At the end of his lengthy comments, Kelly quotes George Orwell from The Road to Wigan Pier:

At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her - her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold...

She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen.

It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that "It isn't the same for them as it would be for us," and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums.

For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her - understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.

The assumptions we make about others can be powerfully positive or downright crushing. It is essential that we come to grips with and take seriously the "self-understanding" of others.

Orwell's insights are brilliant. They afford the subject of his analysis the respect she had earned by living in her very concrete, extremely harsh and well-understood reality.

Frankly, many of us middle class types just don't get it.