UK austerity has inflicted 'great misery' on citizens, UN says

[sl8]

Source: The Guardian

Robert Booth and Patrick Butler

Fri 16 Nov 2018 12.40 EST

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% between 2015 and 2022, possibly up to a rate of 40%.

"It is patently unjust and contrary to British values that so many people are living in poverty," he said, adding that compassion had been abandoned during almost a decade of austerity policies that had been so profound that key elements of the postwar social contract, devised by William Beveridge more than 70 years ago, had been swept away.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/16/uk-austerity-has-inflicted-great-misery-on-citizens-un-says

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Link to report (pdf):
https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Poverty/EOM_GB_16Nov2018.pdf

[PatrickforO]

1. The bankers hate this idea, but if government began printing their own

currency, then we would not live in a world of scarcity. And, no, the result of this would not necessarily be inflation, though there will, even on this thread, be people who argue this. The bankers would, however, fight back viciously.

Abraham Lincoln funded the Civil War with government-printed greenbacks, and you know what those nice, honest, clean-cut bankers did? They flooded the country with counterfeit currency.

In fact, that's why the American Secret service was created in 1865 to battle counterfeiters.

[airplaneman]

3. Between public banks and MMT - a basic decent living for all could be garanteed.

[Astraea]

2. Who could have predicted this?

I hope the bankers at least got a tax break out of it!

[sakabatou]

4. Also on the report, water is wet

[CharleyDog]

5. I remember Krugman in UK, 2011, on BBC teevee, trying to tell pundits

that austerity is a shill game, and not the way to solve the problems after 2008 crash and depression. hahahah they said, we MUST have austerity. The poor must get poorer.

[Wuddles440]

6. Return to Dickensian England.

This is what the Koch brothers and their acolytes have planned for our society. I can just envision them salivating and rubbing their boney hands with glee at such prospects.

[Farmer-Rick]

7. No country has ever been able to use austerity to get them out of an economic crash

All austerity does is move the remains of the poor and middle class wealth into the hands of the rich.

And the rich are grateful for everyone else's sacrifice.

[3Hotdogs]

8. Thank Dog, they didn't investigate on the U.S.

That would'a been embarrassing.