As a consequence of these efforts by both Labor and Conservative governments to resettle the working class, Britain's slums are slowly disappearing. Of course many square miles of them remain, and any newspaper can publish photographs showing conditions of appalling filth and squalor. Yet a great deal has been done to destroy the slums. There remain, of course, the miles and miles of old working-class districts, shabby and dull, but these are part of the landscape of any industrial nation and it is probably impossible for any government, British or American or German, to eliminate them entirely. The people of the New Towns, of the housing estates, and of the working class generally enjoy full employment and higher wages than they have ever dreamed of in their lives. Admittedly, prices have risen steadily since the war. But rents have not. In Norwich, for instance, there were in 1956 eight thousand council houses that rented at seven shillings, or ninety-eight cents, a week. The manual worker in British industry often pays only a nominal rent. The Welfare State has relieved him of the burden of saving for the education of his children or for medical care. A skilled worker in industry may have a basic wage of £12 ($33.60) or £13 ($36.40) a week. Overtime work may raise the total to an average of £15 ($42.00) for a week's work. A worker at a similar job in a similar industry before the war was extremely fortunate if he made £4 a week. Under these circumstances the buying spree on which the British people embarked in 1953 was inevitable. The new class had no need to save. The state took care of its welfare, and taxes were taken at the source under PAYE (Pay As You Earn). Workers had been fully employed for more than a decade. Now at last the shops were full, and the hucksters of installment buying, known in Britain as "buying on the Never-Never," were at every door. One investigation of life in the New Towns revealed a typical weekly budget for necessities. The family spent £5 10 _s._, or about $15.40, for food and household necessities. Rent and local taxes cost £2, or $5.60. Lighting and heating cost 10 _s._, or $1.40, while the same amount went to clothes and repairs. Cigarettes took a pound, or $2.80, and the weekly installment on the television set was 15 _s._, or $2.10. Few things demonstrate more strikingly the change in the status of the British manual worker than his insistence on a television set as a "necessity." Cars, radios, and, earlier, gramophones were available only to the middle class or wealthy in pre-war Britain. For the first time they are within the range of the manual worker.