Category: Hakka Ethnography

My father – Peter Wyles – used to be friends with a Professor of Law in Devon. As my father helped run the ‘Claimants’ Union’ – he would receive free legal advice from the Professor – who would explain the rules and regulations governing the administration of the British Welfare State. My father – and other people – would then assist the poor and impoverished as they sought to negotiate with the ‘DHSS’ and navigate their way around the Bourgeois legal system designed to ‘exclude’ them (the weakest segment of capitalist society) from securing their ‘Rights’! This is where I first learned that the 1948 Reforms carried-out by the incumbent Labour Government in the UK were premised upon their Soviet counterparts (devised by Lenin and other Old Guard Bolsheviks). Essentially, the Soviets found that collective taxation provided the government with vast amounts of money which allowed the State to provide high-quality assistance to those in need! In turn, millions upon millions of terribly impoverished populations were given free education, healthcare, housing and social help – lifting them out of this state of deprivation in a matter of just one or two