The UK government has inflicted “great misery” on its people with “punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous” austerity policies driven by a political desire to undertake social re-engineering rather than economic necessity, the United Nations poverty envoy has found.
Philip Alston, the UN’s rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, ended a two-week fact-finding mission to the UK with a stinging declaration that levels of child poverty were “not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster”, even though the UK is the world’s fifth largest economy,
About 14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty and 1.5 million are destitute, being unable to afford basic essentials, he said, citing figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. He highlighted predictions that child poverty could rise by 7 percentage points between 2015 and 2022, possibly up to a rate of 40%.
I have also seen tremendous resilience, strength and generosity, with neighbours supporting one another, councils seeking creative solutions and charities stepping in to fill holes in government services,” he said.On food banks, he said: “I was struck by how much their mobilisation resembled the sort of activity you might expect for a natural disaster or health epidemic.”
The Guardian
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/16/uk-austerity-has-inflicted-great-misery-on-citizens-un-says?__twitter_impression=true
1 comment:
“Just think of all the North Sea oil profits Britain squandered on tax cuts and dole queues and so today we are fiat broke again after bailing out the banks.”
Take it easy. The U.K. government does not run on tax revenue or oil revenue. The U.K. government runs on money created out of thin air, and hence can never go broke.
“The One Percent are laughing all the way to the bank while it's austerity for the rest of us. The whipping boy has to pay!”
For the U.K. government, austerity is 100% gratuitous. Its purpose is to continually widen the gap between the rich and the rest.
This works quite well, because the U.K. peasantry denies the truth about government finances. It works because people who are not (yet) homeless look with contempt on people who are. It works because anyone who speaks the truth about all this is a "Communist" and is “anti-Semitic.”
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