Playing Scrabble with my grandchildren was interesting and fun.
To be so imaginative and creative that all the tiles could be played in random order to make a high scoring word.
There was a great debate about the word quayfump.
It was a word that used all the tiles, on a triple word, with a bonus for using all the tiles, 241 points in one go I was reliably informed.
My grandchildren were not educated at Eton but I seemed to recognise a certain key characteristic if not a quayfump of those who are.
We are living now in an Alice in Wonderland world where as Humpty Dumpty informed Alice, 'When I use a word .... it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'
We are not in a recession. We are all in this together. The mess we inherited from Labour. There is light at the end of the tunnel. We have turned the corner.
In 1985, inspired by a conference speech given by Peter Townsend at a meeting of the Church of England's Board for Social Responsibility a group of Social Responsibility Officers from Diocese around the country, of which I was one, formed a response to the increasing evidence of rising poverty in the UK.
We called our response Church Action on Poverty.
At the end of the New Labour Government I was of the view that CAP had done its work, that poverty and in particular Child Poverty, whilst still in evidence, was decreasing.
There was some satisfaction in knowing that a campaign such as this had had some effect, borne some fruit, helped to shape anti poverty legislation and inform government strategy.
Today after three years of coalition government in the UK poverty is once again endemic in the body politic.
The main sign of this is the massive increase in Food Banks.
According to The Trussell Trust a leading Food Bank Charity 13 Million people currently live in poverty in the UK.
Last year foodbanks fed 346, 992 people including 126,889 children.
There are currently 325 Food Banks in the UK and the trust is aiming to open a Food Bank in every Town in the country.
All the evidence points to rising costs of food and fuel, static income, high unemployment and changes to benefits.
How is the coalition responding?
On the one hand the Banks and the Fuel Companies are allowed to continue without their business practises being challenged, indeed they are assisted with further public support either because they are too big to fail or because they are seen as contributing to the continued and unnecessary growth of the economy.
Meanwhile, the poor have what little support is available changed, removed or subject to increasingly intrusive investigation by a DWP and its agents tasked to reduce benefit dependency.
Humpty Dumpty would feel right at home on the front bench of coalition politics.
This is an administration which the United Kingdom Statistics Authority has accused the Chairman of the Conservative Party Grant Shapps, of deliberately misusing statistics on disability benefits.
The UKSA has also accused Iain Duncan Smith of misusing figures with regard to the coalitions benefits cap.
David Cameron has been challenged over his claims that the coalition is paying down the deficit.
Words mean what they want them to mean.
Meanwhile the queues at the Food Banks grow longer and the people who are not served by their own government are increasingly left to fend for themselves for themselves or rely on the comfort of strangers.
Maybe quayflump is just the word because I am simply quayflumped that the coalition is still in office.
To be so imaginative and creative that all the tiles could be played in random order to make a high scoring word.
There was a great debate about the word quayfump.
It was a word that used all the tiles, on a triple word, with a bonus for using all the tiles, 241 points in one go I was reliably informed.
My grandchildren were not educated at Eton but I seemed to recognise a certain key characteristic if not a quayfump of those who are.
We are living now in an Alice in Wonderland world where as Humpty Dumpty informed Alice, 'When I use a word .... it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'
We are not in a recession. We are all in this together. The mess we inherited from Labour. There is light at the end of the tunnel. We have turned the corner.
In 1985, inspired by a conference speech given by Peter Townsend at a meeting of the Church of England's Board for Social Responsibility a group of Social Responsibility Officers from Diocese around the country, of which I was one, formed a response to the increasing evidence of rising poverty in the UK.
We called our response Church Action on Poverty.
At the end of the New Labour Government I was of the view that CAP had done its work, that poverty and in particular Child Poverty, whilst still in evidence, was decreasing.
There was some satisfaction in knowing that a campaign such as this had had some effect, borne some fruit, helped to shape anti poverty legislation and inform government strategy.
Today after three years of coalition government in the UK poverty is once again endemic in the body politic.
The main sign of this is the massive increase in Food Banks.
According to The Trussell Trust a leading Food Bank Charity 13 Million people currently live in poverty in the UK.
Last year foodbanks fed 346, 992 people including 126,889 children.
There are currently 325 Food Banks in the UK and the trust is aiming to open a Food Bank in every Town in the country.
All the evidence points to rising costs of food and fuel, static income, high unemployment and changes to benefits.
How is the coalition responding?
On the one hand the Banks and the Fuel Companies are allowed to continue without their business practises being challenged, indeed they are assisted with further public support either because they are too big to fail or because they are seen as contributing to the continued and unnecessary growth of the economy.
Meanwhile, the poor have what little support is available changed, removed or subject to increasingly intrusive investigation by a DWP and its agents tasked to reduce benefit dependency.
Humpty Dumpty would feel right at home on the front bench of coalition politics.
This is an administration which the United Kingdom Statistics Authority has accused the Chairman of the Conservative Party Grant Shapps, of deliberately misusing statistics on disability benefits.
The UKSA has also accused Iain Duncan Smith of misusing figures with regard to the coalitions benefits cap.
David Cameron has been challenged over his claims that the coalition is paying down the deficit.
Words mean what they want them to mean.
Meanwhile the queues at the Food Banks grow longer and the people who are not served by their own government are increasingly left to fend for themselves for themselves or rely on the comfort of strangers.
Maybe quayflump is just the word because I am simply quayflumped that the coalition is still in office.
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