UK must accept UN’s poverty report as reality and act now
Press Office
UN warns of major concerns with UK poverty levels by Tom Parsons
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Professor Iain Wilkinson from SSPSSR has commented on the UN’s report into the state of poverty in the UK, noting that its findings are, sadly, no surprise.
‘It is a well-established fact that levels of inequality in the United Kingdom have been increasing since the late 1970s and that these have now reached a point where the gap between rich and poor in Britain is wider than in any other European country.
‘Those committed to documenting these conditions have moved beyond the point of sounding political alarms, for it is now being made all too clear that we living in the midst of a social and economic calamity. In recent months a series of reports have been published as part of attempts to draw public debate to widespread experiences of social suffering relating to austerity and its human consequences.
‘One in three children now grow up in households where experiences food poverty, deteriorating mental health, dire housing conditions and rising levels of violent crime are encountered as a regular part of British social life. In my recent work analysing data collected for the Children’s Future Food Inquiry final report, I was presented with vast numbers of examples of young people not only experiencing hunger as normal part of their lives, but also announcing that they felt increasingly abandoned, resentful and without hope.
‘Philip Alston (the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty), seeks to make clear the extent to which all this is the result of government policies that appear to be deliberately designed to single out the poor more as objects for punishment than as vulnerable people in need of care.
‘For such policies and conditions to be framed as an abuse of basic human rights that warrants international condemnation is not just a shame on our government, it is a shame on us all.’
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