teenager in the 1970s and was shocked, when going to Italy for the first time, to see people begging on the street. Until the advent of Thatcher it was very rare to see anyone sleeping rough, except on the Embankment in London. It was only with Thatcher’s policies that this became commonplace.

As somebody who remembers a world with high income tax and low poverty and homelessness, I consider it a duty to remind those who don’t that such a society is possible and existed not long ago.
Rabbi Margaret Jacobi
Birmingham

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