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      Gordon Brown calls for new poverty fund to halt slide into ‘hungry decade’

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 19:44

    Former PM says multibillion-pound fund would be ‘transitional arrangement’ to give struggling families breathing space

    Gordon Brown has called for the creation of a multibillion-pound national poverty programme using interest levied on bank reserve funds as part of an emergency plan to halt Britain’s slide into a “hungry decade” of destitution and hardship.

    The former UK prime minister said the programme would signify a break with 14 years of austerity and help provide short term “pain relief” to millions of people in desperate hardship, alongside an overhaul of Britain’s welfare safety net.

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      Britain seems stuck in a doom loop of poverty. I have a plan to raise billions to address that | Gordon Brown

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 18:46 · 1 minute

    With will and ingenuity, communities, charities, companies and government could work together to rescue millions of people

    An election year is the time to confront the paralysing gloom and declinist thinking besetting our country and, by rediscovering our moral compass, inaugurate a new age of hope.

    The British people long to feel part of a shared national endeavour. But instead, near-zero growth is giving birth to a zero-sum mentality , a belief that you can only do better if at someone else’s expense. Young people – historically the most optimistic about the future – yearn to believe in something bigger than themselves, yet this generation is fast losing faith in the very idea of progress . But the most devastating twist in this doom loop is the one created by rising poverty, the despair and divisions it causes, and the mounting public concern about its impact on our social cohesion. To break out of this downward spiral, Britain needs a reason for optimism – and a good starting point is a new partnership to end destitution and poverty that, by bringing charities, companies, communities and government together in a common national project, shows the United Kingdom can be united in more than just name.

    Gordon Brown was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010

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      The poor need the money, the rich may not – but I say hands off the state pension triple lock | Owen Jones

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 06:00 · 1 minute

    The policy has its critics, but as Tories and Labour vow to keep it, I back its retention. It can be made fair, and a state should care for its people

    A wealthy nation can afford to offer a comfortable and secure existence for all of its citizens. If it chooses not to do so, that is a political choice. If rationality reigned supreme, this would prove the starting point for all decisions about how society is organised. Bad news: it doesn’t, and instead much of the vast riches generated by the graft of millions of workers ends up hoovered into the bank accounts – and offshore tax havens – of a tiny few. The result? It’s easy to encourage the general population to believe that they’re locked in trench warfare over ever-scarcer resources, with so little to go around that politics is merely the art of managing a zero-sum game.

    Enter, then, the question of the triple lock on the state pension, which both Tories and Labour have confirmed will feature in their upcoming manifestos. First introduced by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010, it ensures that pensioners’ entitlements increase each April in line with whatever is highest: inflation, the average increase in wages, or a 2.5% minimum. That means more than £100bn is now splashed on the state pension each year, by far the biggest single item of social security spending, while working-age benefits have fallen drastically behind. When you include other entitlements, well over half of the welfare state ends up in pensioners’ bank accounts. At the same time, more than 60% of older Britons own their home outright , sitting on golden eggs that have only appreciated in value.

    Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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      ONS scraps plans to no longer report the deaths of homeless people

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 17:57


    U-turn comes after campaigners attacked proposal by data body for England and Wales as ‘callous’

    The Office for National Statistics has scrapped plans to no longer report the deaths of homeless people after an outcry.

    The data body for England and Wales proposed cutting the release of the figures to help increase the efficiency of health data. But the idea was attacked as “callous” by campaigners.

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      The Guardian view on rising poverty levels: political attacks on the poor have produced penury | Editorial

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 4 days ago - 17:30 · 1 minute

    Politicians should say how welfare will support claimants with daily living costs rather than stigmatising recipients

    Poverty is a political choice – one that Conservative governments have much to answer for. Since 2010, Tory administrations have chosen to have a significant percentage of our population impoverished, including, especially, our country’s children. The Child Poverty Action Group’s analysis of official data last week showed that a third of those between infancy and adulthood – 4.3 million children – were in relative poverty, up from 3.6 million in 2010-11. Even by the government’s preferred measure, absolute poverty, the share of children in penury rose in 2022-23 by its highest rate for 30 years .

    No principle of economics says such a degree of immiseration should prevail in one of the richest countries in the world. The reason for this extraordinary rise in poverty ? The most obvious explanation is the low level of benefits and the restrictions on accessing support. Benefit levels have fallen by 8.8% in real terms since 2012. Cutting back on welfare produces more poverty, not less. There is money. But not specifically for the poor. Ministers tout tax cuts worth £9 a week extra for the average worker, while about 3.7m people struggled to feed themselves last year.

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      Neglected, derided and exploited more than ever: why won’t the UK protect those who rent a home? | John Harris

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 4 days ago - 12:55 · 1 minute

    Millions face a perfect storm of rising demand, limited supply and politicians who don’t really care enough to ease their plight

    Last week, a news story broke about the sheer impossibility of everyday living for millions of people all over the UK. According to the Office for National Statistics , the average monthly rent paid by private tenants rose by 9% in the year to February, which is the largest annual increase since records began nine years ago. The average monthly rent in England is now £1,276 and £944 n Scotland. If you are unfortunate enough to be renting from a landlord in London, your monthly outgoings may well be almost impossible: there, average monthly rents have risen by 10.6%, to a truly eye-watering £2,035. Given that the median UK monthly wage currently sits at about £2,200 , the dire affordability crisis all this points to is glaringly clear.

    Everything, moreover, is woven through with a very British sense of the market’s base cruelty: late last year, an investigation by the Observer found that the rents paid by tenants in the wealthiest parts of Britain had gone up by an average of 29% since 2019, whereas for people living in the most deprived areas, the figure was a mind-boggling 52%.

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      For the birds? Far from it. At last Rachel Reeves has given Britain a plan for economic liftoff | Will Hutton

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 4 days ago - 08:45 · 1 minute

    Despite being called continuity Hunt, the shadow chancellor has set out a proposal for meaningful change

    Chancellor Jeremy Hunt likes to tell business leaders not to worry about political instability and more policy upset. He claims to be carefully building policy that will survive – win or lose the next election. If the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, succeeds him, accepting nearly all his proposals, be reassured, he says, there will be continuity rather than change. In the run-up to her important Mais lecture last week , the pre-briefings seemed to warrant his judgment.

    She would reaffirm her iron attachment to fiscal rules and budgetary discipline, we were told. After all, she had beaten a wholesale retreat from Labour’s cornerstone £28bn green spending commitment . In successive fiscal “events”, she has accepted all the proposed tax cuts, not even reinstating the cap on bank bonuses. There was chatter describing her as “continuity Hunt”. Even Margaret Thatcher, we read, would be invoked as a change agent she admired. Unite sharpened its claws, writing off the lecture even as Reeves spoke as “for the birds”. Only a “sustained rise in public investment in infrastructure”, declared general secretary Sharon Graham, “can turn the tide on decline”. Two days later, columnist Owen Jones resigned from the Labour party , citing the refusal to challenge catastrophic Tory policies in “a race to the bottom”.

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      Poverty data is a mark of shame for Tory rule | Observer editorial

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 4 days ago - 06:30 · 1 minute

    Prioritising tax cuts for the better off while letting children bear the brunt of financial hardship is not only cruel, it makes no financial sense

    Poverty figures published last week show that in 2023 one in six British children lived in families suffering from food insecurity, up from one in eight children in 2022. And one in 40 children lived in a family that accessed a food bank in the previous 30 days, almost double the proportion the previous year. The growing number of children whose parents struggle to afford to feed them properly in a country as rich as the UK is a shameful reflection of just how low a political priority tackling child poverty has been for Conservative prime ministers and chancellors since 2010.

    Child poverty is rising on every official measure. Almost one in three children now live in relative poverty, defined as households with incomes of less than 60% of the median. And one in four children live in absolute poverty, in households with incomes of less than 60% of the median income in 2011. This represents the fastest rise in child poverty for almost 30 years . Almost half of children from black and minority ethnic backgrounds live in poverty, and 44% of children in lone parent families .

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      You’ve heard stories of poverty in Britain. Now here’s the irrefutable evidence of a society failing its poorest | Tom Clark

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 7 days ago - 17:26

    Ministers boast of lifting families from ‘absolute poverty’ but figures show even that’s getting worse. The safety net has been shredded

    If you work in a shop, you’ll have noticed an extraordinary wave of thefts that retailers link to a growing black market in food . If you work in a hospital, you might have clocked a surge in diagnoses of malnutrition and other dietary deficiencies among patients. If you’ve walked around any large British city with your eyes open of late, you’ll have noticed a proliferation of street tents.

    The crisis of penury gripping the UK has long been abjectly evident everywhere – except the official poverty data. The chancellor and the prime minister have lost no chance to boast that Conservative-led governments have since 2010 “lifted” two million people, including hundreds of thousands of children, “out of absolute poverty”. The experts explain that this particular count will always go down just so long as poor people are thrown a few crumbs from a growing economy – and that those crumbs have been very small of late.

    Tom Clark is a contributing editor at Prospect and a former Guardian leader writer

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