The above title is the UN’s description of the UK government’s treatment of children in Britain. In a report into poverty in the UK, the UN has exposed the effects of the Tory and Labour austerity plan that has been in place the last 8 years. The disastrous effects of which, the government has been either hiding by manipulating statistics, or just barefaced lying. A tradition they have stuck to in their response to the report by claiming that income is at a all time high, along with employment and inequality being at record lows. The government also claimed that universal credit was helping a great number of people into work and improving their lives.
A claim that is an outrageous lie, areas subjected to universal credit have seen at least a 50% increase in food bank use. Additionally, I have been on the business end of universal credit and it is nothing short of a soul crushing experience. I was sanctioned for four weeks, that is I received no money for 4 weeks because I missed one day of job hunting because I went to my Nan’s funeral. The sanction happened not because I missed a job centre appointment, but because I didn’t log into my job centre online account for one day. Additionally, I was forced to spend 35 hours a week online looking for jobs plus 15 hours a week of unpaid labour at a local business. After about a year of this without a successful job application, in one of the weekly hour long interrogation sessions, they tried to have me to move 90 miles away to find a job. I however got off lightly, while I was attending the job centre, one woman was sanctioned for much longer, she couldn’t see anyway to carry on and so jumped of the multistory car-park in front of the jobcentre. There are many more stories I could tell of the consequences of the inhuman misery that has resulted from the ruling class’s intensification of the class war against the working class and unemployed, however the data collected by the UN can speak for itself.
Below are the highlights of the report:
- 14 million (1/5 of the population) live in poverty
- 1 in 4 children live in poverty, and is set to rise another 7% by 2022 to 40% of UK children
- Homelessness has increased 60% in the last 8 years
- A 49% real terms reduction in council funding
- An exponential rise in food bank use
- Austerity linked at least 120,000 deaths
- Austerity is a breach of the UN’s human right’s agreement relating to women, children and the disabled
A lot of comments on the report I’ve seen are mentioning only the Tory party in relation to austerity. While they are responsible, we can not forget the 184 of the right-wing Blairite Labour MPs that abstained from voting against austerity, allowing the Torys to pass their austerity bill. It was only Jeremy Corbyn that voted against the Austerity and Welfare Bill. In relation to these MPs, they should know that in refusing to stand against an oppressor, you have already taken their side!
Here is the link to the full UN report: UNpovertyreport
Marx in the Carparx 