Measuring poverty by an absolute threshold has the advantage of applying the same standard across everywhere, making comparisons easier and clearer. On the other hand, it suffers from the disadvantage that any absolute poverty threshold is arbitrary; the amount of wealth required for survival is not the same in all places and time periods making it very difficult to define a common minimum standard of living for everyone. For example, a person living in far northern Scandinavia requires a source of heat during colder months, while a person living on a tropical island does not.
Relative poverty however, in contrast classifies individuals or families as "poor" not by comparing them to a fixed cut off point, but by comparing them to others in the population in a more local society. Advantage of this are that it gives a more realistic picture of deprivation within society and broadens the idea of what poverty is from not just basic necessities but to other needs that other people in society have making life bearable.
However, when take to its extreme this approach means that as long as inequality exists, so will poverty and can lead to people ignoring the differences across different countries. For example, as expectations are lower in third world countries, if a person living there is not starving, they are not poor. Poverty in the UK is generally measured on a relative, rather than an absolute scale.
Welfare state also has numerous main interpretations being firstly, “the provision of welfare services by the state” meaning an ideal model in which the state assumes basic responsibility for the welfare of its people. Welfare state can also mean the creation of a "safety net" of minimum standards with varying forms of welfare.
The Welfare State of the United Kingdom was prefigured in the William Beveridge Report in 1942, which identified five "Giant Evils" in society being,
Want
Idleness
and Disease.
A series of changes were put in place by the government to deal with these Evils after the Second World War. The changes meant that the government took measures in policy to provide for the people of the United Kingdom which they referred to as "from the cradle to the grave."
This policy resulted in massive expenditure and a great widening of what was considered to be the state's responsibility. In addition to the services of Education, Health, Unemployment and sickness allowances already put in place, the welfare state included the idea of increasing redistributive taxation, increasing regulation of industry food and better safety regulations for housing.
It was believed that the overall cost of medical care would decrease, as people became more healthy and so needed less treatment. Instead the cost increased dramatically which, in 1951 led to severe financial problems, and charges for dentistry, Optometry and prescriptions by the same Labour government that had founded the NHS just three years earlier. Despite this, the principle of health care ("free at the point of use") became a central part of the dogma of the welfare state, which later governments critical of the welfare state were unable to reverse. The classic Welfare State period lasted from approximately 1945 to the 1970s, when policies under Margaret Thatchers leadership began to privatize public institutions, although many features of it remain today. This includes National Insurance contributions, and the provision of old age pensions.
Since the 1980's, the British government has begun to reduce some provisions in England for example, free eye tests for all have now been stopped and prescription charges for drugs have constantly risen since they were first introduced in 1951. Providing a Welfare State is however still the most important, most controversial, most politicized, most expensive and most loved element in the UK today. Even those who seek to dismantle it agree that it represents the British state's finest single achievement.
For example, “New Right” ideas were developed in the early eighties and took a distinctive view of elements of society such as family, education, crime and deviance. In the United Kingdom, the term New Right more specifically refers to a strand of Conservatism that the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan influenced. They were ideologically committed to being socially conservative. Key policies included deregulation of business, a dismantling of the welfare state, privatization of nationalized industries and restructuring of the national workforce in order to increase industrial and economic flexibility in an increasingly global market. Similar policies were continued by the subsequent Conservative government under John Major and the mark of the New Right is said to be evident in the New Labour government of the present.
Marxism, on the other hand is an idea that comes from the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Modern Communism is based on Marxist ideas, but many Marxists disagree about whether Communist countries have understood Marxism correctly.
Marxism is the idea that there are different economic classes of people. Most people need to work to get money. They are called "workers" and belong to “Working Class”. Another group, usually business owners, are called "capitalists" because they live by amassing capital which is money made by selling something for a higher price than they paid for it. In the Marxist view, not all money is "capital", only money made by buying something and then selling it -- in other words, the same thing other people refer to as "profit".
Most workers work for companies owned by other people or groups. The capitalist pays a wage to the worker. The capitalist has bought work from the worker, which according to marxist economic thinking is the only thing that can add exchange-value to a product, and then sells the product for more money than the worker was paid. The capitalist amasses capital by paying the worker less money than the value added to the product by the work done and then selling the product for more money. Exchange-value is the value something has on a market. Exchange-value is created by adding work to something. A products exchange-value is determined by the average work needed to create the product for the market. Exchange-value is often described in work-time.
Poverty in Scotland particularly, has fallen significantly from 23% in 2001–02 to 18% at the end of 2007. Evidence suggests that the poverty profile in Scotland reflects that of the UK as a whole. On some measures, such as child poverty, Scotland is doing slightly better. On others, such as fuel poverty, it is somewhat behind, but the variation in poverty rates is small and on average, matches that of the UK as a whole.
Although the rates of poverty in Scotland and in the UK as a whole are now broadly similar, progress on reducing poverty over the past ten years has been faster in Scotland than in other parts of the UK. Evidence suggests that this is due to the fact that more people were simply living in poverty in Scotland in 1997. Furthermore,the target of eliminating child poverty by 2020,with interim targets of reducing rates by a quarter by 2004–05 and by a half in 2010–11, The Government failed to meet its national targets and due to this, 250,000 children are still living in poverty in Scotland today.
