Jehovah's Witnesses etc.

Well, I had a chat with the Jehovah's Witnesses and they were a very pleasant and intelligent young couple with a 2 year old son. Both were bilingual and their English was fantastic. She is German but you could hardly tell. We chatted about all kinds of things and we seemed to see eye-to-eye on a lot of matters. We discussed how people worship money and how stupid and selfish that is and how some people would rather see their neighbour starve than give them food even though they have plenty themselves. Thay told me that Marks and Spencers now throws food away when it reaches its sell-by date even though it is still perfectly good to eat, whereas when I lived in England they used to give it to charity. Here they don't even cut the price when things reach their sell-by date - they just throw it in the bin. A few days ago I saw a young girl diving into the rubbish bins in our street in search of food. There seem to be more and more beggars on the streets now - some of them genuine and others not! I've given a euro or 2 to a couple of them and I?ve bought a copy of La Farola from a seller outside the supermarket. He was very polite and now says hello to me when I see him. However, another one I gave to had a story about having been robbed and his passport stolen which turned out to be a pack of lies as I've now noticed that he's there every day. I think from his accent he was probably French and he said he was sleeping on the beach but now I don't know what to believe. Now I tend to think it's probably better not to give money directly to these people but rather to organizatons that provide assistance. Is homelessness a problem in England now or has it got any better. I think the Cameron government´s policies aren't going to help by cutting benefits. I know they had to do something about government spending but targetting the poor is not a good idea. Here they're going to re-introduce a wealth tax for people with over 700000 euros in assets which is a step in the right direction but they've also been making cutbacks in healthcare and education whilst continuing with crazy projects like the AVE network (Spain's high-speed train). They're building the largest station in Europe in Barcelona (Sagrera) at the moment and it's a dreadful mess. There's also a plan to build a new station under Plaza Francesc Macia near us, but I hope that gets scrapped under the new cutbacks.