As Joseph Townsend put it in his Dissertation, the ideological cornerstone of the 1834 Act:

„Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjection, to the most perverse. In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them [the poor] on to labour; yet our laws have said they shall never hunger […] [L]egal constraint is attended with much trouble, violence, and noise […] whereas hunger is not only peaceable, silent, unremitting pressure, but as the most powerful natural motive to industry and labour, it calls for the most powerful exertions.“

Fast forward to 2012, and the shameful efforts to reduce wages in the name of economic competitiveness through increased taxation and cuts in Greece, Portugal, and a number of other EU countries sound like a distant echo of 1834.