Yakoub Islam: "If you want to know England, just look at the way many of us treat our most vulnerable groups – the elderly, adults with learning disabilities, runaways and children who are under local authority guardianship. The care of the two former groups have been subjected to a systematic de-professionalisation – today, most of those who care for these groups have no more than a national vocational qualification, although many have no qualifications whatsoever. As for children in care, most are likely to leave school with little or no education, and as adults, they go on to make up an astonishingly high proportion of England’s homeless. Charities such as Kids Company have to take Local Authority’s to court in order to force them to give vulnerable children somewhere to live."
I wonder how much difference a welfare structure makes to the idea of a 'social ethic'? Does the existence of such a pervasive welfare structure diminish the feeling we, as individuals, ought to do something about the vulnerable?
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