Re: Really ....
"but not remotely as bad as parts of China/India/Africa today"
FFS this is absurd. It takes moments for you to find out just how bad life was in the 19th C.. Let me help you:
"Henry Mayhew was an investigative journalist who wrote a series of articles for the Morning Chronicle about the way the poor of London lived and worked.
In an article published on 24th September 1849 he described a London Street with a tidal ditch running through it, into which drains and sewers emptied. The ditch contained the only water the people in the street had to drink, and it was ‘the colour of strong green tea’, in fact it was ‘more like watery mud than muddy water’. This is the report he gave:
‘As we gazed in horror at it, we saw drains and sewers emptying their filthy contents into it; we saw a whole tier of doorless privies in the open road, common to men and women built over it; we heard bucket after bucket of filth splash into it’ (2).
Mayhew’s articles were later published in a book called London Labour and the London Poor and in the introduction he wrote:
‘…the condition of a class of people whose misery, ignorance, and vice, amidst all the immense wealth and great knowledge of “the first city in the world”, is, to say the very least, a national disgrace to us’ (3)."
http://www.hiddenlives.org.uk/articles/poverty.html
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If the only way you measure success is in the achievements of the rich or the number of countries 'owned', then yes, Britain was "great". But life for ordinary people in Britain has never been better than today, and if you think differently, you really have been duped by the two arse cheeks of nationalism and xenophobia.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
