I WAS intrigued, not just by everything, but by a story in yon Herald newspaper about Victorian asylums not always being the nightmare we'd imagined.

 

The Glasgow Asylum for Lunatics was cited in particular. Opening for business in 1814, it is said to have defied modern popular assumptions, with inmates being cured rather than left to languish in pools of their own torment.

This is encouraging news, if we define news as the last draft of history. It's pleasant to think that people, even professionals, in the past may have actually cared about those in their charge and, despite a relative lack of medication, to have made things better for them.

It struck a chord because I've been unnerved of late by appalling and increasingly frequent stories of dying and incapacitated people being told by the welfare (now surely the wrong word) authorities that they are fit to work.

Frequently, I've defended frontline welfare staff in the past, so this troubled me. It seems the poor are now considered the enemy and adjudged guilty until proven innocent.

I wondered what else might - big, huge M - have been better in the past, and shoved my neb into some workhouses. Not good obviously. Most complaints involved the gruel but, in general, these places were clearly nightmarish.

And yet there is one way in which many of the poor or infirm have it worse now: they are alone. No one is praising the enforced social solidarity of the workhouse, just making the point that everything is easier when you're not suffering on your tod. And today we live in an atomised society.

Ach, consider the absurd position that a contemplation of austerity forced me to take: I was genuinely looking back at 19th century poverty to see if it had any redeeming features compared to today.

But we do hear of people going hungry now. In Britain. In the 21st century. Financially, you cannot be surprised. I have written time and time again that folk cannot live off the welfare allowance of 70 quid a week. It isn't possible.

You'd certainly have to give up the car and the internet, which isn't going to help you find work. But nobody does anything to increase this pitiful allowance. At best, folk nod and say: "Aye, 70 quid. No' very much." Where are the unions, the left-wing politicians? All the caring people are running food banks, putting bandages on the sores.

Sometimes, we look back in social history to appreciate how much better things are now. And, sometimes, we look back and begin to wonder how much worse.