[DanaC]

It may be destructive for me as an individual to focus on what other individuals have. But at a policy level, it is useful for politicians to look at those areas of prosperity and those areas of deprivation and ask questions about why those disparities exist to their current extent. Individuals are responsible for themselves. Government (local and national) is responsible for looking at the wider picture

[eta] an individual is not responsible for the culture and economic circumstances in which they grow up. Many of the inequalities which most trouble us as a nation begin at a very young age and often at birth. It is right, in my opinion, for a country as relatively wealthy as Britain to ask the question, why do some of our communities have a decade less of life expectancy than others? It is also right to ask the question, why do some of our communities have higher levels of teen conceptions than others? It is not simply 'individual failure' when it affects such large numbers of people clustered together and is found so little amongst other large groups of people. These are societal problems and societal problems require a little more than individual effort to overcome.