(Picture: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

The UK is facing the biggest poverty crisis since Margaret Thatcher was in power.

Due to a combination of the government’s austerity programme, incomes for the poorest failing to keep up with inflation, and Brexit fears, poverty rates are the most substantial since 1988.

According to new projections from the Resolution Foundation, real incomes for the third poorest people of working age fell between £50 and £150 in 2017-18, while inflation rose above 3%.

The official poverty rate has risen from 22.1% to 23.2%, something that should be a source of great shame and unease in a highly developed and wealthy nation like Britain.


Disturbingly, the child poverty rate has increased even more, jumping from 30.3% to 33.4%.



More than a third of children in the UK now live in poverty.

Poverty saps children of their energy and their zest for life. It means they grow up in cold, damp houses or insecure temporary accommodation, too embarrassed to ask friends round for tea when their home is chilly or crowded, and there’s no spare food.

Poverty means that girls and women are going without essential menstrual products, missing out on education because they’re too afraid to bleed through their school uniforms or forced to stuff their underwear with toilet roll and newspaper pages.

Poverty puts people at greater risk of developing mental health problems – particularly children.

It means malnourishment, stunted growth and unfulfilled potential.

These effects can be seen quite easily in the increase of rough sleepers for the seventh year running, and revelations of private tenants feeling pressured to trade sex for a place to sleep, as well as people who have committed suicide or starved to death after their benefits were cut off.

The Tory government has been accused of ‘economic murder’ by Cambridge University professor Lawrence King, after a British Medical Journal study found austerity responsible for 120,000 deaths.

These are facts.

This government has blood on its hands and a gaping hole where its conscience should be.

As long as the elite cabal of morally bankrupt, Eton-educated buffoons remain in power, poverty will continue to claim lives in Britain.

The only way we can hope to reverse the damage being done to communities across the country, through punishing cuts to services and the deliberate targeting of the most vulnerable members of society, is through a radical new economic programme and Labour government.

When Jeremy Corbyn stood for the Labour leadership election in 2015, he was the only candidate to do so on a clear anti-austerity platform.

He was the only candidate to point out the fact that austerity is not an economic inevitability, but an ideological choice.

Under Corbyn, a Labour government would invest in strengthening infrastructure, sustainable (green) industries, education and our National Health Service, and rolling back deeply damaging policies like the Bedroom Tax.

Labour’s proposals are endorsed by economic heavyweights like Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz.



Their plans rely on making corporations pay the tax they owe, instead of flouting the law, and for top earners to chip in their fair share.

A Labour government would mean no increase in income tax, unless you’re earning over £80,000 (and therefore can well afford it).

Investment sometimes means borrowing money, but it also means growth. The narrative of a profligate New Labour government, causing the recession through reckless spending, is a fairy story peddled by the right.

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 began as a crisis in the US subprime mortgage market, and to blame it on New Labour just shows the lengths that the right are willing to go to divert attention from the fact that banks and bankers actually at the heart of the crash pretty much got off scot-free.

Only five bankers in the UK were ever convicted for their part in the financial crisis.

David Cameron’s coalition government decided that the best way to guide Britain through the recession, was not to control the financial sector to prevent negligent and greedy practices, but to slash benefits, cut services, freeze public sector pay and generally pull the rug out from under people in the most precarious economic situations.

This is austerity and it’s still going on.

The poisonous legacy of 1.3 million people turning to food banks for emergency nutrition last year, and one in four parents skipping meals so their children can eat, is a product of the coalition and successive Tory governments.


Austerity is literally killing people – we cannot afford to let the architects of this monstrous ideological drive off the hook.

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