/ world today news/ The British Conservative Party has created a new poverty – so deep and brutal that only an outdated Victorian word can describe it.
It always starts slow. A food bank (a place where people can get free food) pops up at a local mosque. You notice more sleeping bags on your way to work. A donation box appears in the store for families who cannot afford soap and toothpaste. New terms appear in the news, such as “bed poverty” – a new word now used to describe children so poor that they have to sleep on the floor.
Then one day you read a statistic that seems both shocking and tiresomely unsurprising: around 3.8 million Britons lived below the poverty line last year. It’s as if half the population of London can’t afford to meet their basic needs of being warm, dry, clean and well fed.
Research published on November 24 by the charity Joseph Rowntree makes clear not only the scale of poverty in this country, but also how it may have spread. The number of Britons living in poverty has doubled in the past five years, compared to 1.55 million in 2017. One million children are now living in poverty. A staggering 186% growth in half a decade. According to the study, part of a project that has monitored poverty rates since 2015, two-thirds of adults living in extreme poverty are disabled or have a chronic illness. Cancer patients go for chemotherapy and then return to their freezing homes where they have to wear coats.
The word “destitute”, reminiscent of the Victorian era, suggests such a poor life that it has long been out of use, but only found in the pages of history books. But you only have to read the interviews in the Joseph Rowntree study to see what poverty looks like in modern Britain: children wearing their parents’ clothes because it’s the only thing in the wardrobe; people who eat only one banana a day and take only one roll of toilet paper a week from church donations.
It would be normal to call it a social catastrophe, but that would suggest a hidden sense of urgency that our political circles rarely display. Poverty has long sat somewhere in the background at Westminster, while “real problems” such as the small boats of emigrants and the “awakened ideology” of the elite determined the direction of national politics. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is said to be developing a tax on the richest people and heirs to win the votes of the upper middle class. At the same time, food banks became such an established institution in Britain that suddenly more terrifying variations began to appear, such as ‘warm banks’ and ‘baby banks’. Almost every library in England, Wales and Northern Ireland plans to provide a warm place for people who can’t afford heating this winter, while it is believed there are already 200 centers across the country distributing donations to disadvantaged babies. New moms lining up at a community center for free diapers is the “new normal” and has been for a long time.
Over the past decade, the press, funded by billionaires and wealthy ministers, has worked to spread the myth that these deprivations have nothing to do with Conservative policies, claiming that structural inequality is due to the apparent idleness and high spending of the working class. Or as Andrew Cooper, the Tory candidate for the Tamworth by-election, puts it: Jobless parents who can’t feed their kids but still pay for their phone should “shut the hell up”.
In reality, austerity, wage cuts and benefits have torn apart the social fabric of society, making the population poorer, sicker and more insecure. Meanwhile, several crises – Brexit, the pandemic, rising inflation – have exposed gaping holes in the safety net that was once designed to catch us.
According to the aforementioned study, only almost three-quarters of poor families actually receive support from the welfare system. Or, to put it another way, after a decade of benefit freezes and cuts and various penalties, the level of Social Security rates is so
According to the aforementioned study, only almost three-quarters of poor families actually receive support from the welfare system. Or, to put it another way, after a decade of benefit freezes and cuts and various penalties, Social Security rates are so meager that many of those lucky enough to get benefits are those who can’t afford to eat or do laundry and pay rent. And this is no accident. Keeping benefits as low as possible has always been a deliberate and so-called legitimate means for ministers to separate the undeserving sick and poor from “hard-working families”. In this context, extreme poverty is no longer a problem to be solved, but an accepted status quo. This is deliberate poverty, where governments know which public policies will put those already suffering in dire circumstances, but implement them anyway.
If all this sounds bleak, there is a glimmer of hope: if poverty is a political choice, then politicians can also lift people out of poverty. We as a society can take some steps to help poor families. We can raise Social Security rates to reflect the real cost of living and eliminate penalties for the unemployed and sick. We can deal with the debt by reducing the amount of money the government can take from benefits to make multiple payments. We can introduce a real living wage, we can build more social housing to free tenants from killer rents.
Providing such economic security will improve not only people’s financial well-being, but also their physical and mental well-being. After all, poverty isn’t just about people missing out on meals. It’s psychological abuse: lying awake at night, worrying that the bailiffs will soon be knocking on the door, or counting the pieces of bread, wondering when your children won’t have breakfast this week. Protecting people from poverty will not only make them less poor than before, but also give them back a part of themselves.
Folk wisdom says: now is not the time for that, and the economy that’s breathing right now means we can’t afford to live better. And I would say we can’t afford not to. While the opposition and Labor leader Keir Starmer recently ruled out lifting the cap on child benefit – a move that would lift 270,000 families out of poverty – he pointed to the need to make “tough decisions” to be fiscally responsible. Yet the real responsibility – financial and moral – comes from overcoming the enormous costs associated with social and economic hardship. It almost always comes down to simple maths: child poverty alone costs the economy £39bn a year through extra pressure on social services and future unemployment. In the long run, making the right decisions is reassuringly cost-effective.
But there is also a collective lowering of expectations: a compulsive weariness that suggests that in one of the world’s richest countries, millions of people are without the basic necessities of life. Babies sleep on the floor. Mothers eat a piece of fruit for lunch. It always starts slowly, but we should all fear where it will eventually lead.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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